You are listening to Zombie Strains. I'm John, and with me is my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. We're horror movie fans living in what appears to be a zombie world. According to Wikipedia, over 600 zombie films have been released since 1932. And of those 600, 400 of them have come out just this century. Why is that? To answer this question, we're going to follow the shambling zombie path from the beginning, one movie at a time. Welcome to Zombie Strains. Hello, Andy. Hello, Brad. You excited to watch Ouanga today?

Excited to learn how to pronounce it, yes.

Yes. The love Ouanga. So yes. Hi, everybody. Today, we are watching the next film in our zombie series called Ouanga, O-U-A-N-G-A, or The Love Ouanga, depending on your source.

Or as they say in the movie, Ouanga.

Ouanga. Thank you. And I'm happy to report of the three sort of 1930s movies we've watched, it really is, I'm not being sarcastic this time, Head and Shoulders, the best of the three. I don't know what you thought, Andy, but I actually thought it was like a good movie.

I wholeheartedly agree. I'll confess after our maniac viewing, I was questioning a lot of life choices I had made.

And that brought us to this point.

And I was dreading, especially because as we'll talk in a minute, some of the poster art and the marketing for this seems to be trying to put it more in the maniac zone.

Yes.

It turns out that this movie was different in a good way than what I expected.

What I think is interesting is that sort of the poster for Maniac was sensational and had nothing to do with the movie, which was also sensational in different ways. This poster and sort of promo was sensational, but the movie, though sensational in ways, was really sort of much more clear. It had a story that I could follow from beginning to end. I didn't get lost all the time. Yeah, it's much more conventional movie, I would say.

Yep, for sure.

Now, what do we need to worry about here? There are some hot topics in this movie. However, they're different than the Maniac hot topics. They're hot nonetheless.

Yeah, so in The Love Ouanga, really the main topic to be aware of and careful about as we discuss this is racism, which is pretty heavily centered in the movie. So, we ask for grace and patience, as John and I, a couple of middle-aged white guys, discuss a very sensitive topic, but it's an important one, and it is articulated in this movie in some genuinely interesting ways.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's very much the center of the movie, and the ideas there are out of date, but actually surprisingly interesting. So yeah, I won't say anything else, and we'll get to it.

I couldn't find any box office records because it was a very short release, and I don't think it made any money. I think one of the reasons we all liked this film was the cast was so much better than the previous films. The star is Freddie Washington. She was a Broadway star who had also worked with Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, and she doesn't have many film credits, and after this, she became known as a civil rights activist. Now, I did smile briefly in this film when I recognized Sheldon Leonard, who plays Lestrange.

Oh, really?

Yeah, as an Evan Costello fan, he was the mobster in Hit the Ice. Now, unfortunately, in this film, he is in blackface, so that's disappointing.

It is. It's interesting. And Freddie Washington, yeah, we'll talk about her performance throughout. She sort of elevates this whole thing to a different level.

She really does. I have not seen any of her performances before, and she is a remarkable actress. Can we pause for a minute to talk about her, because I think her lived experience is reflected in some interesting ways in this movie. Like Brad said, she's part of the Harlem Renaissance, and became a civil rights activist. But her career in Hollywood, and correct me if I'm getting anything wrong here, but her career in Hollywood was hit some obstacles because of her racial identity, or at least that's what she said.

Yeah, what was interesting is, like her previous sort of big role was in a movie called The Imitation of Life, in which it was a passing story, right? Like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye about a black woman who's very light skinned. Apparently in real life, Freddie had green eyes, so passing was the subject. Though she says about that film, Imitation of Life, that's not her experience. She always identified as black and was treated that way. But she got cast in some of these roles that maybe in the 30s, they were not casting African Americans in. And after these roles, they wanted her to play things like maids or servants or stuff, and she didn't want to do any of that, right? So it was interesting for her.

Yeah, so her skin was perceived as too light for some roles, but too dark for others, which obviously would have put her in a difficult spot. So what was going on in the world when this movie was filmed and released? Well, much like we talked about in Maniac last time. This is the 30s, so the Great Depression is underway. FDR is president. Across the world, Stalin is instituting his purges. And generally speaking, the world is sort of lurching towards World War II.

Yeah. And I think relevant to this, and I think I might have mentioned it in our Maniac episode. But the US, one of the questions that we had is why Voodoo? Why now for the United States? And one of them is, well, the United States occupied the country of Haiti militarily from 1915 to 1934. So a lot of that cultural stuff, I think, was fascinating to Americans.

Yeah, I imagine that stories about Haiti were coming back to the US in a way that they had not before the US occupation.

And that's where this movie begins, actually. I think that's actually a great place to jump in because we start with a title card, right, that talks about all the dramatic stuff that's going to be in this movie, right? It says, real Voodoo stories filmed in the East Indies. The movie is very proud that it features real Voodoo practitioners and that it is filmed on location. It says the West Indies, which is not a term we use anymore, but it means, you know, Bahamas, Caribbean, that area of the world.

I think it was filmed in Jamaica. I think there's an interesting and troubled production history with this that I don't know enough to go into detail about.

Sheldon Leonard, the actor, claimed that the prop master in the film was trying to get relics to be used in the film and no one would sell them to him, no one would trade them to him, so we stole them. And the actor implied that they were run off of Haiti, so then they went to Jamaica to finish the film. And then there's an implied curse because two people died, they were attacked by hornets. One of the deaths was related to a barracuda with an infection. I mean, I don't know how much of this is a legend or how much is fact, but it was troubled.

So a legendarily troubled production, you might say.

Yes, interesting. I hadn't read that and that stuff is really fascinating. But it opens with that title card. And then I think we cut to this voiceover talking about sort of grotesque voodoo rituals or something. But all you see is people dancing. It's people sitting in a circle and there's a couple of people ecstatically dancing. I'm like, well, that's not that scary. I think we're overreacting here a little bit.

I would say, you know, a theme throughout this movie is, yeah, that voodoo is presented by everyone as sort of a terrifying, dark experience. But until the very end, you know, most of the actual practice that we see looks pretty innocuous. It looks pretty fun, to be honest.

Yes, exactly. And then we start at a voodoo ritual where our main character, Cleely Gordon, who apparently is the daughter of a voodoo practitioner, is being granted her powers, and she gets them in a form of this sort of amulet or charm called a Ouanga. And she pronounces that this is how she's going to have her power, and she will protect this no matter what. And so this is her initiation into the rights to become like a priestess or a sorceress.

With foreshadowing that if she should ever lose it, she will be cursed.

Correct. Yes, if anything ever happens to it.

Yeah, I don't know if that vow she makes, that if she ever loses it, death and destruction will come to her. I don't know if that's a necessary part of the ritual, but not to spoil anything, but she could have saved herself some troubles in the long run if she had not made that particular vow.

Yes, I think she says, should I lose it, may evil and death come upon me, which maybe she's supposed to, maybe that's sort of part of the deal. I don't know.

She's identified later in the movie as a high priestess, so she is high up in whatever hierarchy there is in the Solar Red Lotus community.

But then we go back to, we're on a ship and Adam Maynard, one of our main characters and his fiancee, who I can say with confidence, I don't know that we said her name, is it Martha?

Eve is the fiancee.

Eve.

Adam and Eve.

Oh, Adam and Eve. There you go. Well, they gave us some, there's exposition here. He's been in New York for a while. He did live in Haiti on his plantation. He's coming back to Haiti, but now he's found Eve and they're going to get married in Haiti, and they're very excited. But who should be on the ship with them, except Cleely, is watching them from around the corner. And she is now dressed in very sophisticated upper middle class, like elite clothing, and she's clearly watching Adam and wants to talk to him.

Can we pause here for a quick second at the beginning to say that the film quality of this is pretty good?

Yes.

I assume you watched the same restored version that I did.

Yeah, we should talk about the restoration, Brad, if you want to talk about that for a minute, because I think partially because of the importance of the race conversation, or partially because of Freddie Washington's amazing performance, UCLA chose this film and restored it, didn't they?

Yes, in 2015, UCLA restored Ouanga from a 1951 print. The restored version is 15 minutes shorter than the original 1935 cut. The film was censored for its 1941 release, and later again by a film distributor.

Oh, that's a bummer. I mean, it feels pretty solid. It's another one of these short movies, but I could have watched more of this movie.

I went on YouTube and watched some clips of the pre-restored version, and it's really dramatic. The pre-restored version looks like maniac levels of quality, but the version we watched, it looked really good. I had more trouble with the dialogue, audio. I struggled at times, but the picture looked pretty good, so.

I agree. But right away, Cleely comes up to Adam and says, Adam, we find out that Cleely owned the plant station next to Adam, and they were friends, and Cleely is convinced that they should be together. Cleely is in love with Adam, and she would like him to forget about Eve and go with her, and he says he can't do that. There's too much of a boundary here between us. They don't specifically say the race boundary, but that's what's implied. But that is not enough for Cleely, so this is what she says to Adam regarding that.

I've heard it all, Helena. The barring of blood that separate us can't be overcome. But, Adam, I can't and won't be satisfied with just friendship.

There'll never be anything else.

Yeah. So, it sets the stakes pretty clearly right now. And what I'd like to say is, this movie, unlike, I think, every other movie we watch is actually a love story, right? It's a love triangle, which will meet the third part of the triangle, though I guess Eve would make it a quadrangle, but she's sort of not really a player in an active way, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I interpreted this scene a little bit more strongly. I thought that they had actually had a romantic relationship in the past, and that he had dumped her because she was black, and he saw no future in the relationship. That's how I took it.

Yes, but they also made clear that their peers in every other way.

Yes.

You know what I mean? Like, she is a plantation owner, he is a plantationer, she's riding on the same ship he is. So that was, I think, very interesting, that that's the one thing that separates them.

One thing that I came across while reading up a little bit about this film that I think this scene is dancing around is, have you heard of the one drop rule?

No.

It was a legal kind of standard that defined you as, quote, black.

Oh, yes. I have heard of this one.

If you could identify even one black ancestor in your past. Obviously, that's a big topic. We're not gonna get into it now. But it did have this very important effect of sort of forcing a lot of people with ethnically diverse backgrounds into the buckets of white or black. And so that's where Cleely finds herself. And I wanted to say also from my reading, I think Cleely is being kind of coded here as a little bit of a character that would have been recognized as a trope. And that is a person in the 1800s in the early 1900s. I think this character might have been setting up pretty strong signals that this is sort of a trope tragic figure of a person who was caught between two worlds. Like again, you can't quite fit into the quote white world, but simultaneously can't quite fit into the quote black world either. So I think that has been lost a little bit on us in our modern age. But I think it would have been more clear to viewers in the 30s or 40s.

Yeah. And I think that's why this movie feels like it's her story so much. By the end, I feel like I've been watching Cleely's story and not Adam and Eve's story throughout. But we'll talk about that as we go through it.

So they've just had this confrontation on the boat and Adam made it clear that, nope, it's never going to happen. So one thing you didn't mention, John, is that at the close of this conversation where Adam is telling Cleely that there is no hope for any future relationship for them, she sort of threatens that if he tries to get married to someone else, something will happen to prevent it.

Oh, that's right. That's right.

She doesn't go into any specifics at this time. But there's a little bit of menace in her response to Adam here.

So then what happens is we meet Adam's servant, a maid, and another one. And what ends up happening is Cleely talks to the maid, who's clearly enamored with the other servant and says, well, if you're interested in him, I can help you, but you've got to do something for me. And so she tries to get the maid to help her place a charm in Eve's bag. In an exchange, she'll help the two servants fall in love.

The servants are Susie and Jackson. And they are minor, they are secondary characters, but they do recur throughout the film and have some modestly important role in the story.

Yes. So Jackson, when he hears they're going to Haiti, is immediately suspicious of Voodoo and says that won't happen to him. And Susie is interested in what Kleeley is offering, but is also afraid of Voodoo. And Kleeley sort of compels her to cooperate with her.

She does that with a very intense stare. The camera focuses on Kleeley's face as she is either just intimidating with this death stare of the poor maid Susie, or it might be implying that she's using some sort of hypnotic Voodoo priestess power. But it certainly reminded me of all of those cuts in White Zombie where you see Bela Lugosi just doing that death stare into the camera.

So at this point, we end up in Haiti. Adam and Eve and Susie and Jackson get off the boat, and they meet Adam's overseer who runs the plantation while he's gone. His name is Lestrange. And as they're getting in the car, Lestrange catches sight of Kleeley, and clearly he doesn't like her. Like there's some relationship there that we don't fully understand. And they head back to the plantation. And as they get out of the car, the driver notes that Jackson has something in his pocket. And it is a charm that I believe Susie, that Susie got from Kleeley, that she has planted on him. She's trying to get Jackson to fall in love with her. Is that your understanding of what's going on here?

Yes. My understanding is that in exchange for helping Susie win the love of Jackson through a voodoo charm, Kleeley is going to ask a bigger favor of Susie down the road.

Yes. So then we cut to Kleeley at her home, and she is confronted by Lestrange. And this is actually where I found out that he was supposed to be passing as black, Andy. Did you realize that before this point?

I did not realize that Lestrange was supposed to be black. I mean, he's an obviously white actor and a well-known white actor at that. And it's my understanding that getting around the production codes and expectations of the times required that this character be black.

At this point, they have a discussion about how they belong together. Lestrange loves Cleely, and Cleely only has eyes for Adam. And so they have a very heated exchange where Lestrange proclaims that, you know, they should be together and Cleely sort of laughs in his face and Adam says, I would rather be dead or have you be dead than have you with Adam, right? So our love triangle is sort of established here.

Yeah, this is a fascinating scene. I actually, this to me, this conversation, this scene is like the center of the film in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

For one, you have some, it sounds funny to say it because this is kind of a schlocky film, but Freddie Washington's acting is fantastic. She is really doing a good performance.

It's really weird to see somebody who feels like they're acting in a much more modern film than everybody else.

Yes, that's exactly it. Yes.

Adam and Eve feel like they're in White Zombie, sort of doing big broad stage acting, and Freddie Washington's clearly is doing a subtle, nuanced, interesting performance about a person that is conflicted in many ways.

This was, I think, one of the last films Freddie Washington was in. I think we lost, I mean, she went on to do other worthwhile stuff with her life for sure. But it's a bummer that we don't have more of her around in film, because this is a neat performance. And it's also, I feel, the moral center of this film is this confrontation between Lestrange and Cleely, where Cleely is basically trying to insist that she is white enough to be with Adam. And you see Cleely struggling with her identity and her desire to be with a white person that society will not allow. And Lestrange is very explicitly making the case of, it doesn't matter how light your skin is, you are still black, so be with me. It's just a fascinating exchange.

It is. And he threatens her at this point.

Yep.

Threatens to kill her if she proceeds.

There's a lot of death threats being levied fairly quickly. Especially in romantic relationships in this film, but yes.

So then we go back to the plantation, and I believe that Susie comes to see Cleely, correct? Or Cleely encounters her in some way.

Yeah, they meet up.

Yep.

Yeah, and Cleely gives her something that will make Jackson fall in love with her.

Did you make the Ouanga? Yes. And don't fail this time. Tonight, when the dance is at its height, take off the powder that's in this pouch, throw it in the face of the man you want, and don't leave him. Yes, ma'am. There's something else. Something you must do for me.

And what Cleely wants Susie to do for her is put a charm. The first time she tried to get her to put a charm, plant one on Eve, it didn't work, so now she wants her to try again. And this time, I believe it works.

Yeah, the movie is either a little sloppy with the details here, or I had trouble following some of the dialogue. But I think this is, you know, Cleely's second attempt to get a charm on to Eve.

Then we cut to a scene which I think is just exposition to set up some future stuff. But what we find out is one of Adam's workers on the plantation comes up to him. And you sort of come to this conversation where he is telling Adam that somebody has died and a body has been stolen, right? And Adam's like, why would that happen? And there's this, did we know this guy's name? He's like Adam's older, I know he's his accountant or something.

There's this older couple that is in and out of the movie, and yeah, just mostly there for exposition, I think.

Yeah. But they say, well, the reason the corpse was stolen was because...

If they can get on of a corpse, they usually dress the body in some borrowed article of clothing belonging to the person upon whom they wish to put the curse. Then the body dressed in these borrowed clothes is concealed somewhere in the jungle. But then what happened? Well, unless the person marked the desk and find the body and get their clothes back, it's just too bad. People have become raving maniacs, trying to recover their clothes. And if they fail? They usually die in awful acts.

Little hat tip to maniac there. I didn't understand the significance of this scene until... This scene is setting something off that will pay off in the film's final moments. But a woman's body, a woman's corpse has been stolen and vanished. And it's suggested that there's something voodoo-ish about it. But we won't learn the significance of this particular vanished corpse until the end of the film.

Right. And I think at this point, Lestrange, the drivers, we cut to him stealing some of Cleely's clothes to sort of bring the two things together. And I can't remember if that's later, but that's the connection. It's not actually Cleely who's done this, but Lestrange, and he is stealing her clothes to put on this corpse.

He's embittered by Cleely's rejection of him, so he's setting up a little voodoo ritual of his own, although the movie's going to not let us know that until later.

So then what happens is we have sort of competing parties. I actually like this. There's a very sort of Western traditional wedding party where people are dancing and drinking champagne, and then there is also like a voodoo ceremony going on at the same time, and we sort of cut between those two events. But as that's going on, Adam says, of course, all of this is silly. Adam is like the voice of reason. Voodoo is silly, this isn't real. However, his wife finds a charm in her bag and is immediately told by this older gentleman who we don't know his name, who's the exposition guy, get rid of that immediately. That is trouble. But as the voodoo ceremony goes on, she faints, right? And she passes out and is taken to the doctor.

There's a very particular way that people sort of swoon in old movies. It's usually right into the arms of the man standing next to them. It's pretty funny.

Yes, absolutely.

But yeah, so she faints and is carted off. We then skip to a conversation between Adam and the doctor he's brought in to help Eve, and the doctor says that Eve seems to be slipping deeper and deeper into a coma. And the doctor suggests that it feels like it's an unnatural thing, and that this sort of thing happens in Haiti.

Yeah, so he says it's a suggestive hypnotic condition. So it's sort of that voodoo magic thing. By the way, just to remind everybody, this is a podcast about zombies, and we haven't seen a zombie yet, so.

We are getting there. Be patient.

We are getting there. And Adam, at this point, is also convinced that someone stole his wife's clothes. He thinks that the stolen corpse and this, her fainting, are related, but that's not actually the case. Kleeley has gotten Suzy to put this charm in the bag, and that's why she has passed out.

So John, at this point in the movie, have you seen any qualities in Adam that would explain why a remarkable person like Kleeley Gordon would be obsessed with him?

Absolutely not. And at this point, he goes to confront her. At her home, she has a voodoo altar in her home.

Yeah, he interrupts her in mid-ritual, yes.

Yes. And clearly, she is putting a curse using a voodoo doll on Eve, Adam's wife. He interrupts her, and she is actually fairly defiant at the beginning of this conversation. Unapologetic, like, yes, I was conducting a curse to kill your wife, shows him the voodoo doll, which he takes, and then he sort of reprimands her, and she begs like, hey, you must take me back. Again, I don't feel like he's really in her league, but this is 1932, so I guess. Yes. But he leaves with the voodoo doll.

But he does something important on the way out.

Which is throw it in a fire. And when he gets back to the doctor's office, his wife has started to recover.

Yes. So the clear implication is that, yeah, this attempt number to charm Eve to death has failed. Yes.

And also, Lestrange has heard this conversation between the two of them. And approaches Cleely again. And it's like, please, we could be together. But Cleely will have none of it.

So this is another pretty heavy scene between Lestrange and Cleely. Because this is where Lestrange is making the point of, now you know what it feels to be just rejected, to be cast off like an old shoe, he says.

You know what, you're right, there's a great moment here where it's sort of like, yes, what's happening to you is what you're doing to me.

And this is, I think, where Cleely fully commits to her evil plan. And she explicitly says, well, if Adam and the rest of this world are so convinced that I'm black, I am going to embrace that part of myself, and I will show these people what I can do.

And then she engages with the person who I thought was like her sort of master, but maybe I'm thinking it's too much like Jedi and Jedi Master. It's been not that clear relationship. But she gives him orders and says, you know, we're going to raise zombies, go find these two men. We're going to raise them as zombies. And I actually, and she makes him actually do the digging of the fresh corpses to get them up. I actually enjoy this part quite a bit. This is where she goes through the ritual of raising these two men who are in boxes in the ground and getting them to do her bidding and giving them instructions. What did you make of this scene? I loved it.

I loved this scene. So she forces this other voodoo priest guy to dig up the coffins. And then she does this weird kind of alluring dance maneuvers where she is pantomiming, pulling them up out of the ground.

Actually, it's kind of interestingly shot. They're shot in profile. They both sort of rise and sort of form an X. It's actually probably maybe the most artful shot of the whole movie.

There are a couple of shots that seem better than they need to be in this film, and this is one of them.

Yes.

And yeah, so she raises these two corpses of these two dead men.

And I'd like to point out, there's no question here. These people were dead. They were buried in the ground, right? Because in White Zombie, there's a suggestion that they just become zombies through hypnosis or magic. Here, we're clearly saying these two men are dead, and she is raising them from the dead, and they are now zombies. I think that's a clear distinction between White Zombie, for sure.

Well, I think in White Zombie, they raised the dead as free labor.

They did, but also some zombies were also people who were alive who were hypnotized. And that is not the case with these two. Yeah.

Yes. And there's some visual discordance here because these two zombies look uninjured in the prime of life, basically.

We haven't found the practical prosthetic effects for gross zombies yet.

Right. I do like, so once they've been raised up, they're sort of, it's like they're waiting to be imprinted with, to be told what to do. And so Cleely goes through this little, it seems like a little ritual saying where she kind of binds them to do her bidding and only her bidding.

Yeah, I kind of love this, actually.

Yes, I do, too. I will say at this point, I was wondering if the solutions to Cleely's problems really require zombies.

Because her plan, her plan is to use the zombies to kidnap Eve and sacrifice her.

She orders the two zombies to go along with this other priest and bring Eve to her. And you know, you can just pay people to do that, right?

Right. But maybe they're not as compliant because she clearly makes them her creatures.

Yes, for sure.

You are powerless to talk or respond to any direction. Save those I give you. Go with it, man. Do as he directs you, obey him. These men will follow your instructions to the letter. I want that white girl brought to me at the great cotton tree of dust.

Yeah, and I think the one thing we see in this scene is like clearly in charge, right? You were like leaning into that before when she was talking to Lestrange, but she's clearly saying, I'm gonna be tough and I'm gonna get what I want, and we see her sort of power here.

Yeah, at the beginning of the film, she maybe seems like she's lower in rank, I guess, than this other Voodoo priest, but in this scene, she's been just bossing around and it's clear, no one can get in her way.

I think this is also a good time to mention that the music in this film, it's wall to wall. There's like no break in the stock music clips that are played.

And it's not, and it's not thematically keyed to the scene. So I did not find, I did notice the music as the zombies were being raised was not, however you would score a zombie uprising scene, it was not what this movie chose.

And I wonder if it's a symptom of early movies, right? Because we still got these long pauses in between actions and words. And in silent films, they would just have an orchestra playing the whole time. Right? So now we're sort of get a combo, right? Where they have music to fill in a lot of the quiet. Because in a modern film, you would just have people talking, right? You wouldn't allow those pauses.

IMDB doesn't list a composer for this film. It lists writers who did stock music. So they were buying music clips and inserting them. So nothing was written for the movie.

And again, it's early Hollywood. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised by that. Like we honor composers so much right now. And 90 years ago, this is just sort of cheap entertainment. They're throwing whatever they can get together to get this thing out the door.

So yeah.

And then we sort of get this B plot going on with Susie and Jackson. So the zombies come up and they kidnap Eve, right? And walk off with her.

This is a simultaneously a silly looking scene and a kind of effective one.

Yes.

Eve is sort of frozen in terror with her kind of arm flung up in a very dramatic stage.

Very Victoria era.

And then you see the hand of one of the zombies reach in from off camera over her face. I thought it worked at the same time that I thought it was a little bit silly.

Yes. But I think Jackson sees this, right?

Yes.

And is determined to follow and sort of see what's going on. So Jackson and Susie take off in pursuit, and so does Adam. And I believe somehow some police investigators get involved as well. I think this older man, the exposition man, we'll call him, wanders off and he goes and rounds up the constabulary. And so now we have three active groups of people looking for Eve.

Yeah. So for the rest of the movie, these three groups will all be sort of circling around closing in on the movie's climax.

Yes. And you can tell they're police because they're all wearing pithels, which is great.

We should note also that it's mentioned, someone mentions that Lestrange has gone missing at this point.

Yeah, Lestrange is off doing something we don't know quite what. But eventually the zombies get to the cotton tree. And I can't remember if Jackson and Susie get to the zombie ritual that's going on prior to that or not.

They do. So a couple of things I wanted to point out. So thinking about zombie lore, we get a couple of details about how you would deal with a zombie here. So they're assembled, the police are there. They're basically going to head out scouring the woods for Eve. And the old exposition guy says that, I think he identifies two ways that you can stop a zombie. One is to shoot it with a silver bullet, which obviously no one there is going to have. And the other is to pour salt on them.

Yes, and I wonder, the silver bullet thing, I don't know if that is from Voodoo, or if they are just stealing that from werewolf movies. Like, I don't know. Like, I think we have so much rigor around our sort of a hierarchy of how these things work, right? It's sort of like Greek myths. Like, that rigor was not there in early Hollywood. They're like, silver bullets work against werewolves. Let's throw it in this movie. Like, I don't know where that comes from.

Yeah, I don't know either. So, Suzy and Jackson head out with salt on their own.

Can I just say, like, as a fan of sort of like mystic fantasy stuff, the idea that you could throw salt on a zombie to make them sort of lie down is kind of a fun, it feels very sort of old world, mysterious mythology stuff. I kind of love it.

It does. And as zombies evolve in popular culture, I mean, I guess you would say their Achilles heel is being shot in the brain, right? That's their weak point. Right.

Yes. But we're not there yet.

Yeah. This zombie feels very much like part of the tradition of supernatural creatures that have some sort of a bane that can be exploited to completely disrupt or shut them down.

Yeah. Like garlic for vampires. And the salt is a similar thing. Yeah.

I like that a lot. The next bit that I don't know if you took note of is this little scene that I think is being played for comedy where they-

Susie and Jackson run into another driver, but they think he's a zombie, so they tackle him and start pouring salt on him. But he stops them and says, hey, I'm headed for the voodoo ritual. Why don't you join me? Yeah.

And he says, it kind of sounds like the entire area is converging on the ceremony. So all of the locals know that something big and voodoo related is going on. And so everyone is sort of converging, following the sound of these voodoo drums. Drums are used throughout the movie to like, anytime they need to inject some voodoo background, you will hear drums. And so you have a lot of locals, I guess, gathering for this ceremony. And then the different search parties are all following the sound of the drums of the ceremony as well.

But before we get there, the plan is that Cleely is going to sacrifice Eve at this ceremony. But what happens, there's a couple of things that happen first. One, there is a great scene where Eve is sort of hypnotized or out of it. And Cleely sort of is comparing herself to Eve and basically saying, like, you are, you, and I think all of us agree, like, you know, in the modern world, if we had to choose between these two women, not that either of them would talk to us, but if we had to choose, Cleely is clearly the better choice.

I'm sorry, Cleely is not on your level.

Yeah, no, she's not. But she has this comparison where she sort of vents her rage at Eve, saying, like, you are not enough for Adam. I'm way better than you are.

Adam needs a woman of fire, of passion like me. I could have won him if he stayed down here. He was so lonely. But you took him away from me. Well, you won't have him. Do you hear? You won't have him.

Yes. And I love this scene and I love, again, you get like a good, it's good acting from Freddie Washington. But Lestrange comes in at this point, right?

At this point, this movie is succeeding at something that is very hard to do. Who are you rooting for at this point?

As a modern viewer, like I'm rooting for Cleo. Like I don't approve of the fact that she wants to sacrifice Eve to get Adam. But like I feel like she's a person just trying to live her life and express her agencies up against forces out of her control and is like, this is unfair, right? I deserve, look at you and look at me. Why don't I get to be with Adam? Like I'm on her side except for the sacrifice.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Yeah, you know, murder, murderer side.

Nobody here condones murder. We just want to be clear on that.

Firstly, she's just the most charismatic character in the film. So it's impossible not to kind of be on team, clearly.

But not to go over the top here, but you can hear from that. Like if we were to play some of Eve's dialogue, that actress' dialogue and compared to what we just played, everybody else feels like they're on downers or something, and clearly feels like a really animated, energetic person, you know what I mean? Which nobody else feels like in this movie.

That's what I was going for. And there is a long tradition in film in general of trying to make your villains sympathetic. But I genuinely wanted clearly, at this point in the movie, I didn't want clearly to kill anyone, but I wanted clearly to come out at the end of this okay, and with a better choice, and with something that wasn't Adam, to be like the driving motivator for her life.

I don't know what I wanted, but I wonder if at the time, right? 90 years ago, people actually find her scary, right? That's my question.

Exactly, I was going for that too.

Because I don't, but I wonder.

Yeah, I mean, is Adam supposed to be a dashing romantic lead that of course you would fall in love with this guy? Because to a modern viewer, the hero, the protagonist of this film is obviously clearly. But would that have been how you understood this in the 30s or 40s?

And I don't know the answer because I just find Adam to be sort of a stiff jerk, right? But maybe that's how you were supposed to be. And at one point, he finds the zombies that have abducted Eve, and sort of starts ordering them around. And I don't know if you're supposed to be like be impressed by that. I found him just to be like even worse after that scene. You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. And like you said earlier, clearly has been treated unfairly by the world. And I do wonder if viewers at the time were primed to be more sympathetic than we are today towards like Adam's position, where he's basically making this racist statement that like, I can't be with you because you're a different race, and that wouldn't be possible. Like today, that's the thing villains say in movies today. Right. Back then, that was a thing. I wonder if that was a thing that a hero could say, and that you might expect the audience to be like, yeah, he makes a good point.

And I'm not entirely sure. I think civil rights had not been an issue that anyone talked about, but I think in government circles anyway, it sort of started up again with Roosevelt, right? Like for a long time, and this is where Andy and I reading Robert Carroll's The Years of Lyndon Johnson finally gets brought in. But the point I want to make is that it hadn't been on people's mind as a solvable problem until FDR's second or third term. And then late FDR term, Truman was right after FDR, and then Eisenhower, civil rights became something we started talking about as a culture. But I don't know in 33, FDR has just become president if that's actually true. And I think it might be too early.

And maybe your typical viewer reacted the same way I reacted, which was like, wow, this is awful and racist and Adam's a jerk for going along with it. I want to give people credit, but I worry maybe that our cultural distance is particularly great on this particular matter.

I think that a lot of people were supposed to think Adam was a good guy here and clearly was the evil cackling sorceress. And that's just not how it plays today. You know what I mean?

All right. So anyway, back to the film.

Yeah. So here comes Lestrange and he's come and he assaults Cleely. And he grabs something from her and you don't see what it is initially, but she shoots him with the world's smallest gun.

Yes. There is a way that people in old movies shoot guns and they-

They hold them right to their rib cage?

And they gesture forward with the gun as they shoot it.

Like they're throwing the bullet, not shooting it.

They're throwing the bullet at them.

Exactly.

So, but yeah.

So she hits him and he falls down, and she takes off with Eve. Then as soon as this race to get to the sacrifice, there's a sacrifice going on, and what's got to happen is clearly he's got to get there and bring Eve, and then her father slash assistant is sort of getting everything set up as they arrive, and then they're going to complete it. And then becomes this really slow race to get there before the sacrifice happens. Not the best part of the movie. This is maybe the most laughable part of the movie, is these policemen in pith helmets sort of trying to find the sacrifice and break it up and all this kind of stuff. And I think Adam gets there first, and like a fist fight ensues, but then the cops show up. It's like a whole thing.

Yeah, so just to take this step by step. So Eve's there in the ceremony. Cleely's getting out a big machete sized knife, right?

And then Lestrange shows up. And what does he have?

Lestrange, he has a shot in the heart. So he is...

We haven't figured out that you just shoot everybody in the shoulder and we'll all believe it. He's got a big bloody wound like right over his head. He seems to be okay.

No, but he does say he doesn't expect to live.

That's right.

The expectation is he dies.

Yes.

Yeah, so he stumbles in and disrupts the ceremony.

And he holds up her Ouanga, which we haven't seen since the beginning, really. And he burns it.

This was like the mark of her kind of voodoo priestess to her power, and the one that she swore if she ever lost it, then death and darkness would come for her.

So this is what he grabbed from her when he assaulted her right before she shot him. And then she sees this, she screams and runs off into the jungle.

Yeah, strangely, the ritual continues without her, which is kind of funny. I guess. You would think that this would put an end to the sacrifice, but no.

I know, it feels like, well, we got all these people to show up, we might as well. It's sort of like a wedding where the bride leaves. Well, let's have a party. Everybody's here.

So they're still going to kill Eve, but then Adam shows up and there's a big scuffle, and then the police show up, and then that's that.

And that's that. We're kind of not concerned. Actually, Adam, Eve, all of those people, Susie Jackson, who are not Lestrange, or Clearly, we're done with them for the movie. So Clearly goes wandering in the jungle, and eventually comes across, this is actually probably the scariest, most horrifying shot. She sees...

I love this part. This is, I love it.

We want to describe this shot, because I think it's kind of amazing.

Well, she's stumbling through the jungle, and it's obvious that she's getting weaker. You know, she appears to be, you know, she's just staggering through the jungle. And Lestrange is staggering after her at a similarly slow pace. A lot of slow chases in this film, you know what I'm saying? But yeah, she comes to this massive tree, right? And it has the feel of like, you know, the elder tree from like a fairy tale type of thing.

Yeah, and it's got like a bowl in it. It looks like a cave. It's so huge.

Yeah, so she sees hanging in the tree. It took me a minute to figure this out. It looks, she sees a body. The camera is positioned that you don't see the head, but you do see a body clearly hanging, which was jarring in the movie. A body wearing Cleely's dress from earlier in the movie.

The dress that Lestrange stole.

The first impression that you have is that she is seeing like a vision of herself hanging dead from this tree.

But it turns out it's the corpse that was stolen wearing her clothes and it's driving her mad. And so she tries to get them. And she's like standing under this corpse, like trying to figure out how to climb the tree or hop or whatever to get these clothes back. Feudally, she's like panicking. It's very, I don't know, I found it very...

Yes, and good acting here as well. I mean, she conveys this sort of panicked realization that she's in deep trouble.

Yeah, and I just like, we keep harping on this, but just for a moment, compare, if you watched White Zombie, compare the performance here versus the woman who becomes a zombie. Like we complimented that performance, but again, like this performance is just so, I don't know, it's so emotional. Like I'm so, I think the other reason we are so attached to Cleely's story, is she's showing genuine vulnerability and emotion where everybody else is like, stolid and staid and boring. You know what I mean? And we identify with that, I think.

So yeah, so this is the final scene of the film.

Yes.

She is unable to get the corpse down or to get the dress back.

And Lestrange stumbles up. He basically says, you know, this is what you deserve, but I've outwitted you voodoo priestess, and this is what he says to her.

The voodoo priestess has been out voodooed.

And she sort of screams, and he comes up on her with his arms extended. It's clear he's going to strangle her. And just as he gets to her, the movie ends. It says the end, and we don't see the actual killing happen. But yeah, and that's the end of the movie.

And so just to clarify, so what's happened is quite early in the film, Lestrange started this plan. Basically, the first time he was rejected by Kleeley, he went and he started this plan to do a voodoo ritual to... What is the point of this ritual? Is it to kill her? Is it to...

I think it was to drive her mad. And I think he was taking vengence because she rejected him. And though she shot him, now he realizes he's going to die, he's going to kill her too.

Okay, so that makes sense. He clearly wants revenge. And so he's not trying to get her back. He's just trying to make her reap the consequences of her actions.

Yes, I think so. And I think this is his vengeance. And I think that's the other reason we relate to Kleeley. Clearly in these final moments, he's the villain, right? Because he's murdering her.

He also advances on her at a pace of about half a mile per hour. So I...

Yeah, like Michael Myers could outrun this guy. Like, this guy's really slow.

But I guess, I mean, I suppose in the movie's logic, Kleeley is, you know, near to death herself just from the fatal weakening of her power.

And that's the show. So I don't know, Andy, we should discuss this thoroughly. But let me... Let's go through our questions. But before we do that, like, how did you like it? Did you like this movie?

I liked this movie. I genuinely, unironically liked this movie. I liked it because Freddie Washington is a joy to watch. I can't overstate it. This is an easy recommendation compared to, certainly compared to Maniac.

And even compared to White Zombie, I think it's a much better film.

It is a much better film than White Zombie.

I was sitting there watching it going like, oh, after I was doing research afterwards, and I'm like, oh, and now I want to watch Imitation of Life to see what that movie's like. I certainly wasn't going, I want to see the other movies by the Maniac director, or I want to go, White Zombie didn't inspire me to go see a bunch of old Bela Lugosi movies. But this one, it was like, oh, I like this. I want to watch some of her other films.

So let's see how it stacks up against your zombie movie criteria.

Well, I think it doesn't. So what I'm wondering here, so my criteria is there's a contagion, a world catastrophe, that zombification is contagious, and that your loved one turns against you. Those were my sort of four. And I'm realizing that for these early movies, these just don't apply. And we've got to rethink, because I think what we're following is a trail of how we got from where we are now to those sort of tropes in zombie movies, because none of those in our first three movies are really super strongly there, except for a little bit in that first one, in White Zombie.

Yes, I agree. I think as good as those criteria are for evaluating, I think, a modern zombie movie, we have put the cart before the horse by applying these two older movies. So maybe the question is, do you see any connecting threads between this movie and White Zombie and Maniac, these early portrayals of zombies, and where we wind up, or are we watching just an entirely different genre of horror?

In this movie, I think we're watching a genre of horror that is different. This is about a powerful sorcerer who uses their magic to get what they want with tragic consequences. So it's a very different plot. I think the idea of the zombie is strong here, though. The zombies are supposed to be mindless and terrifying. So I think this is sort of the, those threads are starting to get pulled together, but not in the way that we expect them to yet. Zombies are a minor player in this.

They are. And I mean, you would be hard pressed to really, I mean, the zombies are effective in this movie, I think, but they are not scary in the way that like a modern zombie is, because first, they're under the total control and direction of a human being. And so they could obviously be used to do scary stuff to you, but they are not an existential menace to your life in any way. They are the tools of a very human motivated villain.

I think that's interesting. And I think the big thing that is different from these three movies than from our modern experience is, these zombies are servants and controlled by someone to do their bidding. In the modern zombie movies that we are used to that we started out with, the zombies are not controlled by anything but the virus and their own sort of impulses, their desire to kill and eat. And that is a very different type of zombie.

So John, does this get the Zombie Strains seal of approval as a zombie movie that you should watch if you're a zombie fan?

I'm hesitant. I can easily recommend this movie as one to watch. And I think her scene where she raises the dead zombies and the behavior of the zombies is where we maybe start to get a little bit of a feel of a more modern zombie. But I think we've got a ways to go. I'm curious to see how zombies start showing up in other movies. We're not there yet, but I could see it be in the beginning.

I agree. This is an easy recommendation as a film to watch. Setting aside the zombie stuff, I found this movie to be a genuinely interesting film in conversation with the racial and racist ideas of its time. There's some things we didn't talk about about the portrayal of the native Haitian population that isn't great. I'm not saying that this movie is a modern masterpiece of discourse on the topic of race. However, it is a film that is obviously just in conversation with the society around it, and I find that very interesting. But as a zombie movie, I recommend it. I think you should watch it, but I think you should watch it instead of white zombies. So if you're going to watch an early zombie movie that is quite a ways away in theme and detail from modern zombie movies, I think it's easy to point to white zombie because it was first. But this is basically the plot of white zombie. It's way better executed. There's good acting. It works as a more coherent film. So watch it. You don't need to watch this in white zombie. Watch this one instead.

I'd agree. I can stick with that recommendation, but by any means, we continue our recommendation from last episode. Don't watch Maniac.

I mean, I assume after your tenth viewing of Maniac, that movie will spoil you so much. I don't even know if you'll want to watch another movie after watching that. But maybe a second, a distant second after Maniac would be this.

Well, what do we have next, producer Brad?

Before we go next, we should mention that UCLA has posted not only this film, Ouanga, on Vimeo, but they also have a discussion with two UCLA professors discussing the context of the film. So if you're interested in learning more, that's available on Vimeo.

Excellent. Link in the show notes.

Check your chat. Here's the poster for the next film. It's from 1936, Revolt of the Zombies.

Whoa.

Wow.

There's a pith helmet, so I'm in good ground there. So I'll read some of the text of this poster. At the top, it says, Zombies, not dead, not alive, Revolt of the Zombies. And then it has a Frankenstein-looking zombie, and it stars Dean Jagger and Dorothy Stone.

Okay.

And if you notice, the green is very similar to the green of the poster from White Zombie. This was intended to be a sequel, so this would be our first sequel, but there are a lot of lawsuits, and it's not legally a sequel.

Also, you want to describe some of the visuals here, because there's some weird stuff here.

There is a big, prominent zombie. I assume that's a zombie head. It looks like a Frankenstein head. It has a sci-fi look to it, I would say, or a mad scientist type of look to it.

Yeah.

There is a little idol in the corner of this poster.

A multi-armed idol that looks almost like something out of Hindu mythology.

Right. Yeah. So we'll see what new cultural elements they're bringing into zombies. And then up in the top right, there's two people having a really boring looking fight. It looks like they're conversing with each other while holding weapons. I know.

One of them has a knife, and the other one, I thought he was originally holding a phone, but I guess it's a bottle.

I thought it was a phone as well, but you're probably right, that must be a bottle.

Yes. So this will be interesting. No big proclamations about what's going to be in the movie. Just zombies. Not dead, not alive. Exclamation point.

This is the first movie in at least two episodes to not talk about how risque the movie is going to be.

Yes, and this is from 1936. So we're jumping ahead a couple of years now. All right. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Brad. Please join this next episode as we talk about Revolts of the Zombies. You have been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back in two weeks to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend. Post on your socials. This will help like minded people find our show. See you next time.