In the summer of 1965, Hammer embarked on a cost-cutting exercise that saw them produce a block of four films destined to become a brace of double bills early the following year, films that shared sets, cast and crew. Rasputin the Mad Monk was shot in conjunction with Dracula Prince of Darkness and were destined to be the ‘A’ films on the bills, but both were outshone by their supporting features, both directed by John Gilling. The Plague of the Zombies, widely regarded as one of Hammer’s very best, provides the link between the voodoo-raised zombies of the 1940s and the more terrifying Night of the Living Dead variety that came along two years later.
In August 1860, Peter Thompson (Brook Williams), doctor in a small Cornish village, is fighting a losing battle with a mystery plague that is killing the locals. He calls on his friend Sir James Forbes (André Morell) who arrives in the village with his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) in time to see the local hunt, led by Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson), disrupting the funeral of the latest victim. Thompson and Forbes dig up the bodies of the recently afflicted only to find their coffins empty. They come to suspect that the corpses have been revived as zombies to work in the tin mine on Hamilton’s estate. Hamilton sets his sights on Sylvia who he plans to sacrifice in a voodoo ritual and while Forbes investigates Hamilton’s manor house, Thompson races to save Sylvia.
Hammer were never shy of injecting a little social commentary into their films, albeit subtly and mostly focussing on issues of class. Their human monsters – and indeed many of their non-human ones – were aristocrats – counts, barons and squires whose treatment of the working classes around them left an extraordinary amount to be desired. This was never more sharply focussed than in The Plague of the Zombies, camera operator turned writer Peter Bryan creating in Squire Hamilton a monstrous exploiter of the workers even after death. He and his gang of scarlet tunicked thugs are not that far removed from the braying mob in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), which Bryan also scripted – there was little time for forelock tugging in a Hammer film, little deference shown to our supposed “betters.”
Gilling’s work for Hammer could be a bit hit and miss – adventure romp Pirates of Blood River (1962) is fun, but The Shadow of the Cat (1961) and The Scarlet Blade (1963) are dull, The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) a step up from The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) but still no great shakes and star Oliver Reed later dismissed The Brigand of Kandahar as the worst film he’d ever made. But the two films he shot in the summer of 1965 are among the company’s best and, along with the non-Hammer The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), certainly the most fully entertaining films in Gilling’s filmography.
He’s assisted no end here by the trio of talents whose work underpinned so many of the early Hammer classic – the ravishing photography of Arthur Grant, the glorious score from James Bernard and the miracles that production designer Bernard Robinson was able to work on his meagre budget. Grant’s photography is particularly striking, his camerawork very mobile and full of effective and unexpected angles.
The film is perhaps best remembered for its two most famous set-pieces, the first glimpse of a cackling zombie as it disposes of a body and the dream sequence. The former is one of Hammer’s most chilling moments, the latter a tour-de-force that was still influencing zombie films well into the 1980s and beyond. The ranks of the undead clawing their way out of the ground, Thompson’s recently deceased wife Alice (Jaqueline Pearce) climbing from her grave (“zombie!”) and her subsequent beheading linger longer than most such scenes in later films. The zombies themselves, mouldering and rotting before our very eyes, were particularly influential – their cousins can certainly be found stalking the streets and beaches of Matoul in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie (1979).
The cast is headed by André Morell who, having played Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles, steps up to the Sherlock Holmes role as the Victorian rationalist whose certainties are challenged by the fact that voodoo really does exist and is being put to such repellent use (“I find all kinds of witchcraft slightly nauseating,” he notes, “and this I find absolutely disgusting.”) Pitted against John Carson’s suavely decadent zombie master, the two actors spar off each in thrilling fashion and both men are utterly compelling throughout. Further down the cast, Brook Williams and Diane Clare are stuck with the usual underwritten younger lead roles but Jacqueline Pearce, who would hang around to take the title role in Hammer’s other Cornwall set chiller, made back-to-back with Plague, is excellent as the doomed Alice. And of course, as it wouldn’t be a real 60s Hammer film without him, there’s Michael Ripper as a local copper baffled by all the supernatural shenanigans.
Like all films, The Plague of the Zombies has its problems – the ending, as was the way in many a Hemmer film, is a tad too hasty, too eager to wrap things up neatly as the end credits hove into view and Hamilton’s interest in sacrificing Sylvia in a voodoo ritual is never satisfactorily explained (did he want her to join the ranks of his undead workers? Did he go through this rigmarole when creating the other zombies?) but otherwise The Plague of the Zombies, which opened on 9 January 1966 supporting Dracula Prince of Darkness, is one of Hammer’s genuine masterpieces.
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