The Omega Man (1971)

"Eat lead, you undead commie bastards!"

I really wanted to like this movie. I know there are some high-profile fans of The Omega Man (Tim Burton) and that it's often seen as a prime example of camp or satire or some species of so-bad-it's-good. I love a rousing apocalyptic romp. My family has owned a copy of Planet of the Apes since 1982, and I think Charlton Heston is awesome. But, brothers and sisters, I can't say I liked much about The Omega Man.

The Omega Man isn't good camp because it's not artificial or ostentatious enough, nor does it put almost everything in quotation marks, as I remember reading somewhere about camp. Good camp is the old Batman television series, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Moulin Rouge, and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The Omega Man can't be bad camp because there is not bad camp – there's just bad.

The Omega Man has some satirical elements, of course, poking fun at materialism, gun culture, the media, revolution, and how all old animosities can fade away once the world ends. But these objections are too easy, and pulled off in such a graceless way that even the Heston's wry growliness amid the rubble overreaches. And the film isn't in the so-bad-it's-good neighborhood because there are too many glimpses of competence amid the stupidity.

"We shall kill you with our flair for ferocious rhetorical nuance!"

The plot is loosely based on Richard Mathisen's novel I Am Legend, focuses on an Army scientist (Heston) who, as the world is being destroyed by biological warfare, desperately injects himself with an experimental vaccine. It works, but Heston's character is the only normal man left on Earth – or at least in the city of Los Angeles, which will have to do. He spends his solo time driving fast through the streets, armed to the teeth, killing off members of The Family when he can find them. The Family are what's become of the bioweapon survivors: light-fearing, sore-festering, black-robe-and-mirrored-sunglasses-wearing creeps, led by the former news anchor and current postapocalyptic windbag/madman Mathias (Anthony Zerbe). The members of The Family are just plain goofy looking, and I was awfully pleased when Heston got to kill a few here and there, though it didn't seem a fair fight. In his spare time in the evenings, Heston's character enjoys wiping sweat from his naked man-torso and drinking scotch, maybe breaking up the monotony to eat some beans and fire a few rounds at the Family from his fortified fourth floor balcony. Wipe, glug, pow, pow.

In Act Two, Heston meets a fine young woman, Lisa, played by Rosalind Cash, who has not yet been infected, and he takes her back to his place. Turns out, of course, there's a small group of survivors living outside the city. Maybe Heston could come and visit? Maybe he could help them find a cure? Maybe, baby, but how does that song go? “If you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy. . .” It doesn't matter that Heston's a old white Army dude and Lisa's a foxy girl with an Afro. It's the end of the world, people. Bow-chicka-bow-bow.

Anyway, the sex might be good, but the movie really goes downhill from there. A cure is found, and the Family almost get Heston, but then they don't, then all that good lovin' makes Heston vulnerable, and he gets caught, wounded, and dies in a fountain, laid out dead in his best Christ-pose. Jesus, it's bad. He died so that others may live, see? Yawn. At no point are the baddies scary. At no point are you disturbed or even grossed out. There's a couple of chuckles here and there, but mostly the whole rigmarole is annoying. If you like Heston, you'll enjoy bits here and there. If you like zombie movies, you'll dislike The Omega Man. That's my final word.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Writing about the mother of all zombie movies -- the film that changed not just the horror genre but may have helped usher in the original MPAA ratings system -- feels a bit intimidating.  Much has been written about George A. Romero's seminal zombie movie, and in no way can I cover every possible reading of the film or provide a full survey of its history or related trivia.  But, like Ben holed up in that remote Pennsylvania farmhouse, I'm going to do my best to survive!

Night of the Living Dead still has the capacity to shock because it goes into taboo territory, to include story elements or images that for the most part are strictly off-limits.  In this way, NLD reminds me of a much older film, Tod Browning's Freaks, a pre-Code movie (from 1932) that challenges the audience by using many real-life sideshow performers as characters in what is basically a gruesome revenge tragedy.  With NLD, screenwriters John Russo and George Romero plotted a story that moved into territory that violated social values and taboos.  Many people have written about the filmmakers' intention of commenting on the times, but I don't think that's exactly how many zombie films work.  Rather, much of what an effective zombie film does is to show how human nature reveals itself when the social fabric unravels, civilization collapses, and existence is reduced to a kill-or-be-killed scenario. Whatever values and habits survivors hang on to -- or whatever new ones they develop -- unfolds in them.

The primary taboo that zombies violate is the eating of human flesh.  As many will know, one of Romero and Russo's original titles was "Night of the Flesh-Eaters," and, of course, NLD was inspired in part by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which the apocalyptic scourge comes in the form of vampires, blood-suckers existing a degree of magnitude beneath flesh-eaters.  And although one could make much of cannibalism as a commentary on the excesses of consumer capitalism, cannibalism has a much more fundamental history as an idea that Western civilization defines itself in opposition to.  It's not so much that zombies are eating your flesh, it's that, in a sense, they are eating everything we've come to identify ourselves with.  Again and again, zombies are shown as outside (a room, a house, a mall, a wall) and trying to get in. The barbarians are at the gate.

Certainly, 1968 was a year of cultural anxiety in the United States.  Richard Nixon was elected President, in part, by running as the candidate of law and order.  Coming as it did out of this moment of perceived chaos, Night of the Living Dead builds some of its  tensions out of cultural elements.  The media is shown as slow to perceive what's really going on, referring to the growing hoards of cannibalistic ghouls as "mass murderers," still applying the old framework.  The federal government may know what's going on, but they are not going to be forthcoming with the general public.  Local law enforcement is handled for the most part by dangerously cocky rednecks with guns, and they'll happily deal with the walking dead as long as the coffee's hot and the ammo plentiful.

Ont the ground, where the main plot of Night of the Living dead unfolds, matters are far more gruesome.  Opening in a rural cemetery where Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O'Dea)  have reluctantly come to visit the grave of their father, Johnny teases her graveyard-fearing sister with the now famous line, "They're coming to get you, Barbara!" Before you know it, Johnny is downed by an indigenous zombie and Barbara runs for for her life, finding refuge in a rural farmhouse. She is soon joined by Ben (Duane Jones), who, seeing that she's in shock, takes it upon himself to secure the house, boarding up the windows and doors and locating a gun.  Although the pairing of a white woman and a black man alone in a house might not seem problematic for younger audiences, at the time, it would certainly have raised some eyebrows.  The fact that Ben is perfectly comfortable taking charge -- asserting himself physically when necessary -- is all the more socially provocative. We're a long way from the island automaton of Carrefour in 1943's I Walked With A Zombie.

After a time, as night falls, Ben discovers that a handful of people have been hiding in the cellar of the farmhouse.  There's a teenage couple, Tom (Wayne Keith) and Judy (Judith Ridley).  More notably, there's a family whose daughter, Karen (Kyra Schon) has been bitten by a zombie, and she's dying despite the care of her weary mother Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and her panicky, overbearing father Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman). Harry would rather everyone stay cooped up down in the cellar, door bolted against the gathering hordes.  As Ben makes clear, once everyone's locked into the basement, there's no way out.  Some of the best moments in the film happen between Ben and Harry, exchanges full of racial subtext, with Karl Harman showing some fine acting chops for imperious douchebaggery in the face of Duane Jones' urgent confidence.

The plot ball rolls along quickly after this point.  After a time, everyone agrees to Ben's plan.  They'll gas up the pickup truck they have at one of the farm's outbuildings and make a run for a nearby refuge. This goes badly. Teenagers are burned alive and then eaten in gory detail; Ben just makes it back to the house, where he and Harry struggle over the only gun, even as the zombies are climbing through the doors and windows.  Harry gets himself shot, but stumbles back to the cellar, where he finds his daughter Karen, now a zombie, ready to eat him. Helen manages to free herself and retreat to the basement as well, but undead Karen stabs her over and over with a trowel, presumably antecedent to making a meal of mommy. Barbara, who had been staying alive to this point, sees her brother Johnny among the invading zombies and is carried off.  Karen, escaping from the cellar, makes a move for Ben, but he slips down into the basement and locks himself in. As a bonus, he gets to shoot the animated corpses of Helen and Dickhead Cooper.  In the morning, the zombies are cleared out by the redneck/NRA hordes, who happen to take out Ben with a head shot.  He could have been a zombie, after all. Game over.

The reversals pile up faster than the motionless bodies of zombies in the last half of the film.  Still concerned about your brother?  You'll be carried off and eaten, and Johnny will nibble on your knees.  Idealistic teenage love?  That'll get you blown up and eaten.  Take a gun away from a black man?  That'll get you shot.  Look after your children?  They'll kill you and eat you.  Stay loyal to your husband?  He'll get you killed and eaten by your own children. Assume the authorities will come to your rescue?  They'll end up assuming you're part of the problem shoot you in the head.  Forget the zombies, it's people who are the problem. Romero and Russo pile up the unthinkables-- murder, cannibalism, miscegenation, patricide, matricide, racial revolt, martial law, even incest -- to the point where viewer's might miss them on a conscious level, but their effects would nevertheless be felt.

Produced in black-and-white in and around Pittsburgh on a very limited budget, using regional actors, and for a grand total of $114,000 (about $750,000 in 2011), Night of the Living Dead should be understood as an independent film in the the purest sense.  In contrast, the year's top-grossing films in similar genres were Rosemary's Baby (which I've never cared for) and Planet of the Apes (which I adore), although both of these deal with themes of paranoia and revolt.  The realism of the film's look -- especially its prominent gore -- combined with its uncompromising presentation of taboo -- provoked a remarkable range of reactions from audiences and critics.  Regardless of critical or public opinion, Night of the Living Dead is the film that spawned most of the zombie movies to follow -- in part, because of its innovation, and perhaps because of its (oops) entry into the public domain. As a true original, it should be mandatory viewing for all zombie fans, if not all students of American cinema.

Navigating the Living Dead

Up next in Mort-Vivant's exploration of the zombie movie canon is George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the groundbreaking and poorly-copyrighted work that has spawned a whole family of living dead movies.  For the most part, I'll follow the main line of Romero's movies, with a few digressions here and there.  In the meantime, I leave you with this excellent genealogical chart for figuring out what goes where in this particular corner of the zombiverse, courtesy of paultagonist.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

The contemporary zombie movie makes a protean appearance in the 1964 Ubaldo Ragona/Sidney Salkow film, The Last Man on Earth.  Starring Vincent Price and a cast of all Italian actors, this adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend has many of the elements that, a generation later, define the parameters of the world of the zombie apocalypse.  Produced on a low budget and differing significantly from Matheson's novel, The Last Man on Earth is nevertheless successful in its stark imagery, sustained mood, and the precise, restrained performance of the great Vincent Price.

In the year 1968, the world is three years into a plague that has killed billions, and turned untold numbers into vampire-like creatures who shun sunlight, hate mirrors, and are repelled by garlic.  Shambling, stupid, and weak, these undead don't pose much of a threat to our antihero, Dr. Robert Morgan (Price), who roams the city by day exterminating the sleeping undead, then holes up in his fortified house at night.  

At the start of the plague, three years earlier, Morgan had been researching a cure, not realizing that he was in fact immune, having been bitten by a vampire bat in Panama some time before.  As Morgan seeks to find a cure, the plague is killing people by the thousands, and the government has decreed that bodies of the recently deceased are to be burned to prevent them from returning as the undead. Mogan's wife and daughter succumb to the plague.  His daughter's corpse is burned, but Morgan manages to arrange a burial for his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli).  But she, now undead, claws her way out of her grave and shows up at Morgan's door one horrible night.  Morgan must lose his wife all over again.

Back in the apocalyptic present, Morgan, who has survived by creating a regimented existence for himself, struggled to sustain his ongoing project of ridding the city of undead.  For Morgan's character -- and Price plays him as a weary mix of grief, hope, obsessiveness, and black humor -- to continue the work must at times appear to be a futile task. There are millions of undead; his quest is absurd.  If he were to find a cure, how would he go about implementing it?  Every now and then, it appears Morgan has a lachrymose evening in his wife's crypt or a boozy night watching home movies, but he's up the next day to turn wooden stakes in the lathe and go a-killin' all over again.

This changes, naturally, when Morgan discovers a young woman, Ruth (Franco Bettoia), off in the distance on his daily rounds. Morgan chases her down, convinces her to come back to his house, and, after a time, she reveals to him that she, too has the plague.  The difference is, however, Ruth is part of a group of survivors who are under treatment and have managed to avoid the whole undead thing.  They are starting a new society, and Ruth, in fact, was sent to spy on Morgan, who's managed to destroy some of the new breed in his daily rounds.  When Ruth falls asleep, Morgan takes a chance and gives Ruth a transfusion of his blood, which, containing antibodies for the plague, cures her.  It is, however, too late, as the militia of the new breed arrive to rid the world of Morgan, who is seen in their eyes as a monstrous remnant of the old world.

For viewers seeking gore and gruesomeness, keep in mind that the film was made in 1964, so, being under the motion picture code, there was no way to go beyond the consensus censorship of the period.  The undead are extra pale, have shadowy rings around their eyes, and extreme cases of bed-head, but are otherwise intact in appearance.  They talk a little, and say things like, "Morgan! Arrr! Come out, Morgan!"  They can hit things with sticks and throw rocks, but generally have a hard time getting around given the rigor mortis in their joints.

The most frustrating aspect of this otherwise effective film, in truth, is the new breed -- the hybrid undead, so to speak -- who appear in the last twenty minutes of the film. Their presence in this post-apocalyptic world is so poorly explained and unexplored -- though their hatred of Morgan is clear enough -- the waste of a good idea becomes all the more nagging the more one reflects on the film. Another understandable annoyance is the poor dubbing in post-production, a flaw no doubt inevitable as all the actors but Price must have been speaking their lines in Italian-accented English.

Neither of these shortcomings detract from the strengths of The Last Man on Earth.  It presents a compelling dramatic situation made all the more tortuous by the internal conflicts Morgan faces both as a scientist and a family man;    The settings of urban environments starkly empty of people are all the more chilling for the effective use of black-and-white film.  First and foremost, Vincent Price's performance will be a surprise for many in its emotional nuance and control -- there's not a moment of camp and scenery-chewing to be found.  Most of all, The Last Man on Earth, as it offers the first glimpses of what would become a whole richly explored genre of horror film, carries with it the suggestion of yet-unexplored areas of the premise.  Just how long can a survivor last -- and why bother?  How strong are the bonds of family between the living and the undead?  If the undead develop a culture of their own, how does it happen, and what does it look like?

Richard Matheson, the author of I Am Legend, preferred this version of his book to 1971's The Omega Man, but ultimately didn't care for the casting of Price or for some of the director's choices.  Matheson helped with the screenplay, but used the pseudonym Logan Swanson in the film credits rather than his own. It would remain for George Romero and others to work out the movie world of the zombie apocalypse in the years to come, but The Last Man on Earth is still the first word.

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

Although its title and marketing are sensationalistic, the 1943 film I Walked With A Zombie, produced by Val Newton and directed by Jacques Tournier, is a compelling narrative that offers understated mystery, intriguing characters, and a thoughtful exploration of a tropical setting.

The plot, based on a magazine article by Inez Wallace with dramatic improvements taken from Jane Eyre.Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is assigned to care for the invalid wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a wealthy sugar planter on the Caribbean island of St. Sebastian. When ingenue Nurse Betsy comments on the beauty of the islands, Holland has a cheerful response about destruction and decay brought about by the tropics. “Everything good dies here,” he grumbles.

True to the dynamics of Jane Eyre, Holland comes off as a prick, while his half brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison), manager of the sugar refinery, seems charming and attractive. On the island, the descendants of slaves are more respectfully depicted here than in other films of the period, with a few black roles developed into actual characters – most notably Alma (Teresa Harris) , a kind servant in the Holland household who looks after Betsy. The patient, Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), isn't exactly the madwoman in the attic, but she has a building to herself, where Betsy, a doctor, and the servants attend to her. Mrs. Holland, the beautiful blond woman in white, suffered a tropical fever that badly damaged her nervous system. As Alma says, “She went mindless,” a sleepwalker who can never be awakened.

Betsy's day off with sweet Wesley complicates matters. After Wes has a few too many rums at the local cafe, he passes out – but not before a local calypso singer (played by the legendary Sir Lancelot) lets drop the truth in the lyrics to one of his songs: Before she became zombified, Jessica was about to leave Paul Holland and run off with Wesley. Betsy sees that Wes is a drunk, and learns that Jessica may have been an unfaithful wife. As the days pass, Betsy, who begins to see her boss Paul Holland as a victim and has had glimpses of his softer side, decides that she will try to help Jessica recover. When a new scientific treatment fails to restore Mrs. Holland, Betsy takes Alma's suggestion and slips away one night to take Jessica to the hounfort – he voodoo temple – to see if the houngan and mambo (priest and priestess) can cure her.

In the most effective sequence in the film, Besty leads Jessica through the cane fields at night, down a complicated network of paths, marked here and there by totems of dead animals and guarded at the crossroads by the towering, zombie sentry Carrefour (Darby Zones). Carrefour is easily the most frightening figure in the film – bony, expressionless, shambling, and dead-eyed in the best zombie tradition. At the hounfort, the houngan determines that Jessica is in fact one of the walking dead, and hence belongs with the those who practice voodoo, and not with the whites. Betsy, with the help of the mysterious Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) is able to take Jessica back to the Holland compound. But the voodoo-people are going to want that pretty white woman back, it seems.

There's much to enjoy in I Walked With A Zombie. First and foremost, Frances Dee is appealing and engaging as the principled Betsy Connell, and her performance is controlled and pitched perfectly for the screen. Some of the other actors are a bit too polished and stagy, even for the period. As mentioned before, there's also a range of roles for black actors – not all of them stereotyped or patronizing. The film is beautifully lit in the way that only black and white films, and director Tournier makes wonderful use of foregrounding and tracking shots. Made as it was in the heyday of the Motion Picture Code, the filmmakers were limited in what they could show and what events they could relate. All in all, I Walked With a Zombie is more suspenseful than terrifying, more mysterious than shocking, but it's nevertheless engaging as a take on the voodoo-zombie world in the days before eaters of flesh.

The Walking Dead - Issues 79-84

When last we left our survivors, they had settled in -- if that's possible in post-apocalyptic America -- with a group of survivors in a walled compound just outside of Washington DC.  Rick, Andrea, Glenn, Abraham, Michonne and the rest had just found places for themselves in The Community (what else are you going to call it), when a gang of baddies showed up.  Rick Grimes, of course, led the fight against them, there was a lot of gunfire, and, in the end, the baddies left, and The Community's leader, recognizing the better man, turned over management of the place to Rick.  The problem is, all that noise from the shootout attracted every walker from miles around.  Good luck in the new job, Rick! (SPOILERS AHEAD!)

Issue 79 has the feel of a breather in the narrative, although some attention is paid to the problem not so much of the walking dead but to people.  When a Community member is stabbed by a loner on the outside -- even when an offer of help was no doubt in the making -- the question of the value of even sticking together in a community is raised. Eight-year-old Carl Grimes, clear-eyed and cynical, responds to the news of the the stabbing in his typically blunt manner: "Now maybe everyone will stop pretending we're safe."  Andrea, too, for all she's been through, is distrustful of the possibility of a normal life, and prefers the edgy solitude of her sniper tower and the company of her rifle, keeping the Community safe from on high.  It's clear that the roamer who's been attracted by all the noise are becoming a herd of thousands of zombies outside the walls, and that, in the end, no wall will likely keep the survivors safe for long.

The "No Way Out" storyline begins in Issue 80, with a bit of a misdirection -- first in a reminder of the stark zombie-killing force of Abraham, and second in the reasonable and comforting leadership of old One Hand, Rick Grimes.  "Keep as quiet as possible," Rick advises.  But the Community walls are quickly surrounded several zombies deep on all sides.  It's winter, so there's no easy way to grow food and no chance to to forage.  Rick admits that it's not ideal, and further suggests that, to conserve heating energy, people should start sharing living space.  All of this unfolds amid pages that are surprisingly white, made so by the effect of snow created solely by irregular white blobs that spatter each panel.  By nightfall, Michonne and Morgan are in bed together, and -- surprise -- Rick is hosting Jesse, the wife of the man he just killed.  Andrea, having taken her post in the sniper tower at the start of the day, looks to be there overnight and through the foreseeable future.

Before you know it, there's a breach in the wall -- small at first, but the weight of a thousand undead can move things, you know.  At the same time, Glenn decides to lead a mission to help out Andrea, stranded in her tower, by climbing across a rope suspended over a sea of walkers -- see the image at right. Issue 81 offers some more familiar zombie-killing fare and narrow escapes (or not), but it's clear that the herd outside must be dealt with directly in issues to come.  As a side note, WD 81 was one of the first comics I read in digital form, and the application for doing so requires you read panel-to-panel, not page-to-page; it seemed to me that the dramatic impact of certain moments was enhanced by the digital format, while the visual sweep was lessened --despite the ability to zoom in or pan any of the images.  At any rate, by the final panel, members of the Community are being eaten.  There maybe no way out, after all.

Much of Issue 82 takes place inside Rick's house as the Community is overrun.  "There's too many of them" is a line repeated by several characters as they battle the walkers.  Michonne is in fine form here, unleashing her samurai sword on the herd in defense of Morgan, who gets himself bitten.  (No worries, Morgan: your lady-friend Michonne will lop that arm off with your hardly having to ask.)  One particularly effective image is that of Abraham, looking out from his house while, reflected in the glass, we see the very procession of zombies he's observing.  Young Carl has got his hat on and his gun loaded, and is watching Morgan, now bandaged up and (possibly) heading for zombiedom.  Carl will shoot him if necessary.  With the Community now overrun, there is the question of what to do next, as cooperation will likely go out the window and survival takes precedence.  Take care of yourself and your own.  When asked about what is to be done about the children, Rick puts it unsentimentally: "The thing to keep in mind about other's people's children -- they're not our children."

In the annals of "making a break for it," Issue 83 offers a clear instance of failure, giving full meaning to the title of the story line "No Way Out."  Rick and Carl and their latest charges grab a zombie and pull the old guts-on-a-poncho trick.  But, once outside, people are too freaked out to keep quiet and keep moving, and several folks are eaten before Abraham comes outside and starts shooting.  Many zombies are killed, and other survivors join the carnage, and it appears that, if the gang just keeps blasting and chopping and bashing away, they might just put down the couple thousand zombies in the herd after all.  Sadly, Carl is shot -- not fatally, it appears -- but badly enough.  One of the most gruesome panels in the entire run of The Walking Dead is that of Carl, wounded, turning to his father.

In a moving sequence, the epic battle of the survivors against the herd really comes down to a simple narrative imperative.  If Rick can get Carl to the doctor and he and the others can destroy the herd, Carl might live. Michonne joins the fight, as do Glenn and Andrea (having gotten themselves back into the compound), and the dead pile up.  As they fight continues, they come to realize that they can win.  By the end, in one remarkable panel, we see the core group amid a pile of hundreds of downed walkers.  As "No Way Out" concludes, in a very touching epilogue of sorts, Rick comes to realize that "people are the problem," and that the walkers can be dealt with if the proper steps are taken.  And Carl is hanging on, hope against hope. People are the problem.  Again and again, in the world of The Walking Dead, the problems of the zombie apocalypse have more to do with human nature than the narrow imperatives of the undead.  

White Zombie (1932)

My survey of the zombie in popular culture begins with the 1932 film, White Zombie, directed by Victor Helperin and starring Bela Lugosi. Making full use of re-dressed sets from the 1931 hits Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as the cinematography skills of Arthur Martinelli, White Zombie introduces viewers to a concept of the zombie that is different from what we know these days, but in a visually interesting and consistently creepy film.

The plot is a stretcher from the beginning. Convinced by the wealthy white Haitian Beaumont to come to Haiti and be married on his plantation, the dashing young Neil and beautiful Madeline are drawn into Beaumont's trap. His plan? Enlist the services of the sorcerer LeGendreKarloff) to fake Madeline's death and bring her back as Beaumont's sonambulistic mistress. But Beaumont underestimates the deviousness of LeGrand, and before you know it, practically everyone has been turned into zombies. It's up to the pure-hearted Neil, working with the scientist Dr. Bruner, to save the day.

Now, these zombies aren't your modern-day walking dead. The flesh-eating, shuffle-footed rotters we know today are the evolution of monsters imagined by Richard Matheson (in the 1954 novel I Am Legend), adapted into the film The Last Man on Earth (1964), and given their real nasty edge by George Romero in 1968's Night of the Living Dead. More on those narratives later. In truth, the zombies of White Zombie are mindless automatons, but operate fully in the service of the magician LeGrand. Think of these old school zombies as a victim of mind-control brought about by a pop culture version of voodoo.

The carriage driver (always a useful chap in a horror film) explains the basics of these Haitian zombies to Madeline and Neil in the opening minutes of the film. Who are those fellows up there on that hillside digging around in the dark? “They are not men. They are dead bodies. Zombies – the living dead. Corpses taken from their graves who are made to work in the sugar mills and the fields at night.”

The concept of slavery is clearly impressed upon the film. Set in Haiti, the only modern nation to have had a slave uprising in which the oppressed prevailed, White Zombie depicts blacks often in the same state of servitude – this time as animated corpses, and a disposable work force at that. One of the most disturbing scenes in the film is a tour of the sugar mill, where we see black workers lurching through the machinery of the industry. One black zombie falls directly into the gears of a giant machine. Only the audience cares.

All the more disturbing is the implied horror – perhaps lost on contemporary audiences – of white people becoming zombies (that is, being enslaved) in similar ways. When LeGendre turns the tables on the selfish Beaumont and takes control of a white man, this seems to be depth of the horror the film takes us to, but not before a white woman (Madeline) has met a similar fate. The complications that the plot moves toward – the enslavement of white men and women – is a telling glimpse into the racial psychology of the first half of the 20^th century. White slavery, anyone?

The pacing of and performances in the film will feel awkward at times, as both the actors and the filmmakers are clearly coming out of the age of stage and silent film. It seems that few people understood that the power of film requires that many aspects of the presentation be understated. Bela Lugosi as the mastermind and sorcerer LeGendre gives the most distinctive performance, but many viewers will feel as though they are watching camp and not a legitimate horror film. Nevertheless, White Zombie has many interesting moments – mostly of a visual and atmospheric nature – and, with the film clocking at just under 70 minutes, it's worth your time.

For those of you who are wondering about the heavy metal band White Zombie, yes, they did take their name from which took the movie, and it's been a primary source of inspiration for former art school student Robert Cumming, AKA Rob Zombie, who has been nominated three times for a Grammy, as well as becoming a noted director of House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil's Rejects (2005), Halloween (2007), Werewolf Women of the SS (2007), and Halloween II (2009).

Up next: I Walked With A Zombie (1943)