Robert W. Frazer

A wartime espionage quickie from Monogram, rushed into theaters three months after Pearl Harbor. Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Melcher, a plastic surgeon who has spent years transforming six agents of Japan's Black Dragon Society into doubles of prominent American industrialists — a fifth column planted to sabotage the US war effort. When the infiltrators start turning up dead with ceremonial daggers in their chests, a doctor and a detective try to untangle the conspiracy. Clayton Moore, a few years away from the Lone Ranger, plays a young FBI man. Cheap even by poverty-row standards, but a vivid snapshot of wartime paranoia. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Thriller · Mystery · War

Often cited as the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie stars Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, a Haitian voodoo master who runs a sugar mill worked by the walking dead. A young couple arrives in Haiti to marry at the estate of a wealthy acquaintance, who turns to Legendre to zombify the bride so he can have her for himself. The film predates the flesh-eating zombie of George Romero by decades; its zombies are enslaved laborers, drawn from the same folklore that fascinated 1930s audiences. Lugosi, fresh off Dracula, carries the picture with his hypnotic stare. Made independently for around fifty thousand dollars, it was a surprise hit and the only real success for the Halperin brothers. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Horror