Gary Morris's Review of White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film

The Outline

By Gary Morris

In the cinephile's ideal world, every film would get the deluxe treatment McFarland has given to White Zombie in Gary Rhodes' book. It's hard to imagine why this 1932 horror film, a primitive but atmospheric Gothic directed by Victor Halperin, was chosen, but we're not complaining. Rhodes is aware of the film's dubious rep ("Many lovers of classic movies agree with what many critics said in the beginning, that this is a silly, badly played example of penny-dreadful filmmaking"), but is determined to rehabilitate it by examining it from every possible angle from the historical to the sociological to the analytical. Rhodes is persuasive in outlining the film's attractions. There's the contribution of the inestimable Bela Lugosi ("leaner and more wolfish than in any of his other pictures"); the fantastic mishmash of sets (from The Cat and the Canary, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and others) that together make for a compelling otherworldly atmosphere; the chiaroscuro cinematography; the film's foreshadowing of the mood-drenched Val Lewton B films ten years later; and the film's standing, in the author's words, as "an important work of 1930s cinema, of independent filmmaking, and of the horror film genre."

Rhodes thoroughly investigates the evolution of White Zombie from a myrid of sources classical (Faust), popular (Trilby), and exploitative (the 1929 nonfiction voodoo book The Magic Island), through preproduction, postproduction, and finished film to its purportedly wide influence on "subsequent voodoo and zombie related books, articles, films, and plays." Rhodes deserves kudos for seeking out a wide range of original sources, including the director's widow who supplied him with biographical information on Halperin missing from all other accounts. A series of detailed appendices cover everything from reviews of the film to box-office grosses to pressbook reproductions. If the author's (freely admitted) obsession with White Zombie sometimes carries him over the edge -- the "Victor Halperin Family Scrapbook Photographs" is nice but is it necessary? -- it's easy to forgive him considering the breadth and depth of this obvious labor of love. Included in the feast are 244 images and photographs.

The Highlights:

This is keenly akin to those of Pauline Kael on "Citizen Kane" or George E. Turner on "King Kong": Each author's fascination with a focused topic yields a book of intense purpose and value beyond reviewing theatrical motion pictures. Each of us has such a film in our picture-going experience, one overriding favorite that informs the way we regard all other movies.

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