MORE EERIE THAN "DRACULA."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 261, 3 November 1932, Page 8

MORE EERIE THAN "DRACULA."

"WHITE ZOMBIE" AT THE CIVIC. : i ■ Described as more eerie and weird, than • Dracula," "Frankenstein" or "The Gold Bug," the picture "White Zombie." which will have its premiere at the Civic tomorrow, is said to begin where other mystejy dramas leave off. The very name of Bela Lugo6i, who is cast in the roleof "Murder," has become synonymous with strange, secret powers, and it is not altogether due to his "Dracula" and other eerie portrayals. There is something of a mysterious, hypnotic quality about the . man himself, particularly about his deepset eyes, and the reason appears to he I that he has probed life too deeply. Thf story of "White Zombie" concerns itself with that black sorcery practised in Haiti wfilcb. has to do with dead bodies being . reanimated-and put to work in mills and fields. Reports of these eerie practices had been seeping into the more populated sections of Haiti for years, and recently an American author verified them through personal observation. Madge Bellamy, in the story, is placed under a spell by the leader of the Zombies, a sinister sorcerer who traffics in dead bodies secretly dug from the graveyard, and, after she is pronounced dead by her family physician and interred in a large mausoleum, her body is disinterred that night by the Zombies and taken away" to a mountain retreat. | There the sorcerer brings her back { to life, but only permits her the animation of a sleep walker. Miss Bellamy went through these- scenes one morning, and late that day she and other membenr of the company went into the projection room to look at the result. That part of the sequence in which she is eeen lying in a coffin was flashed upon the and, after taking one look. Miss Bellamy let out a piercing scream and bolted tot the door. And nothing could prevail npott her to return* " __,_,.,—.