A Product of Its Time

Film: King of the Zombies
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

One of the issues with a lot of older movies is that the racism is baked in. With King of the Zombies, the racism isn’t merely baked into the narrative but central to the way the film works. A huge amount of the plot turns on the conventions of Black characters being cowardly and superstitious. It makes this film a difficult watch at times, especially when contrasted with a far more respectful film like I Walked with a Zombie, which came out a couple of years later.

Since this is almost three decades before the seminal George Romero film, you should assume that the zombies in the title are the classical ones, reanimated corpses designed to be servants, created through a magic ritual associated with Voodoo or something similar. What that means is that all of the Black characters in the film are going to be connected to these dark forces in some way, have superstitious beliefs in “haints” and magic potions…and at least some of it is going to be right. Someone much more knowledgeable than I can get into the colonization narrative that is impossible to avoid here; I’m not sure I’m the right guy to do more than point out that it not only exists in the film but is also central to it.

An aircraft flying between Cuba and Puerto Rico is blown off course in a sudden storm. The three passengers, pilot “Mac” McCarthy (Dick Purcell) and his passengers Bill Summers (John Archer) and Bill’s valet Jefferson Jackson (Mantan Moreland) are forced to crash land on an island from which they heard a faint radio signal—and in the vicinity where an admiral has recently disappeared. Everyone seems to be fine from the crash, although Mac has a minor head injury. Investigating the island leads them to a manor inhabited by Dr. Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor), his niece Barbara (Joan Woodbury), and Sangre’s wife Alyce (Patricia Stacey). Of course, there are also servants—the weird Momba (Leigh Whipper), maid Samantha (Marguerite Whitten), and cook and evident magic potion creator Tahama (Madame Sul-Te-Wan).

So here comes the racism. Jeff is going to be forced to stay with the servants, who are naturally obsessed with “haints” and who are happy to talk about the existence of zombies on the island. Dr. Sangre denies their existence (of course), but it’s pretty clear to anyone who has ever seen a traditional zombie movie that Sangre’s wife is clearly among the walking dead.

We’re going to spend a lot of time dealing with the fact that only Jeff sees any of the zombies. Sangre denies their existence, of course, and both Mac and Bill always show up too late to see them. But we’re going to get there eventually.

Since King of the Zombies is just a hair over an hour long, it’s not going to take us that long to get where we’re going, and the place that we’re going to land is exactly where you think we are. It’s not a coincidence that Dr. Sangre’s accent sounds exactly like that of Bela Lugosi. He’s going to be someone that we’re not supposed to trust, and so we don’t. We’re going to expect that the “good” doctor will be at the heart of the presence of the zombies, so it’s hardly a spoiler when that turns out to be the case. And if you think that Barbara is both innocent and a potential love interest, well, you’ve seen a movie from 1941 before.

So, since where we are going is obvious, let’s talk about just how offensive this movie is, product of its time or not. It’s worth noting that Jeff is going to be proven to be more mentally strong than Mac when it comes to resisting being turned into a zombie, but he is simultaneously going to be shown as too dumb to realize that he hasn’t actually been turned into a zombie. Jeff is constantly terrified and simultaneously greedy, eating something like two entire pies at one point. Hell, while Mac and Bill have dressing gowns at the island manor, Jeff is forced to sleep in his suit, not even allowed to remove his bow tie.

Jeff is clearly comic relief, and while I’m certainly happy for the movie to give work to Mantan Moreland, this would be a substantially better movie without his character, if the danger was taken more seriously, and (and this is admittedly a big ask for 1941) if the native people and their religion was taken seriously.

It's clear that King of the Zombies had a significant influence on Jacques Tourneur and I Walked with a Zombie. It’s also clear that Tourneur learned the right lessons and avoided the bad ones from this film. It’s interesting for the history and what it influenced, but you’re better off just going to the better film.

Why to watch King of the Zombies: It clearly influenced a much better movie.
Why not to watch: This is staggeringly racist.