Читать книгу Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse - Brad Steiger - Страница 24

In 1965 when I wrote Monsters, Maidens, and Mayhem: A Pictorial History of Hollywood Film Monsters (Merit Books, Chicago), I included chapters on man-made monsters, vampires, werewolves, mummies, and Things from Outer Space, but I made no mention of zombies.

The book became successful enough for the publisher to request a sequel that same year. In Master Movie Monsters I elaborated on such topics as “Fantasy’s Finest Hour,” “Vintage Vampires,” and “Mad Scientists and What They Hath Wrought.” Once again, I included no discussion of zombie movies.

Why did I neglect to include the zombie, the dreaded creature of the undead, in two books about Hollywood monsters? Because American filmmaker George A. Romero had not yet scraped together a $114,000 budget, gathered some unknown actors and friends, and filmed an independent black-and-white horror film that was released in 1968 as Night of the Living Dead.

Before Night of the Living Dead birthed the way that motion picture audiences and popular culture would perhaps forevermore view the zombie, there had really only been two films of any note about zombies: White Zombie (1932) with Bela Lugosi, and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), the second horror film produced by Val Lewton, who was highly respected for his classic The Cat People (1942).

While White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie have never exerted much influence on the mass audience, they were both set in the Caribbean, and they each made an effort to depict with some accuracy the legend of real zombies. Some critics have said that Lugosi’s portrayal of the Voodoo master in White Zombie was one of his very best. The scene depicting the mindless zombies working in their master’s sugar mill caught exactly the cruel exploitation of the undead slaves.

Jack Pierce, Universal Studios’ top makeup artist (famous for the work he did making Boris Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein), created unusually striking makeup for Lugosi. Pierce also designed the head-to-toe costume and the make-up for actor Frederick Peters, who played the zombie, regarded by many as one of The Horror Hall of Fame’s most frightening looking characters. Remarkably, White Zombie, in addition to the utilization of advanced camera, lighting, and sound techniques, boasted a full musical score—an impressive creative aspect that was lacking in Universal’s greatest success in the genre, Dracula and Frankenstein.

Although zombies never gained the audience appeal and loyalty of the great monsters lineup of Universal Studios’ Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy, White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie actually depicted elements truer to the mythos of the real zombie than did Night of the Living Dead.