Edward L. Cahn made his debut as a director in the early 1930s with gangster and western films: his 1932 take on the OK Corral shootout Law and Order was much admired. Cahn soon found a niche directing Hal Roach’s hugely popular Our Gang series of short comedy films, and these works or others in a similar vein filled up most of the late ‘30s and ‘40s. When the series lost steam and the film market began to alter in the age of television, Cahn moved successfully into low-budget features, mostly making the sorts of movies he’d begun with: crime thrillers and horse operas. As the ‘50s progressed however, he inevitably handled a lot of films in that decade’s most disreputably popular genres: teen delinquent dramas, rock ‘n’ roll flicks, horror, and sci-fi movies. Cahn, who packed in an extraordinary number of films in the last few years before his death in 1963, was the sort of experienced, committed artisan whose rock-like steadiness was desperately needed in a turbulent industry. His sober, simple yet fluidly paced, visually coherent style proved resilient in spite of often working with poverty-row budgets, silly scripts, and leaden actors. His small oeuvre of fantastic films is a general delight, in a similar fashion to what some have seen in his equally cheap noir films. The gleefully weird Creature With the Atom Brain (1955) and Invisible Invaders (1959) seem like they’ve been conjured straight from the pages of the era’s most lurid pulp mags or comic books, as does his seminal, influential It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), the progenitor of Alien (1979), and the utterly crazy The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959). The She Creature (1956), Curse of the Faceless Man and Zombies of Mora Tau are comparatively becalmed in their sonorous evocations.
Zombies of Mora Tau isn’t a film I’ve ever seen treated with respect, even by horror and B-movie specialists and apologists, and people who like to laugh at older horror films will undoubtedly find sources of mirth here. It was produced by the infamous Sam Katzman, doyen of the cheapjack epic. And yet it’s one of the bright spots in the generally sparse and dismal ranks of ‘50s American horror films, and a singular little by-product, a starkly atmospheric, expressionistic morality play set in an entirely psychological Africa, where there doesn’t seem to be any black Africans, and daylight rarely comes. A vintage luxury car cruises shadowy dirt roads, a European mansion rises by the sea, and zombies lie boding time in a dark deserted crypt in the midst of the back-lot jungle before strutting out to find pretty girls to claim and stalk the ocean floor in an unceasing guardianship. Victor Halperin’s legendary independent horror film White Zombie (1932) seems to have been an influence, particularly for the opening sequence, in which young ingénue Jan Peters (Autumn Russell), fresh from a rational American schooling, returns home only to have the family chauffeur Sam (Gene Roth) drive straight over the top of a man standing on the road. This proves the rudest possible reintroduction to a land where ignoring the corpses reanimated by the theft of history is an everyday necessity.
Like Halperin’s film, too, Cahn’s work manages to situate itself somewhere in a dream-state without any affectations of doing so. Autumn’s widowed grandmother (Marjorie Eaton) is the keeper of old legacies and secrets, maintaining her colonial manse in the face of teeming proof that the colonialist project has become a self-defeating, existentially agonising mockery, symbolised by the zombies, which include her dead husband Captain Peters, who are cursed for trying to steal a cache of diamonds from a nearby temple. The diamonds are trapped in a safe in the wreck of Peters’ ship, just off the coast, and Widow Peters has maintained her vigil over all with boding knowledge. She tries to pass on this knowledge to the latest in a long line of adventurers after the legendary diamonds. In a delightfully odd sequence, she gives them a guided tour of a graveyard crammed with their predecessors over five decades of fortune hunting, all of whom met sticky ends at the hands of the zombies.
The new party aren’t easily persuaded, however, even after one, Mona Harrison (Allison Hayes), tumbles into an open grave, freshly dug for the new arrivals, in mordant anticipation of such fate awaiting these new adventurers. Mona’s husband George Harrison (Joel Ashley) is the shady guy bankrolling the venture. Mona is a hardboiled, sensually and fiscally greedy moll with a barely concealed yen for Jeff Clark (Gregg Palmer), the team’s hunky diving expert, whilst Dr. Eggert (‘50s sci-fi stalwart Morris Ankrum) is on hand for a thin aegis of archaeological cred. Mona, constantly twisting in her ultra-tight ‘50s clothes like she can’t sit properly for the overpowering strength of unsatisfied libido, stirs the pot: in the team’s first appearance, Mona prods Jeff for a friendly kiss she tries to turn into a full-on make-out session, to her husband’s chagrin, but not distraction. George gives Jeff all the slack he needs to retrieve the rocks, before calling off all bargains.
Hayes was a damnably cool and sexy actress who, for a time in the late ‘50s, carved out a niche in B-movies, including for Roger Corman (Gunfighter and The Undead, both 1956) after small roles in higher-profile films earlier in the decade; like fellow Corman alum Susan Cabot, she had a lode of eccentric power that manifested best in playing lawlessly wanton and variably evil ladies, but lacked Cabot’s wounded air, possessing rather surprising ferocity. Here she’s a hoot in a relatively small role as the unrepentant Mona, a trophy wife for George although she’s no prize, stirring up the men in competition until George loses his cool, belts her around, and chases her into the jungle night. Mona is later found zombified in the eerie crypt, surrounded by her undead brethren, but this doesn’t so much alter as divert the object of her disposition, still as coldly, mindlessly motivated by a desire to possess. Rescued by the company, she is only, finally and amusingly, pinioned to a single bed by many candles, as fire is the one thing the zombies are afraid of. The zombies have a minatory charge with their shambling gaits, creepy pallor and shoestring ghoulishness, looking forward to the even cheaper, yet indelible ghosts of Carnival of Souls (1960) as well as, more obviously, Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Indeed, Mora Tau is one of the very few zombie movies its era, and perhaps the first modern one. Earlier zombie films like Halperin’s White Zombie and Revolt of the Zombies (1939) hew more towards parables for dictatorship in the time of totalitarianism, as the zombies are mostly anonymous whilst the necromancer villains feel the temptation to suborn all to their will. Mora Tau looks forward to George Romero, Lucio Fulci, and others in depicting the terror of lost identity and the resurgence of repressed forces, the zombies here only animated by abstract powers to protect a taboo. Some of Cahn’s effects are visceral for the time, like Jeff planting a knife up to the hilt into a zombie’s chest as it tries to kidnap Autumn but failing to cause more than distraction. Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) is anticipated in exploiting the nature of zombies as not beholden to physical limitations and thus capable of living under the sea. Cahn realises this idea however not with clever underwater shooting but the device, at once sublimely tacky and amusingly resourceful, of having his actors in hard-hat diving suits pretend to be underwater with bubbles gurgling from their helmets to mimic escaping air, whilst the actors playing zombies tackle them. These scenes are usually cited as the film’s fatal weakness, and yet they don’t much disturb or contradict the stylised atmosphere, as Cahn’s imagery is still striking as the zombie horde lurch out of the murky dark. Such images indeed contribute to a quality apparent in the film from the start, one that harks back to the painted sets and eerie starkness of early cinema or stage melodrama, hoary and expressive for the very absence of realism.
How to get the diamonds from the wreck is the problem preoccupying the would-be fortune hunters, as the zombies launch themselves at Jeff when he tries entering on his own. Inspired by widow Peters’ trick of warding them off with fire, Jeff gets George to hold them off with an underwater welding torch. Like a lot of films in the horror and scifi genres of this period, the fantastic elements here coexist with elements from other moulds, particularly the gangster film-like figuration of tough, resourceful Jeff clashing over a cut of the loot with George whilst Mona rattles their masculine cages with lust. A familiar moral, that riches are less important than safety, is mixed with a quiet but definite commentary on labour relations and capitalist greed: proletarian Jeff (like John Carpenter, Cahn frequently stressed his heroes’ blue-collar cred) forces George to increase his cut of the profits by threatening to withdraw his needed physical services. Once he has what he wants, George cuts Jeff out at gunpoint. Jeff gravitates towards bland Jan on the way to be converted from purely mercenary interests, and his eventual casting away of riches saves lives.
Cahn’s tone is, more oneiric than sociological for all that, and moments of fairy-tale delight dot the film, from the men trying to rescue Mona from the zombies’ tomb, where the inhabitants march forward like some ungodly line dancing team, to the undead Mona wandering out from her room and casually knifing a sailor to death in his bed. After that escapade she is exiled to her own bed, dazzled and caged by candlelight, somehow looking at once perversely regal and also animalistic in her blind fear and purpose. Once the seekers have their treasure, they have to fight off an invasion of their ship by the walking corpses, and engage in a thoroughly pointless battle, highlighting another of the film’s odder aspects: the zombies are quite unstoppable, amenable to no human interaction. When Mona finally escapes her bed and treads out to obey the same purpose as her fellow zombies, George still believes she’s his wife, but with all the casual precision of a cook cracking an egg, she bashes his skull in with the treasure box he’s sought to such cost. Such an apt and brutally concise end to their twisted marriage is contrasted by the widow Peters tearfully begging her husband’s animated shell to at last give up its vigil. Such are the outlandish and effervescent beauties of this elegantly threadbare film.
