White Zombie: Why Tobe Hooper’s Remake Never Happened – Screen Rant

Tobe Hooper almost directed a remake of the cult classic White Zombie, but production never made it past the writing stage.

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 budgetstopped production from happening, and theWhite Zombieremake joined a long list of other unmade horror movies that would have been amazing.

The originalWhite Zombie, released in 1932, is most notable for being the first zombie movie ever made. Even though George A. Romero'sNight of the Living Deadpopularized the flesh-eatingundead hordes that define the modern idea of a zombie,White Zombieused Haitian folklore to firstintroduce the concept of a shambling, blank-eyed reanimated corpseto 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.

Related: Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot Isn't As Good As You Remember

Screenwriter Jared Rivet wrote a spec script forTobe Hooperafter 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 Zombieremake. Initially, Hooper hated Rivet's treatment, but the two worked together to develop a fullscreenplay to modernize the story and more explicitly show plot detailsthat 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'sThe Serpent and the Rainbow.

AlthoughWhite Zombieis 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 HaitianVodou written by explorer William Seabrook, helped launch the American fascination with the Haitian zombie and inspiredWhite Zombie. In fact, producer Victor Halperin and director Edward Halperin allegedly plagiarised parts of the book, whichmeant that Rivet and Hooperhad to remove the most obviousreferences 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.

Perhapsthe most frustratingcriticism 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 directorrealized 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 regardingWhite Zombie, a remake can always reappear in the future, albeit unfortunately not under Hooper's direction, as he passed away in 2017.

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Andrew is a contributing features writer for Screen Rant Horror, as well as for Comic Book Resources. He enjoys trying to see what social commentary he can mine out of the latest horror films, as well as checking up on what's going on in the life of Spider-Man. He also plays bass guitar to exorcise his negative emotions, like the good Mr. Rodgers says you should.

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White Zombie: Why Tobe Hooper's Remake Never Happened - Screen Rant

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero