White Zombie (1932)

Primary Genre: Horror

Secondary Genres: Fantasy, Caribbean Zombie, Independent Film

Plot: In Haiti, the Zombie Master (Bela Lugosi) has been turning people into mindless drones and making them his slave labor force and personal henchmen.  After a young engaged couple (Madge Bellamy, John Harron) arrives on the island, a plantation owner (Robert W. Frazer) decides he wants the girl for himself and enlists the Zombie Master’s aid.

The Good Stuff

• Lugosi: Lugosi is best known for playing Dracula on stage and screen, but he’s much more menacing here.  It could be the weird eyebrow makeup.  It could be that, unlike watching an already known story like Dracula, we have no idea what sneaky evil he’s about to pull.

• Expressionism: The director took the time to establish some creative camera shots and build a strange, creepy atmosphere.  Recall that the early 1930s was when Universal was making horror movies that had been heavily influenced by German cinematic expressionism: deliberately exaggerated lighting and camera angles, surrealistic sets and images, etc.  White Zombie followed this as well.

• Indy Movie: This movie was made as a cost-cutting independent production using leftover sets on the Universal lot and relied upon United Artists for distribution.  It didn’t do as well at the box office as popular horror movies of the time, but it did play well in Germany and small towns in America and had been made for small fraction of the budget of those other popular horror movies..  As such, White Zombie was prototypical of the wave of B horror movies of the 1950s.

• Harrowing Ending: We won’t be giving that away.

The Bad Stuff

• Male romantic lead was still in stage/silent movie mode and distractingly over-emotes.

The Who Cares Stuff

• Dead or Undead?: It’s not specifically said that the zombies in this movie are undead.  One character becomes a zombie after being pronounced dead, but dialogue suggests the death had been faked through drugs.  Later, another character becomes a zombie slowly and aware of his transformation, but does not (explicitly) die during the process.  (A few years later in Val Lewton’s classic I Walked with a Zombie, the story’s primary zombie hadn’t died but had fever induced nerve damage that made her seemingly catatonic.  See also the book The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic (1985) and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

• Direct Mind Control: The zombies are played like What Everyone Knew Back Then from Movies about hypnosis: it depends on willpower, grants control by telepathy, turns the subject into a mindless drone, makes the subject impervious to pain/injury, etc.  See also the strange metaphysics of mesmerism and the story of Trilby and Svengali.)

See Also

Revolt of the Zombies (1936) - Made by the same director and cinematographer. Often mislabeled a sequel to White Zombie.  Interesting plot (a perpetual victim on an archeological expedition in Cambodia discovers and uses an ancient secret for mass mind control) yet surprisingly uncreative storytelling.  More like fantasy than horror.  They say that White Zombie was a good example of how to make a low budget movie, while Revolt of the Zombies is a good example of what not to do.

The Bottom Line

Damn good horror movie made on a relatively small budget. Forerunner of B horror movies thirty years later.