White Zombie is famous mostly for two reasons. The first being that it’s considered by many to be the first zombie movie of all time. The second being that it was shot on the Universal lot, so it reuses a bunch of set pieces from classic monster movies to add to it’s aesthetic. Certainly, the lavish sets are the thing that I enjoyed most about the film. Imposing cliffside castles and cavernous, creepy dwellings add a horror movie mood to a film that actually doesn’t have too many horror elements. The story we get is about a man who is experiencing unrequited love deciding to let a voodoo puppet master (Bela Lugosi) make the object of his affections into a zombie puppet that he can control. We’re not talking about the modern, rotting, eat your brains sort of zombie here; the girl is just painlessly killed and then resurrected into a sort of living doll. Because of this approach to zombiism, the film can get pretty slow and boring at times. There is a tension filled scene near the end of the film where Lugosi begins to control his zombies and turns them loose with knives, commanding them to kill, but it doesn’t add up to anything horrific in the end. Really, the only reasons to watch this one are the beautiful sets and Lugosi’s standard, creepy performance as the film’s ghoul.
