Urban legends of Haiti, tell of zonbi, which is what the western civilization calls zombie. It is essentially a corpse that woke from the dead, a living dead if you will. Said corpse is controlled by the priest who raised it from the grave; usually a voodoo priest or priestess, who can keep the zombie eternally as his/her slave.
The zombi word in English language literature
goes back to The Unknown Painter which is a short story
first published in 1838. Later, the letter “e” was added and the word became
zombie. Also the mythology changed quite a lot, very liberally, and really
quickly.
Now, this
column will cover mostly U.S. films, and so it is appropriate to note that zombies
first became of interest to American citizens during the occupation of Haiti
(1915 – 1934), so it is no wonder that the living dead started appearing in
film during the ‘30s. But first, they became famous thanks to William Seabrook's
infamous The Magic Island book, about which I have heard and read so
much, yet I’ve been able to track down a reasonably priced copy.
I’ve learned
most of the above from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie). There
are many more studies published the last few years on the subject, and my
favourite is Jamie Russell’s Book of the
Dead: the Complete History of Zombie Cinema.
Through this
new column I will try to catalogue and review every zombie movie made in U.S.A.
and Europe, in chronological order. Serials and TV series will be ignored. It’s
an insane task, but I’m too.
White Zombie (1932)
So much has
been written about the first feature film to feature zombies... It is a
low-budget affair shot in 11 days. It proved very influential (White Zombie, the
band, anyone?) but not until the ‘60s when it was re-discovered (it was until
then considered lost). The matte paintings look indeed very dated, but the
whole thing is so good that you’ll probably be too engaged to it to notice.
A young
couple [Madge Bellamy and John Harron] visit Haiti and very soon they will be
surrounded by death as their journey temporarily stops at some funeral that was
taking place in the middle of the road. They then meet Legendre [Bela Lugosi]
who is backed up by zombies. The driver is acting fast and takes the couple
away from him, but first Legendre manages to steal the young girl’s scarf. All
this is happening in the first few seconds.
The couple
visits Charles Beaumont [Robert Frazer from Black
Dragons (1942)] who wants to steal the girl away from the boy and for this
to happen he uses a magic potion that was made by Legendre. Said magic potion
turns the poor girl into a walking corpse and Charles is not satisfied.