White Zombie: Why Tobe Hooper’s Remake Never Happened

One of the most intriguing parts of Tobe Hooper’s career involved the short-lived plans that the renowned horror director had to helm a violent, surreal remake of the cult classic film, White Zombie. Unfortunately, complicated legal issues and a shrinking budget stopped production from happening, and the White Zombie remake joined a long list of other unmade horror movies that would have been amazing.

The original White Zombie, released in 1932, is most notable for being the first zombie movie ever made. Even though George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead popularized the flesh-eating undead hordes that define the modern idea of a zombie, White Zombie used Haitian folklore to first introduce the concept of a shambling, blank-eyed reanimated corpse to horror cinema. These zombies weren’t interested in eating people, but were instead bound to the whim of their master, Bela Lugosi’s Murder Legendre, who had resurrected them from the dead.

Screenwriter Jared Rivet wrote a spec script for Tobe Hooper after producers from RKO Pictures, one of the giant studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age that was trying to reclaim its success, approached him to ask him to direct a White Zombie remake. Initially, Hooper hated Rivet’s treatment, but the two worked together to develop a full screenplay to modernize the story and more explicitly show plot details that were only hinted at in the original film. The result was a violent, surreal, and socio-political horror story that Rivet compared to Lucio Fulci, George A. Romero, and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Why Tobe Hooper Never Remade White Zombie

Although White Zombie is still in the public domain, Hooper and Rivet discovered that there were rights issues related to the source material that the original film was originally based on. The Magic Island, an exaggerated but influential report on Haitian Vodou written by explorer William Seabrook, helped launch the American fascination with the Haitian zombie and inspired White Zombie. In fact, producer Victor Halperin and director Edward Halperin allegedly plagiarised parts of the book, which meant that Rivet and Hooper had to remove the most obvious references to the writing.

In an interview on the podcast Best Movies Never Made, Rivet went on to explain that producer Sidney Sheinberg eventually optioned the rights to the book, but production still never went through. This was because Sheinberg and the other producers kept insisting on changes to the story in order to cut the budget down. For instance, whereas Hooper and Rivet wanted the movie to be set in Haiti on a private estate isolated from the rest of the country, the producers wanted to change the setting to Louisiana.

Perhaps the most frustrating criticism Sheinberg and the other producers lobbed at the script was that it was too strange. Gone were Hooper’s hallucinatory sequences and the veils the zombies wore to keep flies from buzzing around their decomposed body. As the director realized his vision was becoming diluted, he convinced his writing partner to leave the project with him. The good news is that, due to the flexible legal rights regarding White Zombie, a remake can always reappear in the future, albeit unfortunately not under Hooper’s direction, as he passed away in 2017.

About The Author