Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
White Zombie
A sugar mill runs on the dead. A wedding guest asks the miller for a favor.
The first zombie feature, made before the genre had rules, when the word still carried Haiti in it: the horror here is not appetite but ownership — the dead as labor, will as a commodity. Lugosi's mill, grinding on with a workforce past caring, is among the bleakest images of pre-Code horror. Creaky in its joints and genuinely uncanny in its silences; a film that remembers what the zombie was a metaphor for.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Victor Hugo Halperin
- Photographed by
- Arthur Martinelli
- With
- Bela Lugosi · Madge Bellamy · Robert Frazer · John Harron · Joseph Cawthorn
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.