Well, after remembering to set up the DVR when it was shown on TV in early-mid November last year, I thought that I’d talk about John Gilling’s 1966 horror film “The Plague Of The Zombies” 🙂
One of the many Hammer horror films from 1950s-70s Britain, this one is interesting because it pre-dates George A. Romero’s classic genre-defining 1968 zombie film “Night Of The Living Dead” by about two years.
This article may contain SPOILERS.
Yes, like a lot of pre-1968 zombie movies, the zombies this film are the product of Voodoo rituals. In fact, the film even shows that the villain’s main motivation for creating the zombies is to exploit them for unpaid labour – evoking the horrors of slavery, which were a contributing factor to traditional zombie mythology.
Whilst this film isn’t a modern-style zombie movie, there is at least one memorable sequence – a nightmare experienced by one of the characters – which was an interesting precursor to post-1968 zombie movies:
This scene shows one of the characters being menaced by a horde of the undead who rise from their graves. Famously, this scene has been considered something of a precursor to “Night Of The Living Dead” (1968). Yet, this film is very much an old-school zombie film, with more focus on Voodoo and… relatively… little in the way of gory elements.
Anyway, one interesting thing I noticed about this film is that- whilst it might ostensibly be about zombies- it takes a lot of influence from Bram Stoker’s genre-defining 1897 vampire novel “Dracula”.
Of course, Hammer are perhaps most famous for Terence Fischer’s 1958 adaptation of “Dracula” – starring Christopher Lee as the eponymous vampire. And it’s clear that this success has had some influence on this film.
The four main characters – a respected elderly doctor and his daughter, one of his former students and his wife – fit the structure of the characters in “Dracula” to some extent. They might not be Abraham Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra, but you can still notice some vague influence here. Not only that, like “Dracula”, the film also uses a gothic late 19th century setting too – albeit a rural Cornish village, rather than Whitby or Transylvania.
The film’s main villain is an aristocrat, who takes blood from his victims (to use in rituals). Not quite Count Dracula, but it’s still an interesting similarity. Although he is also shown to have male victims, the film focuses much more heavily on his attempts to turn two women into zombies- which is, again, very evocative of “Dracula”.
Like in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, the transformation from human to undead is a much slower and more drawn-out process in this film than the relatively swift vampire/zombie transformations in many modern horror films.
It takes place over at least a few days, with the victim slowly weakening before eventually succumbing after death. When we first see one character, Alice (Jacqueline Pearce), she is shown to be somewhat ill – and in the middle of the process of being turned into a zombie. She has – like a vampire’s bite – previously received a small “accidental” injury from the villain, which has allowed him to collect some of her blood.
In fact, the later scene where she rises from the grave and is killed again by two of the main characters is very evocative of the scene where something similar happens to Lucy Westenra in “Dracula”. Yes, the exact details differ quite a bit, but the basic theme/structure of this scene is clearly inspired by “Dracula”.
Likewise, zombies are initially referred to as “undead”, before the word “zombie” is eventually used. The original unused title of “Dracula” was, apparently, “The Un-Dead“. This one is a bit of a stretch though, given that in the pre-internet 1960s, people were less likely to have researched such things and I don’t know how many people saw or read about the “work in progress” manuscript of “Dracula” back then either. Still, it caught my attention nonetheless.
The most interesting similarity though is that, unlike post-1968 zombie movies, there is a lot more focus on stage blood – rather than on “gross out” gore effects.
“The Plague Of The Zombies” (1966) is a relatively tame film by modern standards – it literally has a BBFC “12” rating in the UK these days – and, except for one decapitation, there isn’t really the “gross out” gory horror you’d typically expect from a zombie movie. Instead, the film’s grisly moments focus almost entirely on bright red Technicolor stage blood. This focus on blood is – of course – something much more typically associated with the vampire genre than the zombie genre.
Of course, the film differs from “Dracula” in a lot of ways too and it is also something of a folk-horror film as well. Still, given how much both the vampire and zombie genres have diverged from each other over the years (with some interesting exceptions, such as Richard Mattheson’s 1954 novel “I Am Legend”, Shaun Hutson’s 1984 novel “Erebus” and Chuck Wendig’s 2011 novel “Double Dead”), it’s absolutely fascinating to see a zombie movie which has so much in common with “Dracula”.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
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