White Zombie
1932 · 67 min · White Zombie (1932)
White Zombie (1932), the Bela Lugosi picture usually called the first zombie feature. Shot in eleven days on borrowed sets. Watch the full movie free.
A Haitian sugar mill worked by men who do not blink, and Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, running the place on a labor force he raised himself. It moves like a silent film that has just learned to talk, and it is stranger than its reputation as a cheap Dracula follow-up suggests.
Victor Halperin made it independently, in about eleven days, for something close to fifty thousand dollars, which meant renting whatever Universal happened to have standing. Halls and staircases from Dracula and Frankenstein turn up in the background.
The reviews in 1932 were poor. It made money anyway, and every zombie since is downstream of it.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is White Zombie public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of White Zombie was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-25. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 358 described cues across a 66 minute 47 second runtime, filling 29 minutes 7 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 43.6 percent of the film -- at 171 words per minute.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 6 kHz, loudness matched in two passes. No picture restoration on this pass.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
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