White Zombie [Victor Halperin, 1932]:
Having been disappointed by many of the iconic horror films of the 1930s, this comparatively derided effort really worked for me. Tonally, there's something very dreamlike about Halperin's film. The nocturnal setting and somnambulistic atmosphere engender a feeling of unreality. The stilted delivery of the actors works in harmony with its extraordinary image making. It felt to me like a precursor to Jean Cocteau's similarly dreamy adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (1946) - although the notion of a character having to plunge himself into the shadowy world of the dead to revive a lost love has definite shades of Orpheus (1950) - as well as a close cousin to Carl Theodor Dreyer's masterful and analogous Vampyr (1932).
