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Victor Halperin, United Artists release, 1932. Bela Lugosi is Murder Legendre, who runs a Haitian sugar mill with dead labor and is hired to keep a bride (Madge Bellamy) from her husband. The first feature-length zombie film. Shot fast on rented Universal sets, including pieces left from Dracula. Lugosi’s stare and the mill’s grinding stones are the images the poverty-row ads could afford. Independent, not a studio horror cycle picture. The zombies are workers. That is the colonial fact inside the chiller.
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The Supernatural and the Occult
The living dead as labor. Lugosi's Legendre runs a sugar mill with corpses, and the horror is the grinding stones, not appetite. Shot fast on sets left from Dracula. The colonial fact is inside the chiller, and the film half knows it.
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