White Zombie is considered to be the first zombie movie ever made. The plot is that a creepy landowner falls in love with a girl named Madeline, but the problem is that she is engaged to some guy named Neil. So like any healthy scorned lover, the creepy landowner enlists the help of a voodoo master (played by Bela Lugosi). The girl becomes a zombie, but the creepy landowner isn’t pleased with the results and eventually comes into conflict with Lugosi’s character. But like any good old time movie, everything works out in the end and we get a nice happy ending.

I should be clear that the zombies in this movie are almost nothing like the zombies we would see in a Romero film. I wasn’t expecting much in regards to makeup because this movie was made in 1932, but some of the zombies do have a strange creepy element to them. The problem though is that some of the zombies aren’t even a little bit scary, and the non-creepy zombies seem like they’re really stoned and just stumbling around.

The zombies in this movie are a product of voodoo. They don’t hunger for flesh and just follow their master’s orders. Being realistic though, a movie featuring flesh craving zombies would have been too extreme for audiences in 1932.

The best thing about this movie is Lugosi’s performance. He is a lot of fun to watch, portraying a character that is so much more than just a rip off of Dracula. By comparison, Lugosi’s Dracula was strong, but the voodoo master is sneaky petty rat. Lugosi is so wonderful in his role, that I found myself a lot less interested in any scene he wasn’t in.