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White Zombie, 1932,
directed by Victor Halperin. Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, John Harron, Robert
Frazer.
Synopsis: Haitian plantation owner Charles Beaumont is obsessed with Madeleine Parker, but Madeline loves another man, who she has agreed to marry. Beaumont can’t bear the thought of Madeleine marrying another, so he schemes of a way to have her to himself. He invites the young lovers to his plantation to have their wedding there. Beaumont conspires with Murder Legendre, the local master of zombies who provides Beaumont with cheap labor to turn Madeleine into a zombie herself. Legendre agrees and on her wedding night, Madeleine enters a state of living death. Soon, Beaumont realizes the horror of what he has done. The automaton Legendre has provided isn’t the woman he loves and he demands that he revive her. Legendre, instead, ensnares Beaumont as well. Meanwhile, Madeleine’s grieving fiancée is consoled by a local missionary, who tells him that Madeleine may not be dead after all.... While, no one would question the dominance of the major studios--particularly Universal--in the horror movies of the 1930s, the dominance of major studios during this period was something of an aberration. Most horror movies are marginal enterprises from small, independent production companies. The resources for the production of such films are commensurately smaller than what one finds in the big studio productions and the incident of success in this marginal business is dismayingly small. But every so often, there is a weird alchemy at work on Poverty Row, and the result transcends the limitations of budget and even internal consistency. I won’t claim that White Zombie is a fully integrated whole. It’s not. Its expository scenes are terrible and the whole enterprise is uneven, at best. But in spite of this, there is something transcendent about the images White Zombie puts on the screen. There is an otherness in this movie that makes one rather forgive some of the film’s dramatic failings. The most immediate reason for the success of White Zombie is the presence of Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, the zombie master. With all due respect to Lugosi’s signature work as Dracula and Ygor, Lugosi’s performance in White Zombie represents the most sinister character he ever played. There is a whiff of brimstone in his screen presence in White Zombie, a hint that Legendre is evil incarnate. Director Victor Halperin wisely keeps Lugosi’s dialogue to a minimum, a move designed to cover over Lugosi’s limited command of English, but one that provides one of those happy accidents one finds in low, low budget films. His silence is threatening in a way his accented speeches in Dracula never were. In fact great whacks of the film are silent--presumably because sound was an expensive proposition in 1932--and the film benefits tremendously by utilizing the language of silent movies. The most grating parts of the movie are the parts that are filmed like early talkies. The images in White Zombie are remarkably strong for such a low budget film. No one who has seen the sequence in the sugar cane mill ever forgets the shot where one of the zombie workers falls into the works. That’s the most gaudy of images in the movie and, with Lugosi’s performance, it is surely the image that has kept the film alive over the years while other films from the same milieu have languished in obscurity. But the imagery in the rest of the film is constructed, unconsciously perhaps, to recast the film as a fairy tale of sorts. Madge Bellamy as Madeleine is consistently filmed in blindingly white costumes that contrast strongly with the gloom of the sets. She is imprisoned in a tower by the sea the likes of which probably never, ever existed in Haiti. And the weird light coming from Lugosi’s eyes speak of some magical power lurking behind them. In this context, the film seems less and less like a story about zombies in modern (in 1932) Haiti and more and more like the story of a sleeping princess imprisoned by an evil sorcerer. There are small touches throughout the film that reinforce that perception: my favorite is the scene where Madeleine first encounters Legendre and he takes her scarf. This scene seems like it comes from a medieval romance, where the evil sorcerer steals the lady’s favor (and the steadfast knight must retrieve it). Lugosi himself embellishes this scene when he smells the scarf, transforming it into a fetish object. This is an act that explains his later reluctance to turn her back into herself later in the movie. The fetishism underlying the film’s action is reinforced in the scene where Legendre carves an homonculus of Madeleine in wax in order to capture her soul. When this film was made, zombies were very much in the news. The United States military had concluded a long occupation of Haiti shortly before this film was made, so the status of this film as an exploitation film capitalizing on events in the world is valid. But over time, these things have been forgotten and the film’s concerns with evil doings in exotic lands have taken on a sort of timelessness. This is something the makers of White Zombie certainly couldn’t have planned, but they surely realized the strength of the film they created once it was finished. There is a direct sequel to this movie--Revolt of the Zombies from 1936, also directed by Victor Halperin--that is completely unable to duplicate any of the first film’s effects. Certainly, Halperin never made another movie in the same league as this one, so one can only credit blind chance with the success of White Zombie, or perhaps one can credit the persistent rumors that Bela Lugosi himself directed portions of White Zombie. Regardless, White Zombie is one of those rare horror films that unfolds like a waking dream. |