White Zombie (Film)

• Bela Lugosi: Legendre
• Madge Bellamy: Madeleine Short
• Robert Frazer: Charles Beaumont
• Joseph Cawthorn: Dr. Bruner
• Brandon Hurst: Silver
• Clarence Muse: coachman
• John Harrow: Neil Parker

White Zombie is a horror film directed by Victor Halperin from the year 1932. It is the first film to play the lead role in the zombies within the meaning of the undead.

Action

Madeleine and Neil are getting married in Haiti, on the estate of her friend Beaumont. Beaumont has accepted the invitation but not very selfless: He is in love with Madeleine and want to own entirely. The owner of a nearby sugar mill called Legendre transforms Madeleine to Beaumont's request into a zombie. The mill owner has experience in these matters, a whole troupe of undead slaves eventually have to work with him. The groom makes itself together with a missionary in order to save his mindless fiancée.

Background

The film uses split-screen representations at the end of the film and led the point-of -view shot in the genre of horror films.

Reviews

• The lexicon of international film writes: ". A late for the classic horror film of the 30s, raising genre film that condenses his poetic atmosphere for horror stories and offers in its best moments of pure surrealism, after years of oblivion "

• The eyes may be the leitmotif of the film, Ekkehard Knörer writes in the magazine Jump Cut: at the beginning of the piercing eyes Legendre, the dead eyes of the zombies, followed by the attempt to revive Madeleine's eyes. The camera take the POV perspective in order to illustrate this, at the same time it creates thus a critical, reflexive distance to the cinematic representation.

The American heavy metal band White Zombie, which existed from 1985 to 1998, chose their name as a tribute to the film.