Tue 2 Sep 2025
An Archived Movie Review: WHITE ZOMBIE (1932).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[5] Comments
WHITE ZOMBIE. United Artists, 1932. Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, Joseph Cawthorn, Robert Frazer. Story by Garnett Weston; based on the novel The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook. Director: Victor Halperin.
To break up the impending marriage of the girl he loves to another, a Haitian plantation owner makes a fiendish deal with a master of the living dead. (There is no doubt as to which of these characters is played by Bela Lugosi, is there?)
While the atmosphere is magnificently eerie, the pace is achingly slow. And there is no denying it, Lugosi is simply a wonderment. Either this movie will chill your bones to the marrow – or, depending on the mood you’re in, you’ll laugh your head off.
— Reprinted from Movie.File.1, March 1988.
September 3rd, 2025 at 6:38 am
Seabrook’s THE MAGIC ISLAND as a novel? Well, maybe if you squint and look at it in the dark. It was published as nonfiction, an account of Seabrook’s trip to Haiti, describing the people, the customs and..the voodoo (Vodou). Seabrook used a lot of imagination in writing this book and critics have decried his portrayal of both Haiti and zombies. THE MAGIC ISLAND was the first popular boom to describe the zombie as the living dead, “a soulless living corpse,” just as WHITE ZOMBIE (the first feature-length zombie film) helped promote the image of a zombie as the result of voodoo and magic. There is a lot of fiction in Seabrook’s book but it is a stretch to call it a novel.
Nonetheless, WHITE ZOMBIE is an interesting film and Lugosi does a more than credible job.
September 3rd, 2025 at 10:29 am
Thanks, Jerry. This is a *lot* more that I knew about the Seabrook book than I ever did before, which is nothing. As for the movie, I think I knew its historical significance when I wrote this review, but I can’t be 100% sure about that. I’m willing to say that what I wrote was just an honest opinion and leave it at that,
September 4th, 2025 at 8:33 am
I enjoyed your comments on this, Steve. They almost captured the outrageous theatrics and slapdash presentation of the thing — aspects that somehow make it even more enjoyable.
September 4th, 2025 at 4:29 pm
The scene in which one of Bela’s “workers” falls into the sugar refinery works is still shocking, although the pace is rather glacial until the end, and Madge Bellamy makes a better zombie than she does a fiancee.
September 4th, 2025 at 8:50 pm
Slapdash, chilling, and glacial, all of the above. Lugosi is stunning.
Seabrook had a brief celebrity as an “expert” on voodoo