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White Zombie was the 1930s equivalent of a Blumhouse production: a horror film made so cheaply (and profiting so tidily) that it called into question the extravagant budgets of other Hollywood fare. (It also had the uncredited assistance of Jack Pierce, the Universal makeup maven responsible for Karloff’s distinctive look in Frankenstein.) Director Halperin and his producer brother, Edwin, had already been cranking out independent films on the fringes of Hollywood for about a decade. It was shot in 11 days with a budget of about $50,000 and used standing sets at the Universal lot, where Halperin had rented studio space. (I’d add that it also anticipates the adult-fairy-tale-with-an-otherworldly-edge quality of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.)ĭue to its underground popularity, we know more about the making of White Zombie than we do about many comparable Poverty Row productions.
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Everson bracketed Halperin’s movie with Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, an avant-garde contemporary White Zombie unwittingly resembles in its pacing and freak ambience. Carlos Clarens’s outstanding An Illustrated History of the Horror Films (1967) argues that White Zombie possesses more poetry and fluidity than Lugosi’s breakthrough, Dracula (1931).
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Caligari and name-checked Jung, Shelley, Byron, Wagner, and Homer in his extended analysis of Halperin’s zombie opus.
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When Wisconsin Film Society president Arthur Lenning compiled a collection of extended program notes and, in 1965, released it as a book titled Classics of the Film, he included White Zombie alongside established masterpieces like Greed, Sunrise, and The Cabinet of Dr. Since I was 18 years old, I assumed that my championing of White Zombie was boldly unconventional-little did I know that the film had been a consensus classic in horror-buff circles since the mid-1960s.
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I wouldn’t instinctively feel the need to make such a comparison today-but I wouldn’t disagree with my original verdict either. I thought the Ophuls film had a messy, self-conscious narrative structure and moments of unabashed melodrama, while White Zombie was pure cinema, its images of terror (clasped hands, glowing eyes) rendered with a graphic simplicity that approaches cuneiform pictographs. I proclaimed White Zombie-a horror cheapie with Bela Lugosi as a unibrowed necromancer in a thinly researched rendition of Haiti-to be the superior film to anyone who would listen. I had snuck into a University of Chicago classroom screening of Max Ophuls’s venerated Lola Montes (1955) and then sprinted across campus to see White Zombie at Doc Films immediately afterwards. The first time I ever saw Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie (which will be screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center twice this week in a 35-millimeter restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive) it was part of an unintentional and incongruous double feature.
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