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!
Bela Lugosi actually learned all his lines phonetically for Dracula (1931), but it was still several years before he spoke conversational English. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume he learned most of his White Zombie lines in the same way.
ReplyDeleteI think one of my favorite things about this movie, from a zombie standpoint, comes from the cinematography. You may recall that when Madeline was a zombie, we got a few shots from her point of view, and everything was blurry. Then, as she came out of that trance, the shots went clear. It's an interesting "clearing of the fog" concept I wish we saw more of in classic zombie films.
Thanks, Catherine! That makes sense, since he was already an established actor, though I wonder if he could read English as well by that point. Even so, that makes his strange delivery more deliberate, which makes me love him more!
ReplyDeleteAs for the shots, yes, there were some great ones! It's nice to see that we can appreciate the camerawork even in B-pictures like this. I really liked all the work with the shadows when Neil was in the bar too. As for the fog, I wonder if we don't see that much now because zombies are no longer the traditional voodoo kind. Could part of that be because today's zombies (like in Zombieland) can't recover? They can't snap out of it? Maybe that goes back to the idea of whether or not zombies actually die first (not just fake die like Madeline). The closest thing I can remember in modern films is the clearing of the fog of the victim in Dead Snow, when she comes to and realizes that the zombies are snacking on her intestines. (And yes, I'm getting queasy just thinking about it).
Good Dead Snow reference!
ReplyDeleteThat's probably exactly why modern zombie movies don't use the fog-filter. Their zombies don't snap out of it (although not all zombies in the modern flick die before turning -- check out 28 Days Later. It's also debatable as to whether or not the Zombieland zombies die beforehand; they're relatively easy to kill, and they aren't decaying. However, since we never actually see someone turn, there's no way to know for sure). On the other hand, there are movies where we're treated to "zombie-vision", and the only real difference tends to be the color of the shot (it's usually red, logically). Really, I think that difference in cinematography illustrates a crucial difference between zombies of yesteryear (the voodoo zombie) and the modern zombie (the virus/infected/parasitic zombie): the former are unable to think or act for themselves, whereas the latter are mindless -- unable to think for themselves, but because they are too consumed with their undeniable hunger for flesh, not because someone else is controlling them.