White Zombie (Victor and Edward Halperin Productions, United Artists, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 6) I had time to run my husband Charles and I a movie, a home-burned copy of an Archive.org download of the 1932 film White Zombie, made by the Halperin brothers (Edward Halperin producing and Victor Halperin directing) in 1932. I’d wanted to re-see this movie ever since Charles and I watched a low-budget public-domain DVD of its sort-of sequel, Revolt of the Zombies (1936), a truly awful movie with only a few flashes of the visual imagination of White Zombie despite the same producer, director and cinematographer (Arthur Martinelli). White Zombie cast Bela Lugosi, already on the downgrade after his success in the 1930 Dracula, probably because he never bothered to learn more than the most rudimentary English. Lugosi actually learned his scripts phonetically, and low-budget producers weren’t going to wait around long enough for him to learn reams of dialogue that way. So they gave him relatively few lines, which in some of Lugosi’s other films left him really at sea but in this one worked triumphantly. Garnett Weston’s script (apparently based on a novel by William Seabrook, though Seabrook is uncredited, I’ve never read the book and therefore I have no idea whether the film is at all close to the novel or not; it’s possible the Halperins just bought the rights to the book to get the title) and Victor Halperin’s subtle, inventive direction create a more convincing mood of terror than the relatively pedestrian writing and direction of Dracula. (Yes, I know Tod Browning is considered one of the masters of cinematic horror, but Dracula is still a piece of filmed theatre rather than a fully thought-out film and I think Browning’s skills as a director deteriorated after the dual trauma of sound and the death of his greatest star, Lon Chaney, Sr.)

I first heard of White Zombie in Carlos Clarens’s 1967 book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, in which he proclaimed it Lugosi’s masterpiece – a verdict with which Charles agrees. I personally like Murders in the Rue Morgue (also from 1932 and the consolation prize Lugosi and director Robert Florey got for not being able to make Frankenstein) better, but White Zombie is still an excellent film and Lugosi delivers one of his finest low-keyed villain performances. Yes, White Zombie has its flaws: though Victor Halperin got to shoot it at Universal (where, among other things, he recycled the bedroom set from Frankenstein in which the Monster terrorized Mae Clarke for a similar scene in which Lugosi, as zombie master “Murder” Legendre, invades her bedroom and terrorizes Madge Bellamy), the ultra-low budget still shows, especially in the really cheesy musical score. The imdb.com page for White Zombie has an unusually long list of soundtrack credits, and I suspect Victor and Edward Halperin scored the film from bits of music published and sold to live accompanists for silent movies. The cues have titles like “Agitato,” “Agitato Pathétique,” “Jota” (a Spanish-sounding dance that makes an unexpected appearance in an early scene and was actually composed by Xavier Cugat, of all people – well, if Boris Karloff and Busby Berkeley could both work in the 1932 film Night World, why not Lugosi and Cugat here?), “Ill at Ease,” “Incidental Symphony,” “S.O.S.,” “In the Depths,” “Appassionata” and “Cavatina,” and their composers were people like Gaston Borch, Nem Harkin and Carl Bohm. There’s also a quite effective use of an off-screen female choir providing atmosphere in one scene by singing “Listen to the Lambs,” which I’d always assumed was a traditional spiritual but according to imdb.com was actually composed (or at least arranged) by the pioneering African-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett.

Another problem with this film is Madge Bellamy; she’d been a minor star at MGM in the late silent era and she was trying to make a transition to sound here, but she’s so hopelessly wooden it’s hard to tell when she’s supposed to be a zombie and when she’s supposed to be a normal human. White Zombie would have been a much better movie with Zita Johann, who played a similarly torn character far more effectively in the 1932 film The Mummy (directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff in a rare role that gave him a rare chance to play romance and heartbreak), in Bellamy’s role. Plot-wise, White Zombie is pretty standard: a young couple, Neil Parker (John Harron) and Madeline Short (Madge Bellamy – I wondered if Weston had named her “Madeline” in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” just as James Whale and Benn W. Levy had named the patriarch in The Old Dark House “Roderick” after Madeline’s brother Roderick Usher) are in love. He lives in Haiti and sends for her to come there. A white planter, Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer), met her on board the ship, ostensibly reached out to them and offered them the chance to stay at his plantation house and marry each other there. Only Beaumont secretly has the hots for Madeline himself, and to win her he hires zombie master “Murder” Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to turn her into a zombie so she won’t resist him.

Actually, Legendre also has a crush on Madeline, and when Beaumont laments that having zombie-Madeline as a girlfriend isn’t as much fun as he thought it would be because she shows no sign of human emotions (which made White Zombie an interesting film for me to watch just as I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, about humanoid robots who are likewise incapable of human emotions) and pleads with Legendre to restore her to normal humanity, Legendre reminds him that as soon as she’s normal she’ll just hate him and return to Neil. Eventually Legendre zombie-izes Beaumont as well, setting up an interesting and almost wordless climactic sequence in which Beaumont, momentarily freed from one of Legendre’s spells, stabs him in the back just as Neil has managed to make it up the long stairs to Legendre’s castle (an obvious glass painting but still a haunting image). Only Legendre doesn’t die, at least not yet, and as he recovers consciousness Madeline’s brief reversion to normal humanity ends and she becomes a zombie again. Neil ultimately does Legendre in by wrestling him and throwing him off the castle balcony to the sea below. Neil tricks Legendre’s other zombies into thinking he too has fallen into the sea, so they march off the balcony and leave Neil and Madeline to be married and the old missionary Dr. Bruner (Neil Cawthorn in a schticky performance Charles mistook for the Swedish comic actor El Brendel) to get the last word.

What struck me most about White Zombie this time around is how Victor and Edward Halperin made a Val Lewton movie 10 years before Val Lewton. The film is full of Lewtonian tricks, including sudden sound edits (the big fright scenes are created with a loud bird noise on the soundtrack and only afterwards do we see its source, a vulture) and shadowy visuals. For a while I wondered if the vulture was actually an incarnaton of Beaumont's butler, Silver (Brandon Hurst), who gets killed by Legendre early on in the movie but might have been (though probably wasn't) reincarnated as the bird of death. Even the famous scene in whicn one of Legendre's zombies falls into the blades of the sugar mill and gets hacked to pieces, while the other zombies go on obliviously, is done with chilling subtlety; we don't actually see the body get chopped up by the blades, we just see the mill wheels keep turning as the man is being cut to shreds. Despite its flaws, White Zombie is an acknowledged horror masterpiece, and it only deepens the mystery of how after two great films in a row – White Zombie and the brilliant, underrated Supernatural, for which the Halperins got the infrastructure of a major studio (Paramount) and stars (Carole Lombard, Randolph Scott, H. B. Warner, Vivienne Osborne and the marvelous character villain Alan Dinehart) – the Halperin brothers not only retreated to the cinematic minor leagues but made something as thoroughly dreadful as Revolt of the Zombies, which had some of the same elements as White Zombie (the zombies themselves and a romantic triangle in which a rotter tries to win a reluctant woman’s affections from someone else by zombie-izing her) but used far, far less effectively.