I saw a movie in my ...
Question: I saw a movie in my horror-film class that was filmed in the '30s or '40s. It took place on an island, and I think there were zombies and voodoo. It was really good. Do you by any chance know what it might have been?
Answer: I have two suggestions, one from the '30s and one from the '40s. Zombie movies were actually relatively uncommon until the '70s. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) reconceived the walking dead, with a heavy dose of inspiration from Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend, which was filmed first as The Last Man on Earth (1964) and subsequently as The Omega Man (1971). Romero's zombies are sort of rotting land sharks, mindlessly driven by the need to eat (human) flesh; in earlier films, they were enslaved by the person whose spell raised them from the dead and acted only at that person's behest. I suspect that you saw either White Zombie (1932) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943). White Zombie stars Bela Lugosi as a Haitian plantation owner who uses zombies to work his sugar mill and, later, to terrorize a newlywed couple because he's fallen in love with the bride. I Walked with a Zombie loosely reworks the story of Charlotte Bronte's classic Jane Eyre: A young nurse is hired by a plantation owner to care for his near-catatonic wife (she is, of course, under a zombie curse) and falls in love with her employer. They're both terrific movies, more atmospheric than horrifying; White Zombie, which is available from several DVD companies that specialize in public-domain titles, is a little rougher around the edges technically, but contains some striking images. I Walked with a Zombie, which is coming to DVD for the first time from Warners in fall 2005, is a small masterpiece of subtext and suggestion.
