Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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War I Cambodia—but mostly a static yakathon shot on a few cheap sets. Far more frightening are the ghostly war dead who rise to trouble the conscience of a self-destructive humanity in Abel Gance’s dark World War I fable J’accuse! (1938). Fear-film fans also fared better with a pair of back-from-the-grave Boris Karloff shockers, 1936’s The Walking Dead (wherein Karloff sports a tonsorial style to rival his striking The Black Cat look) and 1939’s The Man They Could Not Hang. In each, Karloff’s reanimated character operates outside then-established OZ (Original Zombie) rules: He can think, act, talk, and, despite a few physical alterations, was not transformed into an entirely new being.
Traditional native zombies received a bit of a boost in the 1940s, resurfacing, to alternately comic and surprisingly scary effect, in the Bob Hope frightcom hit, set in Cuba, The Ghost Breakers (1940). The following year witnessed the release of Monogram Pictures’ Mantan Moreland showcase King of the Zombies. Although later maligned for being politically incorrect, it highlights the inventive African-American comic’s oft-improv’d interactions with the titular living dead. The subject was played solely for laughs in Zombies on Broadway (1945), a fitfully funny vehicle for Abbott and Costello wannabes Alan Carney and Wally Brown, with a major assist from Bela Lugosi as an unstable (what else?) scientist. Elsewhere, the deceptively titled Valley of the Zombies (1946) offered only one eccentric, vampire-like living-dead fellow (Ian Keith).
Probably the first screen zombies to resemble Romero’s ghouls can be briefly glimpsed staggering, arms outstretched, in the 1942 Lugosi vehicle Bowery at Midnight (“They’re coming to get you, Bela!”). Unfortunately, these creepy Caucasian apparitions are granted criminally scant screentime in a largely crime-centric caper. And on the subject of ethnicity, mad scientist John Carradine may have been the first to integrate the homegrown zombie ranks in 1943’s Revenge of the Zombies. In this film undead Anglos and African-Americans un-live together in apparent blank-brained harmony, bringing to mind TV horror host and once and future “Cool Ghoul” Zacherley’s immortal line: “One day we’ll all be dead; then we’ll finally have something in common.” Rather passive voodoo-struck female zombies, meanwhile, supply the supernatural angle in 1944’s Voodoo Man, wherein Monogram springs for three top terror talents—Bela, Carradine, and the drolly sinister George Zucco.
“One day we’ll all be dead; then we’ll finally have something in common.”
—Zacherley
Zucco scores solo lead honors in the second-best zombie movie of 1943, The Mad Ghoul. This ingenious, wryly scripted (by Paul Gangelin, Hans Kraly, and Brenda Weisberg) scarefest details the adventures of one Dr. Morris (Zucco) who, assisted by a clean-cut, All-American boy med student named Ted (David Bruce), works on a series of seemingly harmless experiments. Little does the ever innocent Ted realize, however, that the doc is actually planning to create slaves to do his ruthless bidding by perfecting a gas designed to induce zombie-like trances. Soon Ted is led by Dr. Morris on nocturnal graveyard visits, where he practices his surgical techniques, removing the hearts from recently buried cadavers in order to sustain his own increasingly worthless life. The Mad Ghoul’s mix of genuinely creepy over-the-top horror and deadpan gallows humor qualifies it as one of the era’s best and brightest fright flicks.
Even The Mad Ghoul, however, pales beside RKO producer Val Lewton’s and director Jacques Tourneur’s atmospheric masterpiece of quiet horror I Walked with a Zombie (1943). An extremely fetching Frances Dee plays a Canadian nurse assigned to care for Christine Gordon, the comatose wife of plantation owner Tom Conway, on the gloomy Caribbean isle of San Sebastian. Here, locals “cry when a child is born and make merry at a burial.” Is Gordon really a zombie, victim of a voodoo curse? Finding the answer to that question provides viewers with one of horrordom’s most haunting cinematic journeys.
In the 1950s, the zombie took a cinematic backseat to radioactive mutants and hostile E.T.s, though exceptions proved the rule in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis romp Scared Stiff (1953), a retooled Ghost Breakers. The largely dull Boris vehicle Voodoo Island, the static, subaqueous The Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), and bargain-basement schlockmeister Jerry Warren’s Teenage Zombies (1959), which was the first flick to feature a zombified ape, as well as your typically overage titular adolescents, brain-zapped to serve as Stateside pawns of the International Commie Conspiracy.
Teenage Zombies (1959), was the first flick to feature a zombified ape.
Ed Wood’s deathless Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956, unreleased until 1959), is justly lauded in many circles (including this one) as the best bad movie ever made. It merged zombies with a more contemporary trauma, the ever-present alien threat. While slow to implement (to put it mildly), the invaders’ insidious scheme calls for the resurrection of the deceased via “long-distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands of the recent dead.” As dedicated Edheads know, the interlopers manage to re-animate all of three zombies—played by slinky erstwhile horror hostess Vampira (a.k.a. Maila Nurmi), massive Swedish wrestler and Ed repertory troupe regular Tor Johnson, and chronically underrated chiropractor Tom Mason, subbing for the actually, inconveniently dead Bela Lugosi. The group ambulates in a manner much like Romero’s future living dead.
The lobotomy-scarred Creature with the Atom Brain (there are actually several in number) were scientifically revived corpses in the service of a crazed ex-Nazi (Gregory Gay), in league with a deported gangster (Michael Granger) who’s looking to rain vengeance down upon his enemies. While lacking Night’s zombie autonomy, these are possibly the most violent and arguably the scariest deaders seen onscreen to that point (1955). They’re capable of snapping human spines and, with the help of those handy atom brains, even blowing up stock-footage airplanes.
Edward L. Cahn’s cheap but occasionally chilling Invisible Invaders sees transparent aliens commandeer earthly cadavers for the usual sinister purposes. Of all the ’50s zombies, these most closely resemble those in Night of the Living Dead. They don’t boast the latter’s age, gender, and occupational variety—all are business-suited, middle-aged white guys who look like they suffered simultaneous seizures at the same sales convention. But they’re honestly unnerving dudes for 1959 as they stagger in stiff, hollow-eyed tandem down a cemetery hillside.
Kicking off the next decade, 1960’s Cape Canaveral Monsters repeats Invisible Invaders’ riff of aliens reanimating and inhabiting expired Earthlings, in this case bodies retrieved from a car crash. An admirably nihilistic ending supplies the lone attribute of this shoestring sci-fi effort by director Phil Tucker, who fails to recapture his Robot Monster (1953) magic. Another notoriously penurious entrepreneur, minimalist sleaze merchant Barry (The Beast That Killed Women) Mahon, went the traditional voodoo route with his obscure New Orleans-set outing The Dead One (1961). It’s the first Stateside zombie movie lensed in color, the better to accentuate the pale white title character’s sickly green visage. Connecticut-based auteur Del (The Horror of Party Beach) Tenney headed south to the Caribbean, by way of Miami Beach, to create the nearly thrill-less black-and-white zombie quickie Voodoo Blood Bath (1964). A.k.a. Zombie, the film wouldn’t widely surface until 1971 when aptly named distributor Jerry Gross resurrected it as the cheatingly titled I Eat Your Skin. The film doubled up with his much more explicit I Drink Your Blood, a blatant bid to ride Night of the Living Dead’s cult coattails.
AIP produced a more lavish living dead story in Roger Corman’s 1962 Tales of Terror. The Edgar Allan Poe-based trilogy highlighted a reanimated Vincent Price in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar segment, a tale George Romero would tackle nearly thirty years later in the Dario Argento collaboration Two Evil Eyes. The most creative of the period’s drive-in-targeted active corpse flicks, though, came from Las Vegas and the fertile mind of the late Ray Dennis Steckler. His 1964 The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies not only boasted the second-longest title in genre-film history (after Corman’s The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) but arrived as the first zombie musical (in fact, Steckler billed it as the “First Rock’n’Roll Monster Musical”). Del Tenney’s Horror of Party Beach, unleashed earlier that year, actually offered the first zombie rock song, the Del Aires’ “The Zombie Stomp.” The Incredibly Strange Creatures…scores more points with its wildly surreal, pre-psychedelic extended-nightmare sequences than with its rather uninspired rubber-masked