A break from the war to go back in time, and beyond the grave. That’s right, it’s time for another Gangsters Movie Night — our irregular series where I and a guest talk about a movie about a place or theme I explore in Gangsters of Capitalism.

This week we go to a place that’s very close to my heart — Haiti — through the 1932 horror cult classic White Zombie. Starring Bela Lugosi as the mysterious sorcerer “Murder Legendre,” and set during the U.S. Occupation, this was the film that introduced the Haitian zonbi to the American masses. Contained within are all the deep-seated racism and contradictions that infuse zombie movies and literature to this day.

To talk about it, I’m joined by Kaiama Glover, a professor at Barnard College and scholar of Haitian and Francophone literature par excellence. At the end of the episode, Kaiama also talks about her new book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being.

You can listen by clicking on the play button above or at Apple, Google, Downcast, Sticher, or wherever you do your listening. While you’re there, be sure to subscribe. And if you haven’t yet, make sure you don’t miss an issue of The Racket by signing up below. A transcript of the episode can be found by scrolling down.

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Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)

Kaiama L. Glover: But then if you think about the fact that scene is happening in a movie that is saying zombification is real. There's something really weird about that I've always thought. The fact that there's this strange ambivalence in giving credence to the phenomenon that's supposed to be ridiculous. The ambivalence around whether or not it's "real".

Jonathan M. Katz: Sak ap fet, kijan nou ye. You are listening to The Racket, the podcast on foreign policy, racket of war and more. I am Jonathan M. Katz and this is another episode of our Gangsters Movie Night Series, which we feature a film that explores a theme or a place from my book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire.

This week, we are going to a place that is very close to my heart, Haiti, via 1932s, White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin and starring the one and only Bela Lugosi. This was the very first feature length zombie film in Hollywood, the movie that introduced American audience to the idea of zombies, a concept that up until that point had been confined to Haitian religion and folk belief. So if you're a fan of The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Army of the Dead, pretty much anything with dead in the title you have this movie to thank for it. Also both Rob Zombie and his band White Zombie took their names from this film. So it has a very important role in culture. Not an amazing film on its own, but I have an incredible guest to talk about it with me, Dr. Kaiama L. Glover.

Kaiama is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College in the city of New York. She is also the faculty director of the Digital Humanity Center. The editor of Archipelagos Journal, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow and the author of a new book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. Kaiama, welcome to The Racket.

Kaiama: Thank you, Jonathan. I take exception at you saying this is not a good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed watching and re-watching it for today.

Jonathan: Excellent. I'm glad to hear it.

Kaiama: Good in that nerdy sense, the way academics think things are good. We've got plenty to chat about.

Jonathan: Spoiler alert! Pause if you want to go see this. If you want to see it, I highly recommend there's a free version on YouTube …

Kaiama: I didn't know that, I spent 99 cents watching this on Amazon Prime.

Jonathan: … I highly recommend the Amazon Prime version. There's a restored version, which does nothing for the racism, but the sound mixing and the visuals are much better in that version. So I highly recommended that.

Kaiama: Well then I don't regret giving Bezos my money. Okay. Fair enough.

Jonathan: You made the right choice. So what's going on in this thing?

Kaiama: It is a pretty straightforward and simple plot, I think it's safe to say. We've got a beautiful young White woman from New York who has shown up in Haiti, ready to reunite with and marry her fiance, a dude named Neil. He is also White, suffice it to say. He's a bank employee. He's working in the capital of Haiti in Port-au-Prince. The backstory of the film is that on her way to meet her beloved, she was on a ship with a very wealthy man, a plantation owner, whose name is Charles Beaumont or Charles Beaumont. This guy has apparently befriended her on the boat on the way over and has enjoined her to marry her fiance on his estate. And she, for some reason, agrees to get married at this stranger's house. Bad move on Madeline's part. But she and her soon to be husband Neil, show up at the estate and they do get married. But we learn very quickly that Charles Beaumont has not done this out of altruism. He is in fact, in love with Madeline. And conspires with a man named Legendre played by Bela Lugosi, who is the leader of a zombie mini hoard, a group of about six other people he's zombified in addition to a whole sugar mill's worth of zombified Black and Brown people who work for him at this sugar mill.

Charles Beaumont (Robert Fraser): Zombies!

Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi): Yes, they are my servants. Did you think we could do it alone? In their lifetime, they were my enemies …

Jonathan: And Bela Lugosi, he's essentially a bokor. He's a sorcerer.

Kaiama: Yes, he is a sorcerer. Or he has sorcerer capabilities, because he is not Haitian, obviously. I want to come back to this clearly not Haitian practicer of magic with the left hand. But any who, Beaumont hopelessly in love with Madeline, he tries to get her to dump her fiance and marry him as he walks her down the aisle. Nonetheless, resorts to the dark magic and gets this poison from Legendre, Bela Lugosi, to zombify his beloved.

Silver (Brandon Hurst): But what you're planning is dangerous.

Beaumont: Don't you suppose I know that, Silver. You don't seem to realize what this girl means to me. Why I'd sacrifice anything I have in the world for her. Nothing matters if I can't have her.

Kaiama: And so a process of zombification happens, she "dies", as far as her fiance is concerned. She's buried and he goes on to develop a small drinking problem, I guess. But Legendre goes, as one does, retrieves the corpse of Madeline. Reanimates it and turns her into Beaumont's zombified bride.

And she then spends the next little while wafting around his mansion in a state of zombification. Beaumont soon finds this to be not ideal in a partner and is distressed by the fact that she is essentially a soulless being that lives in his house, looking pretty. That gets old fast enough.

And so he goes back to Legendre and says, "I'd like to bring her back to life, whatever the cost."

Legendre pretends to agree to do that. He then toasts to the reanimation of Madeline. But in fact, the wine he gives Beaumont is poisoned with the same zombie poison. And he too then becomes almost a zombie.

Simultaneous to this drama happening with Legendre, Beaumont and the zombified Madeline, Neil gets it together enough to work with another character, a secondary character, Dr. Bruner, who has lived in Haiti for a long time. And who is a missionary, I think. Who was a priest and a doctor. And who then with the help of, I mean, what plays in the movie is a Haitian Sherpa man.

Jonathan: In blackface.

Kaiama: They get together and say they are going to save Madeline from what they have figured out is her zombification. Neil has drunkenly stumbled to her grave, found it empty, gone to his friend, Dr. Bruner. And Dr. Bruner has clarified that, that Beaumont dude must have zombified her.

So the two of them go off to the estate. And so the sickly Neil, Dr. Bruner, they go up to Legendre's castle.

Jonathan: In Transylvania.

Kaiama: [laughs] In Transylvania. In an unrecognizable landscape, somewhere in Haiti/Transylvania, to rescue Madeline. And everything goes wrong because, so Madeline's a zombie, Beaumont about to be a zombie, Neil succumbs to his yellow fever and passes out upon arrival. And Legendre uses his zombified Madeline to maybe kill Neil, because he's got other plans for Madeline. I guess she's going to become his zombie bride.

Neil Parker (John Harron): Madeline! I found you! You are alive! Alive! What's the matter? It's I! Neil!

Kaiama: Dr. Bruner keeps Madeline from killing Neil. And then there's a climactic scene in which everyone's fighting. And the end is hilarious. And let's just say Legendre and Beaumont end up falling off the castle cliff to their deaths. Madeline gets de-zombified, Neil recovers from malaria and they embrace at the end.

Madeline Parker (Madge Bellamy): Neil, I dreamed.

Kaiama: Bruner saves the day and cracks a really funny one-liner.

Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn): Excuse me please, have you got a match?

Jonathan: So to situate this a little bit, in the late 1920s, early 1930s, there was a moral panic. There was a sense that films were perverting and turning Americans into psychopaths. And so this Presbyterian elder named William H. Hayes, who had before that been and postmaster general under President Harding, came and wrote this code that basically tried to take the sex and the murder out of movies.

So this is a pre-code film, but the whole plot is, we're dealing with dark magic. We're dealing with horror. We're dealing with exoticism. And these were all things that fall out of movies in the decades after this, once Hollywood starts following this self-imposed code. And I think that's part of why this movie ends up retaining cult status and then launching zombie literature.

This movie is actually based on a chapter from a non-fiction book, a 1929 travel log called The Magic Island written by W.B. Seabrook, who was a white journalist adventurer of the 1920s type. Who traveled to Haiti during the US occupation, which started in 1915.

And that's an invasion in which my Smedley Butler, the main character of my book, plays a central role. The Marines were actually still occupying Haiti brutally when this movie came out in the United States.

So the movie comes out in '32, the occupation ends in 1934, after 19 years in all. So in that chapter of The Magic Island, the part that is plausibly true, is that Seabrook is recounting a conversation with a Haitian tax collector who tells him this legend. The tax collector tells Seabrook about this episode that he claims to have witnessed in which a platoon of zombies have been sold as slave labor to the Haitian American Sugar Company or HASCO, which was one of the main US export companies that was propped up by the occupation.

It's through the occupation that Seabrook learns about zombies. And then he writes The Magic Island, which is a very influential book. It influences a lot of people, influences a lot of writers. It influences American perceptions of Haiti through the middle of the 20th century.

This chapter first inspired a Broadway play also called White Zombie. The Halperin brothers saw that and then redacted that into this movie. This movie is also part of a larger, just gross theft of Haitian Culture, especially Vodou. The Vodou religion. It's being suppressed actively in Haiti by the Marines. And at the same time, it is being appropriated and stolen by the Marines and by other Americans who come within the context of the occupation. And then they're repackaging it for American audiences.

I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about what are zombies in Haitian culture? What did the zombie mean before it was taken by these American colonizers and resold as entertainment back home?

Kaiama: As you well know, in asking it, that's such a big question, right?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Kaiama: I think what one could say about the zombie that appropriate here is that, it's marked profoundly by ambivalence.

What is a zombie? I think you could ask any number of different Haitian people or Haitianists and get any number of different answers to that question. So the way I think about the zombie in my own work is, as having both anthropological and then also creative purchase or metaphorical purchase in Haitian culture.

And by Haitian culture, I mean, both the Haitian quotidian and the Haitian's popular imagination. But then also in literary culture and in cultural production. So zombie is certainly a phenomenon that originates in the Western coast of Africa. It's part of an Afro-diasporic tradition.