White Zombie (1932)
Directed by Victor Halperin

Film Review

The phenomenal success of Universal's series of horror films in the late 1920s, early 1930s set in motion a band wagon that other film production companies were not slow to leap onto.  The Halperin brothers, Edward and Victor, were independent filmmakers who enjoyed some success in the horror genre with their low budget films made very much in the Universal mould (often employing sets borrowed from Universal and filmed on the company's premises).  The best of the Halperin's horror offerings is White Zombie, which was inspired by Kenneth Webb's Broadway play Zombie.  The film has the distinction of being the first feature-length Zombie film, although the walking dead it depicts are positively tame compared with what we find in later Zombie movies, with none of the nasty cannibalistic habits we now associate with the living dead.

White Zombie owes much of its spine-tingling impact to its lead actor, Bela Lugosi.  Now a worldwide star after the success of Universal's Dracula (1931), Lugosi was cinema's perfect incarnation of pure evil and is ideally suited for the role of the Svengali-like voodoo master who has the power to turn anyone into a Zombie.  This is Lugosi at his monstrous best and it is to director Victor Halperin's credit that he makes the actor appear a genuinely terrifying personality, far more so than he ever was in Tod Browning's Dracula and a million miles from the sad, self-parodying figure he would become in later years.  There is a mesmeric, almost erotic allure to Lugosi in this film and yet, at the same time, he is manifestly the quintessence of evil, a true prince of darkness.  No other actor evokes the supernatural so convincingly as Lugosi does in this film.

How sad then that the rest of the cast have so little to offer.  Mostly faded stars of the silent era, there is not an actor among them who can give anything even vaguely appoximating to a credible performance.  The magnificent Lugosi excluded, the quality of acting is poor beyond belief, although John Harron's performance is particularly dire - you have to cringe whenever he opens his mouth.  It's a strange state of affairs when the supposed living appear more unnaturally undead than the Zombies.

It has to be said that the acting is the only thing that lets White Zombie down.  In every other respect, it is on a par with Universal's better horror films, although it does have a very distinct atmosphere of its own.  There is a haunting dreamlike feel to this film that makes it more than vaguely reminiscent of RKO's subsequent I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and you can't help wondering to what extent producer Val Lewton may have been influenced by the Halperins' groundbreaking Zombie film.  In common with Lewton's run of horror films, White Zombie has very little in the way of explicit horror but still manages to chill the blood with its fluid succession of nightmarish images, beautifully rendered in hazy black-and-white. 

The film's underlying concepts are far more terrifying than anything in Universal's Gothic horror output of this era - what could be more frightening than the prospect of being reduced to a walking corpse?   The scene set in Lugosi's sugar cane mill, in which hoards of Zombies are gainfully employed in hard labour without any awareness of the fact is surely one of cinema's most memorably chilling images - and the bleakest of metaphors for the capitalist system for those who are inclined to read a political subtext into the film.  White Zombie has its flaws but, inspite of that, it is still a supremely effective, deliciously creepy horror film.  Lugosi's eyebrows alone are enough to give you nightmares.

Film Synopsis

On the eve of their wedding in Haiti, Madeleine Short and Neil Parker stay at the home of a wealthy plantation owner, Charles Beaumont.  Unbeknown to either of his guests, Beaumont is passionately in love with Madeleine and consults the voodoo master Murder Legendre as to how he can take her from his rival.  Legendre has discovered how to wake the dead and employs zombies at his sugar cane mill.  He tells Beaumont that he can have Madeleine if she is transformed into a Zombie with a special potion he has concocted.  Beaumont agrees and, immediately after the wedding, he gives Madeleine a small dose of the potion.  The young woman collapses and appears to be dead.  Once her body has been entombed, Beaumont collects her and takes her to Legendre's castle by the sea.  Revived as a zombie, Madeleine has none of her former vitality and resembles a walking cadaver.  Beaumont pleads with Legendre to return her to life but the voodoo master refuses.  The latter now intends that Beaumont should suffer the same fate as his beloved...