White Zombie [PG]

A Haitian plantation owner invites a couple of mutual acquaintances to wed at his home, hoping he can profess his love for Madeleine and lure her away from her fiancé Neil. When this fails he turns to the help of a mysterious mill owner and voodoo practitioner who reanimates the bodies of the deceased and uses them as slaves in his mill. Madeleine is transformed into an emotionless zombie, but there is still hope. Neil contacts a missionary who has studied Haitian superstitions extensively and informs him that his bride’s state is just one of sleeping death and there is still a chance to restore her heart and soul. 

If that one ‘Literature and the Screen’ lecture on zombies serves me correctly, this movie is actually one of the very first zombie flicks that sparked the horror genre’s fascination with the phenomenon. The whole viral take on the theme didn’t appear until years later in cinema so originally, zombies were just the mindless, emotionless shells of dead humans that had been bewitched or ‘magicked’ to walk again. What a journey we’ve had! 

A Haitian plantation owner invites a couple of mutual acquaintances to wed at his home, hoping he can profess his love for Madeleine and lure her away from her fiancé Neil. When this fails he turns to the help of a mysterious mill owner and voodoo practitioner who reanimates the bodies of the deceased and uses them as slaves in his mill. Madeleine is transformed into an emotionless zombie, but there is still hope. Neil contacts a missionary who has studied Haitian superstitions extensively and informs him that his bride’s state is just one of sleeping death and there is still a chance to restore her heart and soul. 

Whilst there really isn’t all that much going on in terms of story, White Zombie still sits as a horror flick with gravitas within cinematic history. As I mentioned before, it’s one of the first films that featured zombies and brought them into the eyes of the horror-movie loving public. The genre’s fascination with zombies was thus spawned like a devil child and it’s interesting to think about its evolution from magic to science to viruses and then apocalypses. Warm Bodies, although adhering to the brain-devouring side of the zombie spectrum pays a bit of an homage to this movie I believe, in its idea that zombies can regain heart, soul, and warmth. 

Bela Lugosi, who had only the previous year captivated audiences with his ability to turn on that hypnotic stare in Dracula, reprises said entrancing stare in this flick. So much so that his eyes appear in more scenes than the rest of him! 

The performances are all pretty good: the romantic leads are lovely together, Neil’s breakdown after Madeleine’s death is a bit dramatic but nonetheless effective, and the missionary works well in providing the slightly comic professor type. 

Starring Madge Bellamy, Joseph Cawthorn, Robert Freezer, John Harron, and Brandon Hurst, White Zombie is an eerie little movie that doesn’t so much deliver the thrills of a modern zombie picture or even the classics like those of George Romero, but still has to be thanked for its contribution to the zombie movie canon and the horror genre. Filled with action, romance, voodoo, drama, horror, and comedy, it’s a fine little film. The zombie movie has come a long way from these primitive days of the 1930s, but as clichéd as the saying is, from little things big things grow.