Early this morning, before dawn, I was awoken to my apartment building's fire alarm loudly blaring and had to go wait outside in the rain for 30 minutes while the fire department fixed the problem. When I finally got to go back to bed, I laid there for about an hour realizing that there was a huge hole in my plan to barricade myself in my apartment when the zombie apocalypse happens. If the zombies have any intellegence whatsoever, they'll know to pull the fire alarm in my building to get people out because no one can live with that noise and I have no idea how to disconnect a fire alarm. The point of all this is that I spent an hour, wide awake, dreading a zombie attack and we're only on the third movie. I imagine this will get worse before it gets better. That said, lets move on to the movie...
The opening of this film was great; I can imagine sitting in a movie theater in 1941 watching in nervous anticipation as the pages turn revealing the opening credits. It was perfectly like a classic movie should be. In the opening scene,the two main characters are piloting a plane and a servant, Jeff, is cartoonishly flipping out in the back seat as the plane starts to go down. They crash land in a cemetery and I start flipping out right along with him. You don't know what the types of scares are going to be, they're in a cemetery, there is a spooky house in the background, and our caricature, Jeff, is still losing his mind. Once they move on from the cemetery and meet some of the other characters, the scariest parts of the movie were the stereotypes and racism.
I know it was 1941 and a very different time, but seriously, Jeff, the main character's black servant just won't stop freaking out; his very white eyes are almost perpetually wide which look nuts amidst the dark scenery. My jaw dropped quite a few times throughout this movie after seeing some of the things they had the guts to show. The zombies themselves, classic voodoo servants, were all black. Refer to picture above, remind you of Roots at all? This leads me to wonder if they didn't do this on purpose.
Maybe the black zombie servants symbolized the exploitation of the African Americans in the Untied States. The zombies could not walk freely among the rest of the characters, but were made to stay in the back of the servants quarters, even the non-zombie servants had to stay in the basement. In the early 1940's, with WWII behind and the industrial revolution ahead, there was a considerable shift in employment among the African American population from agriculture to industry. This required more skills and responsibility but African American men and women were be compensated only 43%-44% of what their white counterparts were making. This was also only about a 3% raise in compensation compared to 1900. That's speaking of compensation alone, not social, educational, housing equality, etc. So, I theorize that the zombies lack of life was a metaphor for the lack of equality in America at the time.
After a while, the movie became more of a comedy than a horror. Jeff kept getting drug into horror scenes against his will, saying at one point, "Eyes, if you look, I ain't responsible for nothin' you seez!" Main character or not, he was the best part of the movie with the brilliant execution of all his silly one liners; exaggerated facial expressions and all. He ends up with the most scenes, the best lines, and you identify with him the most because of his hesitation to get into situations where you'd potentially run into a zombie.
Strictly speaking of zombies now, this was the very first one in which zombies wanted to eat human flesh. You don't see them taking any bites out of people but Samantha, shown in the picture, warns Jeff to keep an eye out at night because the zombies like soft meat. The story sticks to the Haitian Voodoo by adding that if a zombie eats or touches salt, it will come back to life. The very end suggests all the zombies have been freed and are able to go back to their lives before they were hypnotized. Even if that meant they took several gun shots to the chest in the mean time. This goes back to that theme of abolishing slavery and promoting equality.
A lot of times what scares me the most in recent horror films is the use of music to build suspense before flashing a scary monster in your face. This is the reason I have a hard time watching old episodes of Scooby-Doo without getting a little nervous about whats going to jump out from around a corner. The music was a big part of the scares in this movie as well. You knew when the drums started pounding at the rate of a heart beat and the trumpets started blaring that the zombies were coming. Fun.
The writer teamed with Mantan Moreland (Jeff) again in 1943 for a followup to this movie called Revenge of The Zombies and I'm looking forward to comparing the two. I enjoyed this movie a lot for its witty satire of equality in the US at the time. Also, for the couple of really likable characters, creepy uncertain feel, and scary looking zombies. If you can look at this movie from the perspective of someone in the early 1940's and not get too caught up in the racist remarks, you're likely to enjoy it as well.
Stats for King of The Zombies...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: yes, they enjoy soft meat
Dead or alive: alive
How they become zombies: voodoo
Other: these zombies eat regular bland food as well
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed
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