Hacker Cinema
White Zombie
1932 · Film · 67 min
Directed by Victor Halperin
A wealthy landowner living in Haiti convinces a sorcerer to lure the woman he has fallen for away from her fiancé. The madman later betrays their agreement by keeping the woman for himself…as a zombie.
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3 comments on Hacker News
It's possible that he's speaking less about "Night of the Living Dead (1968)" as an early zombie film, and more about "White Zombie (1932)" as an influence on later films, as it earlier and more clearly on topic: Set on a sugar cane plantation on Haiti, with voodoo, etc.
Most zombie fiction is premised on a contagious pathogen or a botched scientific response to such a pathogen (28 Days Later, The Last of Us, I am Legend, Shaun of the Dead etc.) Some use accidental exposure to radiation or extraterrestrial contamination, with unclear mechanisms (Night of the Living Dead)
Zombie movies outside of the contagious pathogen paradigm are more uncommon. Some zombie movies, particularly the older ones predating Night of the Living Dead, are premised on religious supernatural voodoo stuff (White Zombie [1932!]). In others, the condition is not strictly contagious, but exposure to a chemical substance causes a reversal of death (Re-Animator, and Return of the Living Dead (my personal favorite and the origin of zombies who desire 'Braaaaiiiiiins')) In only a few, the creature[s] are created by a mad scientist deliberately trying to reverse death using something other than a contagious pathogen (Frankenstein (should that count?), and Re-Animator.)
Mad scientist in an academic setting attempting to reverse death and accidentally creating an outbreak of non-contagious zombies is a pretty narrow list of zombie movies. Re-Animator is the only one that comes to mind. Anyway, a zombie outbreak obviously isn't going to happen, but if the public becomes generally aware of this research, now might be a good time for Hollywood to reboot Re-Animator. Gods know they hate making original movies these days. I'm aware that a zombie movie fan complaining about a lack of originality may seem ironic.
So glad someone got something from it!
Hehe yeah, does look like a lot. But 2012-now is..~2800 days, probably there's less than 1000 movies/episodes on there, I haven't counted. Recently watching a lot of series...I like the longer form. I moved into a house in 2012 where they introduced me to torrents - before then I'd hardly seen any great movies, so that was really amazing watching all the great movies and directors I'd always heard of but never checked out. (Had only downloaded books and music before that I guess!) Used to often watch 2 or 3 movies on weekend days. Lately a couple of episodes of a series (or more if bingeing) each night, or a movie. I did put a lot of hours into researching, reading reviews, finding good things to watch, so that we didn't see many that weren't good.
Finding obscure movies online is sometimes tricky (i.e. can take hours), also tracking down good subtitles can be hard, and often have to resync/shift them and/or fix them up. Being able to adjust audio and subtitles while watching with VLC is a must. I get them from:
1. torrents. Usually only works for popular/recent/famous stuff. Sno's torrents with hardcoded English subs are great, have watched a lot of those - mostly series, some movies.
2. movie and/or series sites like primewire, the now-defunct alluc, (which was amazing, finding obscure tv series episodes is much harder now), zocine.com, megashare.bz, www1.swatchseries.to that have links to online files. These come and go over the years. Adding "watch online" to google searches finds sites that the links to movie files can extracted from, either manually from the HTML or using TubeOffline-type downloader sites.
3. video sites. Google the movie/series name - often movies/episodes are on youtube/vimeo/dailymotion, especially when I forget to look for them there! Archive.org has a lot of stuff. (e.g. recently watched White Zombie (1932), the first zombie movie, and The Best Years of our Lives from there)
Not uncommonly an obscure movie will seemingly only be online in one hard-to-find place. (e.g. The only place I could find one classic Australian movie was on someone's page on vk, russian facebook!) I have a startpage with searches each of those sites one click away, so I only have to type the name (& mostly year) once. Whenever I get something from a site I add the site to my start page to easily search it in future. Also my computer is a Mac from 2005 which doesn't make it any easier! Good luck.