White Zombie

A young couple visit Haiti. A plantation owner who wants the woman turns to Murder Legendre, who runs his mill with reanimated labourers.

This is the zombie before Romero: the Haitian folkloric figure, a living person robbed of will and set to work, and the film is unusually direct about the labour horror of it, with a sequence of dead men turning a cane press in silence.

The Halperin brothers made it independently for very little on rented Universal sets, which is why it looks more expensive than it was.

Lugosi, fresh off Dracula, plays Legendre with the eyebrows doing most of the work, and the close-ups of his hands are the film's signature.

It was dismissed on release and is now recognised as the origin of an entire genre. The word zombie entered wide English use largely because of it.