White Zombie (1932)

Mina! I mean, Madeline!!! ~ Catherine

Intro.
It's great to have friends that are so into movies. Recently I've been watching some zombie films with my zombie-phile friend Catherine. Considered the first Hollywood zombie film, 1932's White Zombie proved to be a good starting point in studying the movie monster phenomenon. I mean, you can't really get much scarier than a scratchy black and white film with close ups of Bela Lugosi!

Overview
White Zombie is the traditional voodoo zombie film - zombies are people given a drug so that they appear to be dead, then their bodies are taken by whomever is working the voodoo and become zombie slaves, without a mind or will of their own. Such is the kind of atmosphere that engaged couple Madeline (Madge Bellamy) and Neil (John Harron) enter as they travel to the house of their friend, Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). He has agreed to let them get married at his estate, but really he has other plans. He enlists a local mystery man known to have an army of voodoo slaves working in his factory, 'Murder' Legendre (Bela Lugosi). Legendre's plan is to turn Madeline into a zombie and have her "buried" above ground. It all goes to plan - Neil is convinced she died and Legendre successfully steals her body and turns her into a zombie-slave. But it doesn't end there, as Neil learns what really happened (thanks in part to a local missionary priest, Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn)) and goes after Madeline. Meanwhile Beaumont discovers that he really didn't want Madeline if she would never smile again. So we have Beaumont and Neil come against Legendre, who's just a bit too voodoo happy for his own good. A few crazy zombie fights in Legendre's super creepy ocean cliff-side castle and at last Madeline recovers in the arms of her love.

Highlights
I think White Zombie was a very important film in the history of horror films and of course in the zombie sub-genre. The low-budget seems obvious and time has not been very kind to the recordings, but even so there's something inherently eerie in scratchy sounds and not-quite-clear pictures. It's definitely Bela Lugosi's vehicle though, not Harron or Bellamy's, though both are key players. He's the one that we watch most intensely and the one who scares us the most. I mean, no other actor besides Vincent Price has ever been so good at being so scary! Catherine told me that he also did not speak English and had to learn his lines phonetically as someone read them to him. That may be the reason his delivery seems out of the normal speaking pattern, but really I just thought the unusual breaks and lilts were to effectively make him more mysterious. He had made Dracula only a year early, and was billed in White Zombie as "Bela Dracula Lugosi". It's pretty easy to see that the filmmakers drew more than just his name to make this film - the entire opening and Legendre's castle all seem like a repeat of Dracula. At one point Legendre's interaction with Madeline is very close to Dracula's talk with Mina (which prompted the quote in my tagline)!

There is quite a lot to be said about the film culturally, but I won't get to all of it here. I'm sure Catherine will cover it on her blog (which you should check out!). I won't even get into the racism issues, though I have to admit, at first I thought that the "white" in White Zombie referred to Madeline being a bride - she's definitely the woman in white here. It's also a sign of her innocence and sacrifice. More than racism, it also had some inherent sexism. I mean, really? You want this woman to leave her fiancee and love you so naturally the best way to do that is to fake her death and turn her into a mindless slave? There is some hope though, as Beaumont realizes that he was very wrong to do this to Madeline - that beauty alone wasn't enough, he needed her to have her soul back. I should correct my post, as these zombies weren't really mindless so much as they were soulless and without willpower. We can see this not only with Madeline, but also with Legendre's other zombies - big scary men who carry out his will. To quote Catherine again, they were puppets, acting out the fears of the audience - loss of control, loss of free will. I think the line that struck me the most in the film was from Bela Lugosi. He's telling Beaumont about his "factory workers" who of course are all zombies under his spell. Legendre says "they are quite used to long hours" as if to suggest that the perfect workers have no sense of time or think to complain. I wonder what factory workers of the time felt - first Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and now this. Dark thoughts for such a dark time as the Great Depression.

Review and Recommendation
Well, it's getting late and I'm about zombied-out. White Zombie was a pretty interesting look at old Hollywood history. From a genre standpoint, it's an important film to watch. If you can forgive the low-budget and poor quality, you'll probably enjoy it. If nothing else, it's just fun to watch Bela Lugosi make so many creepy faces!