White Zombie

Victor Halperin, United Artists release, 1932. Bela Lugosi is Murder Legendre, who runs a Haitian sugar mill with dead labor and is hired to keep a bride (Madge Bellamy) from her husband. The first feature-length zombie film. Shot fast on rented Universal sets, including pieces left from Dracula. Lugosi’s stare and the mill’s grinding stones are the images the poverty-row ads could afford. Independent, not a studio horror cycle picture. The zombies are workers. That is the colonial fact inside the chiller.