1930s genre film
White Zombie, 1932, USA DIRECTED BY VICTOR HALPERIN
White Zombie may have been the first zombie movie but it bears little resemblance to its descendants being produced today. This would more accurately be described as a 'voodoo zombie' picture in that the undead aren't exactly undead, they've just been put into a "lifeless sleep" rather than ending up buried, reanimated and typically in a permanent state of decomposition. Thankfully Béla Lugosi was the man responsible (though the method by which he zombifies his victims is never explained), and through mind control he's assembled a whole workforce of undead locals to run his sugar plantation, all run from his extremely gothic castle on the Haitian coastline. Enter a blushing bride who has been convinced to have her wedding to a New York socialite in a colonial landowner's castle, and the only way the landowner can snatch the bride for himself is with the intervention of Lugosi's character, the wonderfully named Murder Legendre.
Made only ten years after Nosferatu and five years after the first talkies, there's no question that this is a genre classic. It has so many visually dramatic moments of memorable photography that it keeps me transfixed throughout, and I've been back to it many times just to experience them again. The screenplay has served as a template for just about every zombie movie since, and even though I actually don't have much interest in the raft of gorefest zombie films post-Night of the Living Dead (although as romzomcoms go, Shaun of the Dead was bloody good) there's plenty in this subgenre to keep me interested in what may lie between 1932 and 1968. The link above is to the better of two time-worn copies up at the Internet Archive, although the best is certainly the Roan Group Restoration, as far as I know still only available on DVD.
Revolt of the Zombies, 1936, USA DIRECTED BY VICTOR HALPERIN
This was Victor Halperin's indirect sequel to his own White Zombie made four years earlier, and billed as "The Weirdest Love Story in 2,000 Years". What is weird is how the sheer magic of the original couldn't be repeated by the same director and producer, because Revolt sadly pales in comparison in just about every department. Apart from it being a similar story of unrequited love merely relocated to Cambodia, the mystery, strangeness and strong emphasis on the visuals simply weren't recaptured. Béla Lugosi didn't appear either, although his malevolently piercing eyes filling the screen were recycled to add some much-needed punch at some otherwise flat key moments. Both movies pitch naïve westerners up against a powerfully animistic aspect of their colonial conquests, something that they simply can't understand, and while the resolution to Revolt of the Zombies is different and the script quality and smoothness of the photography have both been polished, the end result was something mostly devoid of atmosphere even though real Cambodian locations were filmed for the backdrops. Unfortunately, the end result for me was just to be able to tick a box to say I've seen it, although White Zombie is on my hard drive for keeps.
( Cross-posted with cult_movie)