Actually, the collective noun for zombies is a horde.
I dreamed… I saw the dead rise. All the graves in the churchyard opened and the dead came out. All the graves were empty.
Brook Williams as Dr Peter Thompson, The Plague of the Zombies
Director: John Gilling
Writer: Peter Bryan
Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys
Starring: André Morrel, Diane Clare, Brook Williams, Jaqueline Pearce, John Carson and Alexander Davion.
Released: 3rd January 1966
Trailer
The span of time between White Zombie and The Plague of the Zombies is only thirty-three years, but within that span a huge amount of change across the world. A second world war, the baby boom and the beginning of the nuclear age. Many movie monsters during that time were nuclear monstrosities, (Them!, Tarantula or Godzilla), aliens (This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still) or Other (The Creature from the Black Lagoon). Though there were zombies present, they mostly sucked (The Astro-Zombies, Plan 9 From Outer Space) and were lost in a cavalcade of different, one-off monstrosities. The classic monsters like werewolves or Frankensteins, were at best given teenage versions or relegated to repeats on TV.
In Britain however, horror was dominated by Hammer Studios, affectionately known for its ‘Hammer Horror.’ Hammer Film Productions had existed since 1934, but really found its biggest successes in the period from 1955 to 1969 with horror. Films were made quickly, often sold based on a poster or title and the script written to accommodate standing sets, costume stores and a reliable stable of actors and crew. Though still cheaply made and lurid like the American B movies, Hammer favoured more gothic aesthetics, giving them a sensibility that made them different to what appeared to be the standard fare from across the Atlantic. Amongst those films released was The Plague of the Zombies, one of the last zombie films before Night of the Living Dead would change everything.
One of the interesting things about this film is how closely it follows, yet has refined, the formula set by White Zombie. Just like its forebear, Plague has voodoo zombies (set in Cornwall rather than Haiti, but still name checked) controlled by a master exploiting them for labour. There’s no magic drug, rather just voodoo magic, but the zombies still shamble stiffly like in White Zombie. They are much more explicitly dead, looking a foul bluish-grey with paper skin and white eyes, and this time we get to see them emerge from graves, albeit in a trippy nightmare sequence. We even get zombies on fire (with one stuntman wearing a mask that looks weirdly like Michael Myers of Halloween). Voodoo zombies clearly have a formula by this point that has some variation, but generally follows the model set by White Zombie.
But what stops this being an effective zombie film in the modern sense is that the zombies still lack agency. Just like in White Zombie, they are expendable cannon fodder in service of the main master villain. It doesn’t stop it from being an enjoyable film overall, but the standard of zombies being wielded as a tool rather than the force of evil independently is still in play. That this is still part of the appropriation of black culture and religion makes it problematic in that there is no black voice present in these films, not even as a villain. Though at least the villain isn’t a foreigner this time.
One of the problems in White Zombie is how the black zombie workers are left to rot, forgotten to a plot determined to save the white woman who most certainly didn’t deserve to be made into a zombie. They aren’t some evil army of the dead but innocents used as labour. The same is repeated here. Squire Clive Hamilton is in it purely for evil profit rather than evil and profit like Murder Legendre. The Squire’s plan is not to simply pay the locals to work in his mine, but instead save a few bob by slowly killing the local population, stealing a sample of their blood, resurrecting them and then forcing them to work in the tin mine for profit. By the end, as the zombies and mine burns, they get the opportunity to revolt against Hamilton and doom him to his death. I hardly need make a Marxist reading of the film more clear. In some ways, the zombies problem is a failure to unionise!
This is also a rare, Pre-Romero zombie film that, however briefly, touches upon the idea of zombies as a disease. Much literary analytical ink has been spilled looking at vampires and werewolves as disease vectors, much in the same way that zombies are now the modern equivalent. But with their often magic origins, zombies up until this point weren’t disease carrying viruses, but representations of the fear of unknown religions and cultures, to put it rather generously. The title is our first clue, but in an early scene our lead hero Sir James Forbes receives a letter telling him of the situation occurring in Cornwall that requires his attention. The letter describes symptoms of lassitude, with several deaths taking place over the last twelve months. Though this is not a thread that is fully developed within the film itself, as it is soon revealed to be the work of voodoo priests, it is another interesting thread that leads us to the creation of the modern zombie in time.
This is not to say that this film is without its problems or that it is a proto-modern zombie film. One of the problems still in place, though arguably not as badly as in White Zombie, is the race politics. The black characters are stripped to the waist hitting drums, without any sense of character at all. They exist within the story purely as exotic plot function. The villain is another white, aristocratic (colonial) man who has stolen the culture, but where in White Zombie the few black characters present were victims of Legendre, here the black characters are guilty of the crimes as well. It seems to be black in a zombie film until this point is to be a servant, an evil servant, a zombie servant, or a victim. Not great representation when you can’t even get a speaking villain role.
But there is one sequence that shows the way of the future. Mostly throughout the film, the zombies are the cannon fodder goons they always have been, tools for their masters. But after Sir James Forbes cuts off the head of a zombified Alice Tompson with a spade, her husband, understandably considering the circumstances, faints. What follows is a startlingly effective short nightmare sequence, filled with dutch angles, curling tendrils of smoke and the dead clawing out of their graves like on Judgement Day. These zombies feel akin to their modern counterparts, and their slow, inevitable stalking of Peter Tompson is the first time it feels like a zombie has evil intent independent of any wider control.
This is not the first modern zombie film, but it does hint at what is to come. Looking at it as a modern zombie film would be a disappointment, but I found myself enjoying it quite a bit, especially the incongruity of Haitian voodoo zombies in Cornwall. Hammer would continue to produce many films after this, including many more Dracula and Frankenstein films, amongst other gothic characters. But for one, brief two minute sequence, Hammer stepped out of the gothic trappings that had and would continue to define them so much, and stumble upon something new and modern. It would be only a couple of years later for that promise to be realised in a completely new – and terrifying – setting.
America.
Notes
This was filmed at the same time as another Hammer film, The Reptile, using many of the same sets and even a couple of the same actors.
Night of the Living Dead as a new brand of horror, as well as a general shift in audience taste, highlighted the boredom with formula and caused there to be quite a shift in British horror film. Though Hammer and Amicus would continue to make their stock gothic and folk horror for a few years yet, with rapidly diminishing returns, there were some paltry attempts to modernise, with films such as the embarrassing Psychomania. A description of it is far more entertaining than the film itself, and it almost feels that until Britain itself was able to modernise. Effective contemporary British horror wouldn’t arrive for quite a while on screens, often returning to the likes of M.R. James or Hammer archetypes. However, recent British horror such as Beberian Sound Studio, Censor, or my personal favourite Saint Maud, amongst others, show we still have got what it takes to scare
NEXT: George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 