White Zombie (1932)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
A Haitian plantation owner asks a voodoo master to help him win an engaged woman's affection, and instead gets her turned into a mindless zombie servant — forcing her fiancé to storm the sorcerer's clifftop fortress to break the spell.
Released a year after Dracula, White Zombie is generally credited as the first feature-length zombie film, and it leans on Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic stare — rather than gore, which the pre-Code era hadn’t yet made a horror staple — to do the frightening.
Advertisement
