(1932)
Directed by Victor Halperin
Starring Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, Joseph Cawthorn, Robert Frazer, John Harron

This film starring Bela Lugosi tends to get overshadowed by the one he made the previous year, Universal’s Dracula (1931) since that was the film that made him a star. It is unfortunate because I feel that he gives a much more memorable performance here in White Zombie, as the voodoo priest Murder Legendre, than he did as the famous Count. And while it might not be an all-around classic title in the annals of horror history, it does have more than enough to give it more credit than it gets, besides being the namesake of Rob Zombie’s first band.

This does have the honor of being the very first feature zombie film, taking ideas from William S. Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island, which was where American audiences first heard of tales of voodoo and zombies. These were somnambulist or automatons, humans moving without will, or at least without their own will. These were not the flesh-eating, living dead kind, which we wouldn’t see until 1968. Based mainly on voodoo rites, these were not actual dead that have come back to life, but more likely just under a spell, as well as possibly caused by drugs of some sort. No matter what the belief is, it is the first film dealing with them. This kind of zombie would remain in horror films for the next 3 decades until George Romero changed the game with Night of the Living Dead.