žižek archive
archive / stories / White Zombie: Bela Lugosi's zombie plantation workers

White Zombie: Bela Lugosi's zombie plantation workers

example · film: White Zombie · retold in 3 talks

In the 1932 film White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a plantation owner whose factory workers are all zombies, living dead who work without trade union rights, illustrating the class dimension of horror monsters.

2014: 1 talk 2017: 2 talks
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026

As told 3

“It's wonderful, they just work, they have no trade union rights and so on.”
“It's wonderful, zombies just work, no trade unions, no demands”
“They never demand any workers' rights, you don't have any problems with work hours... they just work and work and work.”

What it carries

one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)

Its cast and sources

populated by
alongside works

Every retelling 3

In the 1932 film White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a plantation owner whose factory workers are all zombies, living dead who work without trade union rights, illustrating the class dimension of horror monsters., illustrating vampires/zombies and class,ideology of horror
Early Hollywood film White Zombie (Bela Lugosi) features a factory owner who uses zombie workers: no trade unions, no demands, they endure torture and go on working, illustrating the class structure embedded in undead mythology., illustrating obscene immortality,class struggle in the undead,undead subjectivity
In the 1932 Bela Lugosi film, he plays a sugar factory owner who uses zombies as his workforce and boasts to visitors that they never demand workers' rights, health conditions, or trade union rights, they just work. The film is so openly about class exploitation that it was censored two years later., illustrating vampires vs. zombies as class struggle,pre-Code Hollywood,labor and capital