It's Zombie Time! White Zombie, 1932
Quick lesson in zombie history: In the 19th century, American troops entered Haiti, and encountered a beliefs in zombies. In vodou religion, there was a belief that zombie making sorcerers had the power to remove a person’s soul and entrap it in a bottle. Then, the zombie-maker would enslave the unensouled person, forcing them to engage in nonstop labor forever, without will or end. It is not hard to see how such a belief might have arisen from the actual on-the-ground facts about race-baced slavery in Haiti. And it’s important to register that the people who believed in this idea were far more afraid of the zombie-maker than they were of the actual zombies. The latter were much closer to automata or robots than they were to any immediate threat to other people. The zombie-makers, on the other hand? They could bottle up your soul and compel you to work at the drop of a hat.
William Seabrook’s sensationalizing novel The Magic Island told about zombies, importing the idea of the reanimation of the dead into the US from Haiti, and giving it a very powerful racist spin—thinking of zombification as black magic, enacted and practiced by Black people, thinking of it as something terribly dangerous and uncontrollable. That, of course, is how it hit the mass market in the US in the 1932 film White Zombie—a film that locked into popular culture that vodou and zombies were things to be terrified of, things that could even turn white people into slaves.[1]
The film opens in a semi-tropical locale, in the evening, with a dim shot of a group of Black people, chanting, beating drums, and dancing in a loose circle. They appear to be conducting some kind of ritual. We cut to a horse-drawn carriage, occupied by a blindingly white young couple—Neil and Madeline—who appear to be besotted with each other. Based upon their dress, it appears the film is set in the contemporary day, which is to say, the 1930s, despite the fact that the attire of the people performing the ritual would put them more nearly in the 1800s. The disjunction between modernity and an older but undead past is important throughout the film.
As the carriage approaches the ritual site, the Black carriage driver stops. The young woman, Madeline, leans out to ask him what’s going on, and he informs her that it’s a burial, and that the people—who are Black Haitians—are burying the dead person in the middle of the road, “where people pass all the time,” because they are afraid of people trying to steal the dead body. As the carriage soldiers forth, we see the superimposition of two large, spooky, glaring eyes over the scene.
A moment later, the carriage stops so the driver can ask directions. A creepy man (Bela Lugosi) with markedly large, spooky, glaring eyes comes over to the carriage, stares meaningfully at Madeline, and puts his hand on her scarf. At that moment, some dazed looking people come trundling over the hill, apparently in the thrall of the creepy man, and the Black driver immediately recognizes them as “zombies.” He shouts to his horses, “Allez, vite!” and they take off, with the creepy dude pulling Madeline’s scarf off her neck and keeping it for his own nefarious purposes. When the couple arrives at a palatial West Indies home, belonging to one Monsieur Beaumont, they ask the driver why he sped away like that. He explains zombies to them, saying they are corpses awakened from the dead to be made to work for their enslavers.
Once inside the Beaumont mansion, we learn that Neil and Madeline have been invited there by Beaumont so they can be married there. A man named Dr. Brunner, who’s been invited to perform the wedding, warns the young couple that something is not quite right with Beaumont. Sure enough, we cut away to hear him scheming with his butler, desiring to take Madeline away from Neil. “Nothing matters if I can’t have her,” he says. After Beaumont greets Madeline in an awkward and overly familiar way, we see him set off in a carriage outside, sitting next to a zombified driver. He appears surprised, but not too surprised. The zombie takes Beaumont to a sugar refinery on a plantation, where there are dozens of zombies, working away.
The zombies’ physical appearances are marked. First and foremost, their eyes are vacant; they are clearly of the unensouled variety of revenant that typifies Afro-Caribbean zombie lore. Second, some of the zombies are dressed in rags; some in monk’s habits, some in witch doctor garb, some in more nearly modern attire, some in 18th century cloaks, some in modern suits. The clear sartorial message here is that many different historical times are being brought together: the colonial era, the era of active transatlantic slave trading, the transhistorical time of the Church, and the modern day. The zombies, then, are somehow outside of regular, historical, linear time, living in an unchanging, eternal present of slave labor. Some, but by no means all, of the enslaved zombies are Black; many are white.
Surprising no one, the man who owns/controls the zombies is none other than the creepy, big-eyed white guy from the highway, who stole Madeline’s scarf. His name turns out to be Murder Legendre—I kid you not, his name is “murder legend.” Beaumont has come to request this creepy slaver’s help in his desired seduction of Madeline. Legendre offers Beaumont a powder in a tube, indicating that this substance will zombify Madeline. Beaumont resists, but Legendre pressures him to take the substance. Meanwhile, the temperature in the room is very, very cold: we can see Legendre’s breath as he talks. Given that we are in Haiti, the idea of freezing temperatures alerts us further to the presence of the occult, and to this man’s ability to violate the usual order of nature. Beaumont accepts the unnatural powder and heads off.
We cut to a scene of Madeline in her underwear (this film was pre-Hays Code, 1934), dressing for her marriage—seeing her in this state of undress reveals her vulnerability to the malign forces circling around her. Once she’s dressed, Beaumont escorts her down the stairs, with the Wedding March playing. On their short walk, he tries desperately to convince her to leave her fiancé and be with him instead. “I’d give my life to make you happy!” he insists. She refuses him, so he says, “One last gift before I lose you forever,” and he hands her a rose that—unknown to her—has been doused in the zombie powder. She sniffs the rose; we know she’s poisoned.
Outside, we see Legendre wrap Madeline’s scarf around the base of a candle, which he then carves into the shape of a woman. He then melts the wax of the candle over another candle and, as he does so, Madeline collapses, dead. Later, Beaumont meets Legendre to dig up her body.
At the graveyard, we meet Legendre’s other zombies. He reveals that, in their lives, they were his “enemies,” including one “witch doctor,” who had taught Beaumont all the occult magic he knows and a “high executioner” who had almost executed the creepy man himself. So, this man—Legendre the zombie master—systematically enslaves anyone who might prove a threat to him, and then uses them for their labor. “What if they regain their souls?” asks Beaumont. “They will tear me to pieces,” says Legendre the zombie slavemaster calmly.
This is a key moment in the film, from the vantage point of evolving zombie art in the United States. Clearly, this film, following the Afro-Caribbean zombie tradition, understands the zombie as a creature whose soul has been taken away by an enslaving sorcerer. It’s not like a Greco-Roman soothsayer revenant (see my previous post on Erichtho), nor like an Icelandic vengeful revenant (see my previous post on the draugr). In both of those cases, the revenant retains its soul. These Haitian zombies are exactly what the Black carriage-driver said: zombies who’ve been reanimated solely to work for their makers and masters. They do so without their souls. But, of course, Beaumont’s question also reveals the possibility that these enslaved zombies might get their souls back. There is a notion that the enslavement isn’t permanent.
Once Madeline is resurrected and missing from her tomb, her depressed beloved Neil discovers her absence, and goes to Dr. Brunner to try to figure out what happened. He learns of drugs that can cause “lethargic coma,” and that Brunner thinks Madeline’s “death” was “native work.” Dr. Brunner is zealous about helping Neil, because he wants to make an example to all “these witch doctors”; to Brunner, the native sorcery—and not the malicious slaving tendencies of the white slavemaster Legendre—is the real problem.
We cut to a scene in a seaside castle, where Beaumont has imprisoned the zombified Madeline. He offers her necklaces, as she sits by a piano, playing Chopin. Now this is key to the zombie philosophy of this film. The fact that Madeline can still play Chopin means that her soul is not entirely absent, merely somehow radically attenuated. She retains some of her former, agential self. Her face is entirely impassive; she barely moves, but she still remembers Chopin. Seeing this mostly-evacuated version of Madeline, Beaumont’s resolve quavers, and he begs the slave-maker Legendre to bring Madeline back.
But that cannot be: Legendre himself has taken a fancy to Madeline. He poisons Beaumont, blinds his butler, and induces Madeline to attempt to stab her husband, Neil, who’s come to find her in the remote castle. We watch Madeline warring against the zombie-maker’s will: she sees his eyes before her own (much as Grettir saw Glaumr’s eyes in the Icelandic tradition, I hasten to note), but she also appears to recall her love of Neil, which stays her hand. As she finally moves to strike, a mysterious, cloaked hand reaches out and stops her. Seeming to recover her wits somewhat, she runs out of the castle, and to the sea, aiming to commit suicide. Neil stops her, but is attacked by Legendre’s other zombies. Fortunately, Dr. Brunner appears, knocks Legendre out, and urges the zombies to jump to their final deaths in the sea. While Legendre is knocked out, Madeline briefly regains her former consciousness. When he comes to, she’s a zombie again. Beaumont then rouses himself, and throws Legendre into the sea. Once he is dead, Madeline returns to her former self, none the worse for wear.
End of film.
So let’s get into it. This film understands zombification as an occult magical practice of the native and Black denizens of the island , but one that can be taught to Europeans like the zombie-maker Legendre. Dr. Brunner intimates that the powder given to Madeline was a coma-inducing drug, and that part of the seeming magic—the raising of the dead from the grave—wasn’t real, magic. What zombification really was, then, was in part medical hoax (the supposedly dead person wasn’t fully dead) and in part some kind of brain-washing magic, or mind control. Because it’s indisputably true throughout the film that the zombie-maker has near-total psychic control of all of his slaves as long as he is conscious. Once the zombie-maker is dead, the enslaved zombies are freed—although, of course, most of them have jumped off a cliff and died in the interim.
The goal of zombification, in this film, is dual. On the one hand, it’s enslavement: the zombie-maker uses his zombies for sugar plantation labor and, the film strongly implies, plans to use it for sexual enslavement, in the case of Madeline. The second goal of zombification is revenge: Legendre only enslaves his “enemies,” with the exception of Madeline, whom he aims to enslave as the object of his sexual desire.
The zombies in this film are somewhat scary—many of them have heavily made-up, sunken, staring eyes, and many of them are large, with exaggerated eyebrows and other quasi-monstrous bodily traits. But it’s crystal clear that the primary monster in the film is the Legendre—he’s the one we should be staying up at night worrying about, not the zombies themselves. He is the repository of evil, malice, revenge, and cruelty. He is the one trading in the occult and planning to use the undead—or, I should say, the nearly dead—to serve his twisted will. The real monster in the film is the slaver, not the enslaved. In that emphasis, the film is very well aligned with Afro-Caribbean vodou belief: sure, zombies are disquieting, but the figure who should be keeping you up at night is the person who makes the zombies, not the zombies themselves.
It's worth reemphasizing that the zombie-maker in this film is a white, ostensibly French, colonialist. (I say ostensibly because Lugosi’s famously Eastern European accent is not even trying to pass for French in the film.) To be sure, Dr. Brunner has a great deal of animus against “natives” and “witch doctors,” but in truth, the actual evil we see in the film resides exclusively with the ostensibly French Legendre. So there is something anti-colonial, or at least critical of white settler colonialism, in this film. And what fascinates me even more is that the film appears to associate that white settler colonialism also with sexual enslavement—let’s not forget, both Legendre and Beaumont were intent upon enslaving Madeline to their sexual will, and both of them were enslavers of other people as well. We only encounter Legendre’s enslaved zombies in the film, but we learn that Beaumont has his money because he runs a plantation; his wealth, then, relies upon the manual labor of other—probably Black—workers.
So in the end, there’s no question that we’re supposed to be swooningly worried about the pure, blond, iconically European looking young woman, Madeline. She is the “white zombie” of the title of the film, and her endangerment bespeaks the panic about “black arts” that suffused mainstream American culture after Seabrook’s book was published. But at the same time, the film makes incontestably and provocatively clear that the real problem in the film isn’t black magic itself, and certainly not the native or Black people of Haiti. Instead, the real problem is the ambitious, dehumanizing white settler colonialists—both Legendre and Beaumont—who take altogether too many liberties in saying who gets to be human, and who does not.
[1] An excellent treatment of all of the foregoing can be found on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-origins-of-the-zombie-from-haiti-to-the-us-kywe4q/