My deduction from reading various comments is that there is NO decent print of this movie available, so tonight, New Year's Eve, I watched one that I've had for awhile in one of those 50 Horror Film boxes someone gave me years ago. It was at least more watchable than the horrid versions on Youtube... and the quality was intermittently decent.

The movie impressed me much more this time around than my viewing way back in the mid 1970s, when I found it hard to get beyond the terrible shape in which the movie as I saw it then was presented. Wish I had been able to see one of the pristine prints back in the 1960s.

What a performance from Lugosi. I noticed that you could see his breath in the sugar mill sequence, so wherever they filmed that must have been devilishly cold. The location filming seemed very unusual for the time.

Beyond Lugosi's sequences, I found the camerawork and set-ups very striking at times, particularly the scene where Neil, the rather effete abandoned husband, gets drunk alone in a fox-trot club--a very Weimar-esque sequence.

Dan Curtis seems to have been a fan of this movie. The set-up/shot of Madeleine's coffin being moved into a niche towards the camera as the screen darkens at its approach was copied by Curtis in House of Dark Shadows (1970) and several subsequent films and productions of his

Now I am very curious to read Gary Rhodes' book about the movie. Although I hope that it does not include pages about the placement of minutely detailed props and lighting effects, I have to confess! My concept of geeking out around classic films has been re-defined since reading Rhodes' essay about Dracula in a recent magazine.

Happy New Year! It would be lovely to think that someday White Zombie would be released in a pristine form but that seems beyond the ability of the current home video "industry" and its acolytes to provide.

H.