“It’s the weirdest script I’ve ever written.”
Decades before George A. Romero redefined the zombie film with Night of the Living Dead, along came Victor Halperin’s White Zombie in 1932, often cited as being the very first zombie movie. The Bela Lugosi-starring film, of course, is notable for having inspired the name of Rob Zombie’s band, White Zombie. But did you know that Tobe Hooper almost remade it?!
In the latest episode of the fascinating podcast Best Movies Never Made, writer Jared Rivet (Jackals, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”) digs into the script he wrote for Hooper’s remake of the black & white classic, which of course never actually ended up being made. This was around 2006-2007, at a time when RKO was intent on remaking all their classic horror movies.
Ultimately, not a single one of those planned remakes got off the ground. Oops.
“Tobe really wanted to go super-duper surreal,” Rivet told the show’s hosts. “He was enamored with David Lynch at that time. We wanted to make things more explicit too. So what I did was I wrote a treatment… a 33-page treatment. I took all of [Tobe’s] key ideas and the plot of the original movie, and wrote this Fulci-esque, Romero-esque, Serpent and the Rainbow-esque remake of White Zombie. And the whole second half is just action-action-action.”
As Rivet explains, Hooper hated that initial treatment, which led to the two working together to refine it and then write the script. “We decided to set it in the modern day. One of the things Tobe really wanted to do…he wanted to do a very stage-bound movie for this,” recalls the writer, comparing the movie they ended up writing to both Dracula and Eaten Alive.
Hooper had James Woods or Bruce Greenwood in mind for the role of Charles Beaumont and Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Frank Langella or Nic Cage for Murder Legendre.
So what happened? Be sure to listen to the full episode of Best Movies Never Made to learn more about the project, and check out a zombie makeup test from the unmade film below.
