I Watch Movies: The Plague Of Zombies

 

The Plague Of Zombies

In a Cornish town there have been a lot of weird deaths, and the new doctor has not been allowed to investigate the bodies. His old professor and the professor’s daughter (a friend of the doctor’s wife) come to visit. They have a run in with the squire, who has spent some time abroad, brought back money to pay off the debts, imported a lot of rowdy friends and is now magistrate, basically in charge of everything.

The squire’s friends kidnap and seem to be about to rape the daughter before the squire stops them. Then the daughter see the doctor’s wife apparently killed by a grey-skinned man near an abandoned tin-mine. When the two doctors dig up her grave, they find the coffin empty.

It’s voodoo of course, from the squire’s time in Haiti. The film takes a somewhat racist turn. Influential on later zombie films, it was shot back to back with The Reptile on the same sets, with the sunken graveyard in particular being very distinctive; I spent a fair part of the film trying to remember where I’d seen it.

Watch This: A fun and quite sharp-edged horror film about zombies
Don’t Watch This: It’s a period Hammer horror film with more racism and rape threats than usual