Ouanga (1934)

The second zombie movie ever, following White Zombie (1932), Ouanga is mostly known — if it is known at all — for the horrible real life-story of the filmmakers going to Haiti to observe actual voodoo ceremonies, but offending the natives. From that moment, the movie was plagued with bizarre production problems. Two men died. Eventually, the film was shot in Jamaica. This intriguing story may have had its origins in Turner/Price’s Forgotten Horrors (1979); Sheldon Leonard’s autobiography And the Show Goes On (1995) added more juicy details. Surely the trades and the popular magazines of the day would have had a field day with such a dramatic story?

(Edit 2021: Thanks to splendid research done by Emiel Martins for The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’, I have since learned that the crew apparently did try to shoot in Haiti — though the sensationalistic accounts appear to be, at least, somewhat exaggerated. Martins’ article, which quotes contemporary accounts from the Jamaica Gleamer, is highly recommended.)

The Film Daily from September 23, 1933, calmly tells us:

A production unit under the supervision of William Saal will sail Sept. 28 for Jamaica to make “Ouanga,” a feature dealing with voodoo. Fredi Washington, prominent Negro actress, will be starred in it. George Terwilliger is the director and Carl Berger is cameraman. A full RCA sound crew, including 31 in all, and three tons of equipment are going along.

And on November 15, 1933, the Film Daily announced the return of the crew “from Jamaica”. No word of Haiti. No words of curses and corpses.

Only in February 1934, a Photoplay feature (“Drums in the Jungle”, by Henry A. Phillips) starts playing the spooky angle. It makes for charming reading even while sounding phony as hell:

“If you want to get a turn, just look at the Big Dipper turned upside down in the heavens,” observed Winnie Harris. “Things are all wrong out here, I tell you. That old woman witch doctor who says she is two hundred years old has been giving me dirty looks all evening.”

So what actually happened? Perhaps we’d be safer off if we’d just watch the film.

We start with a short travelogue: Look how idyllic the West Indies are, the narrator tells us… at least by day, because at night,

seemingly from everywhere comes the throbbing, pulsating beat of the voodoo drums… drums… drums…

and all of a sudden we’re in the middle of a voodoo ceremony in which Clelie Gordon (Fredi Washington) looks snazzy while a protective ouanga is wrapped around her: “Shall I lose it, may evil and death come upon me.” Good old foreboding!

It’s a neat intro: Terwilliger and/or cameraman Carl Berger create intriguing images, the voodoo music is great and the change of scene to an ocean steamer, announced by a nonchalant intertitle, is pleasantly straightforward: We cut right to Clelie, clearly pissed-off, watching as Adam, the white son of a plantation owner, makes out with a white woman conveniently named Eve.

Indeed, Ouanga is one of the earliest mixed-race love stories of US cinema, hot on the heels of Imitation of Life (1933), also starring Fredi Washington. Clelie confronts Adam, and some remarkably frank dialogue makes it clear that Clelie was a pleasant affair (“you were wonderful during those two lonely years, and I loved you immensely”), but “the barrier of blood that separates us can’t be overcome”. No self-denigration (“Oh, I’ll be your slave, anything!”) will change his mind: Adam will marry Eve.

The film’s “Stay with your own kind” message is rather stunningly offensive today: Every character accepts it as a law of nature that black and white simply cannot have true relationships with each other — everyone, that is, apart from transgressive tragic heroine Clelie who has to resort to black (!) magic and is doomed to fail anyway. The film doesn’t even feel the need to argue for its thesis, apparently regarding it as a self-evident truth.

Fredi Washington herself, in 1945, made her position on the matter clear:

“You see I’m a mighty proud gal and I can’t for the life of me, find any valid reason why anyone should lie about their origin or anything else for that matter. Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons, if I do I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior and that I have swallowed whole hog all of the propaganda dished out by our fascist-minded white citizens.”

Luckily, a comic relief butler and maid show up, and the script actually knows what to do with these characters without annoying us.

We arrive in Haiti, and there is a magnificent wide shot of the harbor. (Every few minutes, the film breaks out of its low budget rut to serve us a moment of eloquence, even beauty, as if to say: “Look, it’s not as if we were hacks!”)

LeStrange, the supervisor of Adam’s farm, argues with Clelie who insists “If I can’t have him, nobody will!” LeStrange, a black man, is played by Jewish-born Sheldon Leonard — in his film debut, long before he became a reliable gangster actor, successful TV producer and posthumous namesake for the main characters of The Big Bang Theory — without the aid of any make-up. He is quite awful.

But while we’re still trying to digest Leonard’s performance, once again the movie surprises us, this time with a fluid sequence cross-cutting between a voodoo ceremony and a “white” party, complete with an integrated flashback. Then again, there are dialogue scenes as stiff as in any early 1930ies film, but at least they lead us to a scene of Clelie rising two zombies from their graves through energetic gyrations.

And Eve, having barely escaped death by voodoo, keeps hearing the drums… drums… drums… and then Eve’s aunt announces: “I came out of the house just in time to see two hulking negroes making away with Eve!” Clelie inspects the hypnotized Eve (“a placid white-blooded thing like you to make Adam happy?”) and prepares to sacrifice her…

Ouanga’s basic attitude is less that of a horror movie than of a regular thriller, a fact underlined by stock music, which, while generally well-chosen, emphasizes action rather than atmosphere. But while one might lament lost possibilities — there is nothing quite as disturbing in Ouanga as Lugosi’s relationship to Robert Frazer in White Zombie, and the briefly seen zombies themselves are an unimpressive couple — , there is something to be said for the film’s refreshing attitude: It simply, without making a great fuss about it, accepts it as a given that voodoo magic is real. Even Adam, initially skeptical, simply and quietly revises his attitude after having been presented with proof.

While Ouanga is often creaky and feels older than it is (due to its racist ideology, the technical problems inherent in location shooting and some embarrassingly bad acting — Terwilliger either gave his actors no direction at all, or perhaps he felt silent movie-style acting to be the appropriate approach), there is a flow to the film, and some stylistic subtleties are served as if they were nothing special. Terwilliger’s IMDB filmography lists 81 director credits; that Ouanga was his last film (and only sound film; other projects failed to materialize) is to be regretted: One wonders what he might have done under more favorable conditions. (The all-black The Devil’s Daughter (1939) credits Terwiliger with “original story”; however there is little actual similarity to Ouanga.)

A co-production with Paramount’s international arm, designed as a UK quota quickie, Ouanga was first shown in Great Britain, with the length given as 6.148 ft (68 min); the BBFC had demanded two cuts:

Part 4 Delete voodoo Ceremony and Clelie invoking curses
Part 8 Delete shot of Le Strange strangling Clelia

In the U.S., it was announced as Crime of Voodoo in 1936 and later was shown as Love Wanga (1941, with several re-issues). According to Variety, the Hays Office had reduced a “cooch” “to little more than a distant flash”. (Variety gave the film’s length at 61 minutes — the surviving print runs 56 min.)
In any incarnation, critical attention was scant and abrasive:

The Observer: “A macabre exhibit from the West Indies, which touches, probably, a ‘new low’ in horror films.”

Picturegoer: “extremely crudely produced and badly acted”

Variety: “This quickie meller about black magic, zombies and a Love Wanga charm is amateurish in many respects. (…) Production is badly lighted, photographed, acted and directed. Sound is so blurred many lines are barely audible. (…) Colored players are not too bad but woefully lacking in need of direction.”

Bryan Senn, in Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema, closes his chapter on the film:

… the off-screen narrator unwittingly provides a moment of high camp. Over the image of a silly-looking voodoo doll, he solemnly intones: “Wanga, wanga, that’s voodoo!” Ouanga, Ouanga, that’s awful!