White Zombie

Year: 1932

Actors: Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, Joseph  Cawthron

Director: Victor Halperin

Running Time: 69 minutes

Plot:

Along a desolate road in the Haitian mountains, a carriage bearing Neil Parker and Madeline Short encounters a funeral in which the body is being buried in the road. Further down the road, the coach stops at the sight of a man of satanic appearance: six human shapes step forth, and the horrified driver shouts "Zombies!" signalling the first appearance of the living dead in American cinema.

Review:

Very soon after Bela Lugosi’s success in Dracula and Murders in the rue morgue he landed a starring role in White Zombie playing the villain “Legendre” he played this role to perfection, the role meant he had to use a lot of facial expressions and a very spooky voice to give the movie an atmosphere which coming fresh from the movie Dracula he had the expressions down to perfection.

Madeline short parker was played by the beautiful Madge Bellamy, she played 2 kinds of roles in this movie, first she was a normal very happy fun loving women set to marry her true love Neil Parker and then the 2^nd role she plays the White Zombie who is being controlled by the evil Legendre, She also had to play the role to perfection for it to work not allowing herself to show any kind of emotion in the face just a blank stare, she didn’t have a lot of dialog throughout the movie but I think she played the best role from start to finish.

This style of old horror movie always has to have a brilliant music score to give out the atmosphere for each scene and this score was amazing, when you combine the score with the brilliant facial expressions by Bela Lugosi you instantly got a chill going down your spine and a feeling of dread as to what is going to happen next, there were a number of scenes were the music score was playing that filled this movie with tension and suspense the scene that stands out most for me is towards the final 10 minutes when  Madeline was standing on the balcony outside her bedroom window and her husband Neil Parker was shouting up to her from the shores the music was playing in the background giving you suspense to weather she would notice him in her zombie state or not you get a glimpse of her remembering as she walks away from the balcony but then she goes back into her zombie state, that scene is possibly the most memorable scene in the movie because of its music score.

Even though the picture quality wasn’t great and it was shot in very dark black and white the makeup and special effects were done brilliantly for its time the Zombies looked like they were the zombies you would see in any traditional zombie film today.

In the 1960s the film’s distributer Frank Storace wished to produce a restored version of the film but the copyright owners of the film refused him permission to the original footage they had in their possession so the movie has never been restored from its original look so every now and then the picture and sound would jump and I would miss the most important word in the sentence, this became a little frustrating as I really got into the movie and was fixated by how brilliantly it was made, one scene in particular was Doctor Bruner and Neil Parker were having a conversation Doctor Bruner was sitting at his desk and then the scene jumps and all of a sudden he was standing in front of his desk having the same conversation.

The film was shot in only 11days which is amazing when you think of how much is going on throughout the movie, the acting was brilliant until the final few minutes which unfortunately seemed very rushed maybe being shot in only 11 days was the cause of that.

Scores:

Music score 8/10

Acting and Expressions 7.5/10

Unfortunately because of the last 6 or 7 minutes of acting and the fact the scenes and sound would jump every few minutes I can only give this movie an overall enjoyment score of 7/10

Written by

Evil Bob