White Zombie

‘Master of Horror’ Bela Lugosi stars as a satanic hypnotist in the first ever feature-length zombie film.

When young couple Madeleine (Madge Bellamy) and Neil (John Harron) arrive in Haiti to get married, their host Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) is determined to take the bride for himself and turns to his neighbour, voodoo master and hypnotist Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi, fresh off his success in Dracula) for help.

Shot in less than two weeks on a limited budget, White Zombie remains a cinema milestone for bringing zombies to the screens for the first time; here incarnated as the voodoo-inspired lumbering automatons that prevailed in film until George A. Romero reimagined the creatures as the faster, flesh-eating fiends of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Created by the Halperin brothers (Victor directing and Edward producing), White Zombie has been criticised for its overly expressionistic acting styles (being an early talkie) and its dated representions of race and Haitian culture, but it remains a key text in the development of zombie mythology.