The Plague Of The Zombies (1966)
The second from last in my unavoidably overextended Voodoo Season was one of Hammer Films’ best gothic horrors and the company’s only treatment of the subject. Which is just as well, since they’d be hard pushed to make another zombie film as terrific as this.
In a way, it was natural for Hammer to get round to this particular theme as they’d revisited so many 1930s American horror classics – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, The Wolf Man and the obvious inspiration for this story was White Zombie (1932) with which it shares the basic motifs – a zombie master exploiting undead slaves for financial gain (sugar cane plantation / abandoned tin mine) and the use of zombification to submit a desired but unwilling woman to the lustful appetites of a man repulsive to her. The inspired twist was transferring the locale from 1930s Haiti to 1860 Cornwall.
(BTW an episode of TV series Danger Man titled “Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet” was set on Haiti where the locals whisper rumours about a feared local millionaire industrialist “resurrecting the dead and sending the zombies to work in his company’s mines” The episode was broadcast in 1965.)
In brief - The Plague Of The Zombies is a perfect blend of mystery, costume drama, suspense, creepy atmosphere and chilling horror, artfully but unobtrusively directed by John Gilling.
Bernard Robinson’s sets are top notch, Squire Hamilton’s mansion is both fittingly opulent and convincingly ‘masculine,’while the Thompson’s once genteel, chintzy abode has acquired just the right degree of shabiness.
James Bernard’s music, which at moments seems to echo cues from his Quatermass scores is of his usual high standard and always perfectly achieves the desired mood for each corresponding scene or sequence.
Roy Ashton’s zombie make up is well realised, and he gives Jacqueline Pearce’s Alice a convincingly weary and run down appearance in her early scenes.
Peter Bryan’s screenplay is lean and faster moving than many of Hammer’s plodders and the dialogues, banter, verbal sparring, exquisite articulation of the upper class characters and figured dialectal speech of the villagers is all emminently entertaining.
But what really raises this film to the level of one of the best BHFs of the 1960s are the pitch perfect performances of André Morell as Sir James Forbes and John Carson as the unctuous Squire Hamilton. They are both simply superb in their respective roles and my reply to the oft-repeated speculation that these parts would have been better played by Cushing and Lee is – no way, José.
The irregular Diane Clare does well as Forbes’ daughter Sylvia, nicely conveying her affection for the old man while twisting him round her little finger and her terrified reaction to being abducted by Hamilton’s idle-rich thugs and her spirited confrontation with the Squire himself are nicely done. And it must be said, she looks rather fetching in her dishevelled but defiant stance.
Of couse, the actress most mentioned in relation to this movie is Jacqueline Pearce who features in the midway horror tour-de-force for which The Plague Of The Zombies is best remembered, rising from her grave with an unearthly but alluring smile on her deathly grey visage before being swiftly beheaded by a hefty blow from Sir James’ shovel. This is the overture to Peter’s nightmare as the ground of the cemetery opens up and one by one the mouldering corpses push their way through the earth to rise from their burial places and shamble menacingly towards the petrified man in an eerie sequence of swirling fog, close ups of rotting, blank eyed faces and dizzying camera angles. Some fleeting glimpses of a summer blue sky momentarily distract from the tenebrous atmosphere but the overall ghoulish impact of the sequence remains and indeed has had a lasting influence in the genre.
Michael Ripper gets a more substantial role as the baffled police sergeant, though the Victorian uniform and side whiskers inevitably conjured up momentary visions of The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Olde London Towne.
Brook Williams, Alex Davion and Marcus Hammond (the first actor I interviewed in my journo days) do well enough in the supporting parts, but Roy Royston, who apparently hadn’t made a film for thirty years needn’t have come out of retirement for the badly underwritten role of the Vicar he sporadically essays in this movie. Louis Dahomey, denizen of many a Voodoo production on both large and small screens pops up briefly as the Squire’s ‘coloured servant’.
Having established that PotZ is one of the best films I’ve seen during my trip through Voodoo cinema (as I mentioned before, knowingly saving the best for last), here are a few final whimsical musings which are in no way intended to undermine any of the aforementioned praise.
Apart from Dahomey, the only other blacks to appear are the drummers whose pulsing rhythms accompany the underground magic rituals – presumably brought over from the Caribbean and wearing strange horned fur hats, one almost expects to see written on the zebra skin(?) clad drums some catchy name like ‘The Haitian Voodoo Viking Drum Trio’.
Why was the Martinus zombie already rotting when he’d only died the previous day?
WTF was Hamilton thinking having a zombie dump Alice’s body outside the mine workings where it could be found and put his operation at risk? And who moved it later and what for?
And the non-sequitur when the clandestine post mortem reveals animal blood on Alice’s mouth – had she been snacking on live chickens before she died?
Squire Hamilton resembles Satanist Mocata more than a Voodoo bokor. And could you imagine Gilling directing a version of PotZ in the 1940s with Tod Slaughter as Squire Hamilton?
Martinus has no Christian name but his brother is John Martinus (at least in the end credits, on his coffin lid it says “Jhone Martinus”
Daftest dialogue:
Sir James: “Let me explain. Unless you, Vicar…?”
Vicar: “No, I’m ignorant in these matters.”
Sir James: “Peter, have you ever heard of Voodoo?”
Peter: “It’s a form of witchcraft, isn’t it?”
……
Sir James: “I spent the afternoon reading up the subject in the vicar’s library. It’s all there. It’s all clearly, scientifically (sic) stated” (Two deductions – Voodoo is an oxymoron and the vicar doesn’t read the books in his own library)
It also occurs to me that this film is an inversion of The Reptile (with which it was filmed concurrently)– in this case a white man successfully appropriates the secrets of an‘exotic’ cult and reaps the rewards. In The Reptile the white man who tries to do the the same is subjected to a horrific punishment.