The Plague of the Zombies: Only The Lord Of The Dead Could Unleash Them!
"Someone in this village is practicing witchcraft. That corpse wandering on the moors is an undead, a zombie”. - Sir James Forbes
The Plague of the Zombies is one of my favourite Hammer films and it has earned a place in my top five horror films of all time. I even bought a dress from Etsy with a zombie on the front…dedication to this film is unnerving.
If you have never seen it or it resides deep in your brain somewhere and you cannot quite recall it then I will tell you a little bit about the plot without giving too much away. Here goes my best dramatic horror voice over:
The film is based in a Cornish village and with a mysterious illness bringing the dead back to life, it is enough for the local doctor to bring in his former mentor to try and crack the case – but things get very odd indeed. The dead start coming back. They are the undead. Zombies.
Hammer studios had been re-making universal films for a little while and stumbled upon the idea of voodoo to put some life back into their films. It was thought that the original idea for the film was a little too gruesome and it was shelved. A couple of years later it was picked up again and they settled upon what we see today. And aren’t we glad they did? Hammer had made a unique film that pushed the boundaries and introduced many to the wonderful world of the undead.
The Plague of the Zombies make up effects did what Lucio Fulci’s zombies in Zombi 2 (also known as Zombie, Island of the Living Dead, Zombie Island, Zombie Flesh Eaters and Woodoo) did for me – those ghouls looked like they had been genuinely unearthed and were ready to go on a rampage (a very slow one at that). I love these subtle effects but I also love a good makeup artist that can capture the undead in all their gory glory (I am looking at you Greg Nicotero) but that dry, cakey skin, those white eyes, blackened teeth…it just really works. Even today it still looks great. To push this point further I just managed to get my hands on a restored blu-ray version of The Plague of the Zombies. It is only now that I see how great the sets were, the zombies are still as scary as they were back then and the colours are so rich and glorious.
George A. Romero’s masterpiece Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 (two years after Hammer’s zombie film) and although shot in black and white, I cannot help but think Romero was inspired by The Plague of the Zombies – the same blank stares, slow walks and undead make-up. Although they are both fantastic films The Plague of the Zombies sometimes gets left behind when people talk about the genre. It is like the obscure bands of the 60’s that influenced some of the greatest rock bands - they get left in the archive.
To see such a film in the cinema all those years ago must have been pretty amazing especially as it was double-billed with Dracula Prince of Darkness with the promotional gimmick as a free cut-out zombie eyes – why don’t we get cool stuff like that now? Born too late I tell you!
What I love the most about it is its boldness in going down the zombie route and marrying it up with the classic British sophistication that we are so used to seeing in Hammer films. I don’t know how many times I have seen it but it is never enough.
