![]() ![]() Zombies and vampires thereby establish themselves as cousins, yin-yang monsters farming humans for food and drink. There's even a moment in "White Zombie" where Lugosi's quasi-blackface (in reality, wine-face) is glimpsed in a soon-to-be-zombie's wine glass, as if to show that Dracula truly is the zombie All-father. They want to devour the whole human race. These irreligious creatures aren't going to settle for Jesus Christ's body and blood. Then, came Richard Matheson's 1954 post-apocalyptic vampire novel, "I Am Legend," which inspired director George Romero when he was making the first contemporary zombie film, "Night of the Living Dead." Romero sought to distinguish his zombies (which he didn't actually call zombies) from those of Haitian folklore, but he was still drawing from vampire source material, a book that has yielded three film adaptations: "The Last Man on Earth," "The Omega Man," and "I Am Legend." It's not a stretch to say that zombies mutated from vampires on celluloid. Both of those movies featured Lugosi in supporting roles. What we now think of as meta and comedy horror also spun off from early films like "Mark of the Vampire" in 1935 and "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" in 1942. Fresh off "Dracula" in 1932, Lugosi starred in the first zombie movie, Victor Halperin's "White Zombie." That same year, key plot elements and cast and crew members from "Dracula" carried forward into another Universal Classic Monsters film, "The Mummy," informing its franchise for decades to come.
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