#194: White Zombie
Before George Romero, there was…
This review was originally posted to Twitter on December 25, 2019.
Initial release: July 28, 1932
Director: Victor Halperin
The 1930s were the golden age of horror films, thanks to the advent of sound and new filmmaking techniques. Influenced by German Expressionism and the global mood of the Great Depression, 1930s horror defied censorship to help create much of the visual and thematic language of modern horror. In between the likes of Universal’s Dracula and Mystery of the Wax Museum — one of the last films to use an early color process — came this minor, but intensely influential classic.
A mid-level bank employee working out of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and his fiance are visiting a wealthy friend to be married at the latter’s plantation. Along the way they come across an odd ritual: the natives burying the dead in the road, because busy roads will deter grave robbers. They soon arrive at the plantation, but not before they’re accosted by a sinister-looking white man (Bela Lugosi, who does in fact drink wine in this film) and his strange, dead-eyed attendants, from whom the carriage driver flees on sight.
Our happy couple next meet a local missionary, who’s been working in Haiti for 30 years and makes no bones about the fact that he’s seen some shit, and mentions that the locals believe that the dead are being dug up to work the fields and mills. He’s suspicious as to their plantation owner friend’s true motives; he’s soon proven right when Beaumont, the friend in question, visits the sinister dude. It seems he wants to win Madeline (the bride) over to him and away from Neil (the groom) and is willing to do anything. Well, almost anything — he rejects out of hand the idea, suggested to him by the creepy dude with his mill full of zombies, of giving the ol’ zombie treatment to Madeline… but eventually gives in. She seemingly dies, only to be resurrected. Hence the title: White Zombie.
The title is quite telling, really; it’s not just her purity that’s being sullied, it’s her whiteness. Zombies in voodoo are implied by the film to be strictly a fate for Haitian natives; the idea of white people being zombies is akin to, and implied to be an allegory for, so-called “white slavery.” (White people have often been victims of slavery, yes, but “white slavery,” as a political and social term, is more a reflection of a white society’s fears that what it’s historically done to people of color will be done to them in return. And much like the hysteria over sexual slavery reflected in films like Sound of Freedom, there’s a sexual layer in Madeline’s fate as well, given Beaumont’s motivations for zombifying her in the first place, though he quickly comes to regret it as she’s little more than a doll going through the motions.
This is not a brilliant film. It’s thinly-researched, largely built on colonialist horrors of native superstition, and concludes a little too cleanly. Yet it’s chock full of compelling imagery, often gothic in nature (many sets were left over from earlier movies like Dracula.) Easily the best scene in the film, and the most aggressively expressionist, is a grieving Neil sitting in a bar somewhere, drinking heavily and hallucinating his wife. We know he’s not alone, but all the other bar patrons are mere shadows on the wall, dancing about as he breaks down. Lugosi brings all his sinister Dracula vibe to bear. Much like his successor to the Dracula role, Christopher Lee, he’s got eyes for days, and the film focuses on them frequently, as well as his hands. He’s oddly sexless, seeming to take more amusement in manipulating people. There’s also the fact that, unless you count Abel Gance’s classic French romance/drama/war/sudden horror/propaganda flick J’Accuse!, White Zombie stands as the first zombie film. While George Romero would redefine the zombie as a monster, divorced of its folkloric origins, this film introduced several elements of the archetype. So even though it’s a cheaply produced (most of the cast are washed-up silent era stars,) ploddingly written, kinda racist film (including one character appearing in blackface!) there’s no denying the influence it would have on later zombie films.
That being said, does it hold up at all? Well, it’s pure cinema, with no artifice or pretensions to being something it’s not. But at the same time, the voodoo angle was tired almost immediately. Stick to Romero.
