The Plague of the Zombies

A village in the south west of England in the nineteenth century. People are dying one after another and the village doctor cannot find the cause. A professor is called from London. They open the graves and find the coffins empty. There is a large house in the village and a closed mine; the owner of the house has been in Haiti and brought something back. The dead are being worked in the mine. John Gilling directs. It is a Hammer production. The film is an early instance of the zombie in cinema. The dead here are not contagious; they are directed by one man and used as cheap labour. There is an open class ground: the landowner kills the villagers and works them in his mine, and the film builds that comparison directly. A dream sequence is its best known passage; the image of the dead rising from the ground became a picture repeated in later zombie films. Hammer's known manner is here: colour, the English countryside, costume and a small budget. It was made alongside another film on the same sets in the same period; that was the studio's method. Who it is for: anyone curious about classic British horror and the origins of the zombie genre. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the acting is theatrical, and the frightening elements have no force by present measure.