I’ve said it on this blog before and I’ll say it again: I’m not a big fan of the endless hordes of plague-spawned Zombies that have shambled their way across movie and TV screens ever since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead opened up the flood gates. For me, modern zombies are too abstract a threat, too numerous, and too interchangeable to be all that interesting after you’ve seen a handful of these shows.

I get it that apocalyptic zombies are just there to get the survivalist drama going, whereby we learn something about ourselves -- the good, the bad and ugly -- through characters desperately trying to get by in a desolate and dangerous world. But for me, the relentless survivalist thing with hardly a glimmer of hope gets awfully old awfully fast.

In contrast to the bleakness of a zombified world, I prefer my horrors to be more up close and personal and not quite so earth shattering. With more traditional horror, you can have your monsters and beat them too. When it comes to creating zombies, Voodoo practitioners and mad doctors are a lot more tangible and colorful than viruses or experimental gasses. And they make great foils in the eternal struggle of good vs. evil -- defeating a living, breathing mad person is so much more satisfying.

Zombies in the Great Depression

Voodoo-style zombies got their start in Hollywood around the same time that Dracula and Frankenstein debuted for Universal Pictures. In fact, it was Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, as the enigmatic and aptly named “Murder” Legendre, who conjured up the first cinematic zombies in White Zombie (1932).

Legendre is the sinister foreman on a Haitian plantation owned by Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). Legendre is worth his weight in gold to Beaumont, as he is able to create zombies out of the local population who are absolutely obedient and work for nothing (Jeff Bezos, take note). When Beaumont meets Neil and Madeline (John Harron and Madge Bellamy), an attractive young couple who are engaged to be married, he invites them to stay at his mansion and have the ceremony there.

Of course, the creepy old rich guy has designs on the beautiful girl, and he has his Voodoo-master henchman Legendre turn Madeline into a zombie so that he can have her for himself. Beaumont quickly realizes his mistake, as zombies are not exactly the life of the party, and orders Legendre to restore Madeline to life. When Legendre refuses, it becomes apparent who really runs the show (hint: it’s the guy with the platoon of zombies under his control). Legendre seems to be riding high, but Neil and a local missionary, Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn), may have something to say about that.

Although not well-received at the time, over the years White Zombie’s reputation has returned from the dead to be regarded as an example of the triumph of creepy atmosphere and moody black and white cinematography over stilted acting. According to Bela Jr., the film was a personal favorite of his father’s. But it was also an early indicator of bad career decisions that would haunt Lugosi throughout his life -- for years afterward he regretted taking a paltry sum upfront instead of a cut of the robust box office receipts. 

"Stick with me kid and you'll go places!"

Zombies go to war

While it was no Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie inspired more than a few imitators. Next out of the gate was Revolt of the Zombies (1936), which was not so much an imitation as a follow-up to White Zombie made by the same producers and director. Set shortly after World War I, Revolt switches locales from Haiti to the exotic temples of Cambodia, where an expedition sent by the Allied Command is rummaging around, looking for the arcane “Secret of the Zombies” (shades of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark!).

One of the eggheads attached to the expedition, Armand (Dean Jagger), stumbles upon the secret of making zombies, and uses his newfound power to intimidate the only female member of the group, Claire Duval (Dorothy Stone), who loves another.

The outbreak of World War II couldn’t stop the advance of zombies in the B movie units of Hollywood. Initially, the movie villains exploiting zombies shifted from evil plantation owners and Voodoo followers to Nazi operatives using their arcane knowledge to subvert the allied cause.

Monogram Pictures, King of the “Poverty Row” studios specializing in B programmers, made near-identical twin zombie pictures in the early ‘40s. King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) share so many plot points and themes (and two cast members), that they’re easy to get confused with one another:

✔ Both feature suave doctors who turn out to be Nazi spies using Voodoo and zombies to further their sinister aims (Dr. Sangre in King, played by Henry Viktor, and Dr. Von Altermann in Revenge, played by John Carradine).

✔ Both doctors have beautiful wives who walk around in a catatonic state (I’ll leave it to you to guess why).

✔ Instead of just one rock-jawed protagonist, the films opt for a tag-team bro duo who for much of the time are maddeningly clueless to all the creepy stuff happening in front of their noses (Dick Purcell and John Archer in King; Robert Lowery and Mauritz Hugo in Revenge).

✔ Both feature an attractive female second lead for romantic subplot purposes (Sangre’s niece played by Joan Woodbury and Von Altermann’s secretary played by Gale Storm).

✔ Both Doctors’ households are run by Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who, according to IMBDb, was the first African-American actress to secure a contract with a major studio.

✔ And then there is the dubious comic relief of bug-eyed Manton Moreland, who plays a superstitious valet in both. Monogram could still get away with such stereotyped characters in the ‘40s. Manton’s routines were so popular that he was a regular go-to character actor for the studio, appearing in a recurring role in their Charlie Chan series (and often getting favorable billing). Even though Moreland jumps at every shadow that crosses his path, to be fair, he is far more perceptive than his obtuse bosses, who couldn’t sense danger if it walked up and slapped ‘em silly.

The biggest distinction between the two films, such as it is, is the scope of the villains’ ambitions. In King, Sangre, partnering with the Voodoo priestess played by Madame Sul-Te-Wan, attempts Voodoo soul transference (!?) on a Navy admiral he has captured in order to extract defense secrets. (This being 1941, shortly before the U.S. entered the war, the government Sangre is working for is unnamed...wink, wink.)

A couple of years later, with the U.S. fully immersed in the fight against the Germans and Japanese, Revenge ups the ante considerably, making Von Altermann into a mad Nazi doctor intent on creating an army of zombies to turn the tide of the war.

Will the dense protagonists get wise in time to foil the nefarious plots? Will the more handsome of the pair get the girl? Will Manton Moreland’s belief in zombies be vindicated? Take a wild guess.

War-weary zombies

As the global conflict ground on, movie-makers scaled back the war themes in their B programmers in deference to audiences who simply wanted to forget their troubles for a couple of hours at the theater.

Auteur B movie producer Val Lewton wisely set his 1943 film I Walked with a Zombie on a fictional Caribbean island, and borrowed liberally from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in telling the atmospheric tale of a young nurse (Frances Dee), who begins to believe that the expressionless, sleep-walking wife of her wealthy employer (Tom Conway) is really a zombie.

Lewton carries on the tradition of having a beautiful wife under a zombie spell, but also includes one of the creepiest male zombies ever for good measure. And thankfully, there’s not a whiff of war or spies or mad Nazi doctors.

Darby Jones' zombie scared the snot of me when I first saw I Walked with a Zombie.