#WE LOVE ZOMBIES MOVIE#

Starring Bela Lugosi, this film defined the basic parameters of 'zombieness' which would be in place prior to Romero's appearance on the scene.

#WE LOVE ZOMBIES MOVIE#

Instead, the distinction of being the first zombie movie is usually awarded to Victor Halperin's 1932 opus, White Zombie. A small, but not insignificant, number of films of the Teens and Twenties utilized plots which included voodoo themes, but none of them have survived. Always on the prowl for potentially filmable stories written by African-American authors, Micheaux could easily have placed himself at the leading edge of a new genre if he had made a film version of Downing's play, but the exotic tale doesn't seem to have caught his eye.Įven if he had entered the field, Micheaux would not have been alone. An intriguing 'what if' of film history involves the fact that famed African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was familiar with (and made one film based on) Downing's work. Downing was an African-American member of the diplomatic corps in Liberia, but he wrote a variety of plays and novels based on his own globetrotting knowledge. Though it didn't directly feature the living dead creatures known as zombies, the play was set in the Caribbean and featured voodoo magic as part of the plot, both of which are essential elements in the zombie tradition.

The roots of the zombie tradition in American drama can be traced to Henry Francis Downing's 'Voodoo' from 1914. So, if Night of the Living Dead isn't really about 'zombies' and Romero didn't change everything, then why do we think he did? To answer that question we need to do a little bit of gravedigging ourselves. That novel (thrice filmed, most recently starring Will Smith) related a tale of plague-created vampires facing off against a single human survivor. Though it's often cited as the key film in the now ubiquitous zombie genre, Romero's Night of the Living Dead never used the term 'zombie.' Instead, it referred to it's reanimated undead characters as 'ghouls.' Initially, the filmmaker himself avoided any zombie references, and cited Richard Matheson's novel 'I Am Legend' as the main inspiration for his horror opus. In 1968 George Romero changed everything about zombie movies – except, of course, that he didn't.

We love zombies