Avis des critiques

Really a handsome film, and I'm sure the new restoration looks a thousand times better. The set design is atmospheric, the photography moody, and the music score enervating but innovative. The real frissons come from the sound effects, which deliver some striking moans and screams.

White Zombie also has a distinct aesthetic: the dopey split screens and zigzagging scene transitions only add to its charm. These rudimentary special effects were achieved with then-nascent optical printing technology that had clearly seized Halperin's imagination and enlarged his visual vocabulary. Halperin's daft editing choices, harnessed to a proven box office formula, resulted in a surprisingly experimental feat of exploitation cinema.

Certain aspects of Victor Halperin's 1932 film—the alternately trancelike and hysterical performances, the willful lack of shot-to-shot continuity, the curled eyebrows and forked goatee of Bela Lugosi's witch doctor—threaten to reduce the film to camp but end up contributing to its dreamlike, dread-soaked atmosphere.

White Zombie is interesting—even if it's just in rough historical register—precisely because it's not this kind of zombie movie, and so casts into relief the radicalism (however incidental) of genre-definers like Romero.

Though the Halperins continued to make low-budget films into the '40s, none of their subsequent work has the disturbing intensity and inventiveness of this peculiar work. Much is made of Lugosi's burning gaze, as the camera dollies in to isolate his eyes in anticipation of Sergio Leone's gigantic close-ups.

At its best, this film embodies the eerie poetry of a slow, dreamlike death. Compared to today's zombies, this hypnotic vision of a world trapped between life and death is more disturbing and more beautiful.