Ouanga (George Terwilliger, 1935)

Also known as The Love Wanga, this 1935 voodoo-themed film is a fascinatingly messy snapshot of racial politics in the mid-1930s. It's a racist movie made by white filmmakers about subjects they don't understand and can't experience, but it's also a black movie with a majority black cast who find moments to make the movie their own, in both subtle and overt ways. It's considered the second zombie movie in film history (White Zombie is supposed to be the first), though I don't know how these claims are verified considering how many films from the first 40 years of cinema have been lost. Whatever the facts, Ouanga contains some of the first cinematic depictions of zombies.

The final film of director George Terwilliger (journalist turned screenwriter turned director), though he would live for another 35 years, Ouanga was intended to be shot on location in Haiti. The film crew and the Haitian locals did not get along, however, and the production quickly relocated to Jamaica, but not before the unscrupulous props department stole several objects from Haiti. (Similar problems occurred on another voodoo film made by white Americans, The Serpent and the Rainbow, in the 1980s, causing a move from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, though that crew managed to shoot the bulk of the film in Haiti before things went wrong.)

Ouanga is primarily the story of Klili Gordon, a biracial plantation owner and voodoo priestess in Haiti in love with white plantation owner Adam Maynard (Philip Brandon), in a variation on the "tragic mulatto" stereotype. Klili had a fling with Adam until he went off to New York to hook back up with his white fiancée, the milquetoast high society girl Eve (Marie Paxton), and bring her back to Haiti, along with some of their hired help from Harlem. Klili secretly follows Adam to New York and confronts him on the cruise ship back to Haiti, where Adam says she needs to get over him and stick with her "own kind." She decides to place a ouanga (death charm) on Eve to get Adam back, and she even enlists the help of two zombies when extreme measures are needed to make the plan succeed. Meanwhile, one of Adam's servants, LeStrange, is in love with Klili and working some voodoo of his own.

Despite all the other black roles being played by black actors, LeStrange is played by a white guy of Jewish-European heritage, Sheldon Leonard. Leonard is thankfully not in blackface, though some kind of bronzer seems to have been used to make him look tan. I'm not sure why the producers decided to go with Leonard in this role, though there is a possibility they thought he was biracial, since a studio executive made that same assumption after watching Leonard in a previous role and wondered why he was kissing a white woman. Racism is insane.

Klili is played by Fredi Washington, a biracial woman whose parents were also both biracial. She started her showbiz career as a Broadway chorus girl and was a protégé of Josephine Baker's. After a successful dance career on the stage, she started acting in movies in the 1920s, with notable roles in Black and Tan, The Emperor Jones, and the 1934 Imitation of Life. Frustrated at the lack of opportunities for black actors in the film industry, Washington quit the movies for acting roles in radio, and she also returned to Broadway as both an actor and a casting consultant. She eventually became just as disillusioned at the lack of opportunities in those mediums. The remainder of her life was spent as a theater critic and editor for black-owned newspapers and magazines and as a civil rights activist. A light-skinned woman, Washington was urged by some in the business to pass as white, a move she rejected and spoke out against. She died at the age of 90 in 1994.

Washington steals nearly every scene in Ouanga, but the film has a strange ambivalence about whether she should be seen as the hero or the villain. It's hard to have any sympathy for the white plantation-owning characters, though the filmmakers clearly do (though they also empathize somewhat with Klili), and it's also hard to see black actors having to perform the ridiculous dialogue written for them by white people even if they get to put their own spin on it. Still, the film's location shooting gives it a vibrancy that would have been missing on studio sets, and the black actors, despite the material, rescue the movie from being a doddering snooze. A mixed bag, for sure, but an interesting piece of film history. 

City of Blood (Darrell Roodt, 1987)

An anti-apartheid South African folk horror/thriller/police procedural/character study/political drama made in the tumultuous final years of apartheid (filmed in 1983 but not released until 1987), City of Blood's slower pace and its use of horror as just one of many elements probably won't please viewers looking for a straight-up slasher, serial killer, or supernatural movie, but it's a compelling and unconventional film about apartheid's moral rot. 

City of Blood begins with a mysterious, visually striking prologue taking place 2,000 years in the past, though its relevance to the story won't make itself clear (or at least less murky) until the final scenes. Jumping to the 1980s present, homicide detective Max Wharton (Ian Yule) and medical pathologist Dr. Joe Henderson (Joe Stewardson) are examining the body of a murdered sex worker, the latest in a string of unsolved sex worker murders. Max and Joe get into a heated argument about how to proceed with each other's jobs, which seems pretty gnarly until we understand that this is just how the two old friends and colleagues interact with each other. Max has a hilarious habit of aggressively yelling his early thoughts before pivoting to a quieter, more thoughtful approach.

In a more conventional film, we'd follow the detective as he hunts down the killer, checking in periodically with the pathologist during autopsies while the doc nonchalantly eats a sandwich over the body. Director Darrell Roodt throws us a curveball by making Dr. Joe the main character, and instead of the wacky or unflappable forensic pathologists we see in so many other movies, this doctor is tormented by the breakup of his marriage, the murdered bodies he examines, the political system in South Africa, and the nightmares that keep him up at night and on the streets searching for clues that will help his surly detective friend solve the crime. He's a heavy-hearted dude.

Joe has a lot of competing conflicts, and things get much worse when an imprisoned black activist is beaten to death by overzealous interrogators. The prime minister and two of his goons put relentless pressure on Joe to sign a death certificate stating that the activist died of a heart attack. Joe already has a reputation for being critical of apartheid, so the prime minister figures if the good doc signs off on the heart attack fabrication, the chance of violent protest decreases. Joe tells them all to stick it, and he fends off constant political intimidation while also trying to handle his job duties, manage his depression, covertly investigate the serial murders, navigate a romance with one of the sex workers, and deal with some supernatural weirdness that ties the ancient prologue to the present action.

Roodt keeps control of the varied elements, blending them into a consistent tone. Though the bulk of the film's second half veers closer to drama than horror, the unsettling feeling remains. There's a palpable sense of a political system nearing its end (though not quick enough to help our characters). Meanwhile, the shadow-world of the nightlife exists in its own separate universe, and the black and white populations are still mostly segregated. For a white director's movie about apartheid, City of Blood is surprisingly complex, with most of its characters walking a minefield of moral quandaries.

Darrell Roodt is one of the most successful and prolific South African filmmakers, and he occasionally works in Hollywood, though he mostly makes low-budget indies now. He's probably best known in the States for Sarafina!, with Whoopi Goldberg, Cry, the Beloved Country, with James Earl Jones and Richard Harris, Father Hood, with Patrick Swayze and Halle Berry, Dangerous Ground, with Ice Cube, and Winnie Mandela, with Jennifer Hudson and Terrence Howard. I haven't seen much of his work, but it looks like it varies widely in quality and production budget. He's not afraid of straight-to-video-style schlock or mainstream schmaltz, to put it mildly, and he's also covered nearly every genre. His other horror films include Dracula 3000, Cryptid, Prey, The Lullaby, and Lake Placid: Legacy.