King of the Zombies

The Zombie King is an American comedy about zombies, released in 1941.

In 1941, a small transport plane piloted by James " Mac " McCarthy between Cuba and Puerto Rico runs out of fuel, and a storm knocks it off course.

McCarthy, unable to pick up any radio transmissions over the Caribbean Sea, receives a weak radio signal. After an emergency landing on a remote island, Mack, along with passenger Bill Summers and his black valet Jefferson Jackson, take refuge in a mansion owned by Dr. Miklos Sangre and his wife Alice.

Quick-witted, but timid Jackson soon finds out that zombies live in the mansion, and local servants confirm this. Together with Barbara Winslow, Alice's niece, the men are trying to find out the reason for the mysterious events taking place in the mansion.

The group discovers a basement in which the locals perform a voodoo ritual. They are led by Sangre, who is actually a foreign spy trying to extract military secrets from a captured American admiral, whose plane also recently crashed on the island.

McCarthy falls under the spell of the doctor, but Summers comes to his rescue. With the help of voodoo magic, Sangre tries to transfer the admiral's knowledge to Barbara, but Summers does not allow him to complete the ritual, as a result of which the zombies attack their master. Sangre shoots the pilot, but the zombies push him into a pit with a fire. After Sangre's death, all zombies are released from the spell.

The zombies in the film are not really dead, but represent ordinary people subjected to hypnosis. They consider themselves dead and returned from the other world to serve the "master". As a rule, they are silent, do what they are told, and do not show their own will. Zombies eat (and do not eat meat); they do not put salt and spices in their food, because this can lead to them waking up from a trance.

Probably, the quality of zombification depends on the level of culture of the object and on its belief in zombies. This explains the fact that visiting people who have undergone the same procedure as local people behave differently: they talk, remember their "past" life and quickly throw off their hypnotic charms.

After the death of the "master", the effect of his hypnosis disappears and all the zombies come out of the trance.

The main villain of the film tries to perform a voodoo witchcraft rite, with the help of which he hopes to transfer the memories of one person to another.