''Zombies of Mora Tau'' (also known as ''The Dead That Walk'') is a 1957
black-and-white
Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey.
Media
The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
zombie
A zombie ( Haitian French: , ht, zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in w ...
horror film
Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes.
Horror films often explore dark subject matter and may deal with transgressive topics or themes. Broad elements include monsters, apoca ...
directed by
Edward L. Cahn
Edward L. Cahn (February 12, 1899 – August 25, 1963) was an American film director.
Early life and education
Cahn was born in Brooklyn, New York. He went to work at Universal Pictures in 1917 while still a student at UCLA.
Career
...
and starring Gregg Palmer, Allison Hayes and Autumn Russel. Distributed by
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the mu ...
, it was produced by
Sam Katzman
Sam Katzman (July 7, 1901 – August 4, 1973) was an American film producer and director. Katzman produced low-budget genre films, including serials, which had disproportionately high returns for the studios and his financial backers.
E ...
. The screenplay was written by
George H. Plympton
George H. Plympton (September 2, 1889 – April 11, 1972) was an American screenwriter. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
A prolific screenwriter, Plympton collaborated in almost 300 films. His earliest known credits date back to 1912 a ...
and Bernard Gordon. ''Zombies of Mora Tau'' was released on a
double bill
The double feature is a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatres would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.
Opera use
Opera ho ...
with another Katzman-produced film, ''
The Man Who Turned to Stone
''The Man Who Turned to Stone'' (a.k.a. ''The Petrified Man'') is a 1957 American black-and-white horror science fiction film directed by László Kardos and starring Victor Jory, Ann Doran and Charlotte Austin. The screenplay was written by B ...
'' (1957).
Plot
A team of deep sea divers, led by wealthy American tycoon George Harrison (Ashley), attempt to salvage a fortune in diamonds from the wreckage of a ship that had sunk 60 years earlier off the coast of Africa. When the team arrives, they discover that the ship is cursed and the diamonds are protected by the ship's undead crew, now
zombies
A zombie (Haitian French: , ht, zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in wh ...
, who are forced to guard the treasure until the diamonds are destroyed or the curse is finally lifted.
Cast
*
Gregg Palmer
Palmer Edwin Lee (January 25, 1927 – October 31, 2015), known by his stage name Gregg Palmer, was an American film and television actor.
Born in San Francisco, California, Palmer served in the United States Army Air Corps as a cryptographer i ...
as Jeff Clark
* Allison Hayes as Mona Harrison
* Autumn Russell as Jan Peters
* Joel Ashley as George Harrison
*
Morris Ankrum
Morris Ankrum (born Morris Nussbaum; August 28, 1897 – September 2, 1964) was an American radio, television, and film character actor.
Early life
Born in Danville, Illinois, Danville in Vermilion County, Illinois, Vermilion County in eastern ...
as Dr. Jonathan Eggert
*
Marjorie Eaton
Marjorie Lee Eaton (February 5, 1901 – April 21, 1986) was an American painter, photographer and character actress best known for physically portraying Emperor Palpatine in the original release of ''The Empire Strikes Back'', though her face ...
as Grandmother Peters
*
Gene Roth
Eugene Oliver Edgar Stutenroth (January 8, 1903 – July 19, 1976), known profesionally as Gene Roth, was an American film actor and film manager.
Early years
Roth was born in Redfield, South Dakota. He was the son of a German father an ...
as Sam, the chauffeur
* Leonard P. Geer as Johnny (as Leonard Geer)
*
Karl Davis
Karl Davis (January 17, 1962 – May 2, 1987) was an African-American fashion designer once called one of New York's most promising young designers. Davis had six major collections, the last shown at the Manhattan restaurant Caffe Roma.
Beginn ...
as Zombie
* William Baskin as Zombie
DVD release
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on DVD in October 2007 as part of a two-disc, four-film set of Katzman-produced films called ''Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman''. The set contains ''Zombies of Mora Tau'', '' Creature with the Atom Brain'', '' The Werewolf'' and ''
The Giant Claw
''The Giant Claw'' is a 1957 American monster film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Sam Katzman, directed by Fred F. Sears, that stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. Both Sears and Katzman were well known as low-budget B film genre filmmakers. ...
''.
Reception
David Maine of
PopMatters
''PopMatters'' is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. ''PopMatters'' publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, fi ...
rated the film 6 out of 10 stars and described it as "pretty entertaining overall, and enlivened immeasurably by Ms. Eaton’s feisty grandma". ''
TV Guide
TV Guide is an American digital media company that provides television program
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or t ...
'' rated it 2 out of 5 stars and called it "standard horror quality for grade-B films". Writing in ''The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia'', academic critic
Peter Dendle
Peter Dendle is a professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, teaching classes on folklore, 20th and 21st century representations of the Middle Ages, Old and Middle English (language and literature), and the monstrous (in film, folklore, and s ...
said, "This awkward and talentless movie is nonetheless surprisingly prescient in zombie film history, anticipating a number of motifs that would reappear in later decades". ''Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For'' author Arnold T. Blumberg wrote that the film is "a fun late-night creature feature, but it's prone to boring passages and a low-rent production quality that never allows it to break out of the B-movie mold", adding that the film is "almost single-handedly saved by the
Maria Ouspenskaya
Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya (russian: Мария Алексеевна Успенская; 29 July 1876 – 3 December 1949) was a Russian actress and acting teacher.Nissen, Axel. 2006. ''Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywoo ...
/
Celia Lovsky
Celia Lovsky (born Cäcilia Josefina Lvovsky, February 21, 1897 – October 12, 1979) was an Austrian-American actress. She was born in Vienna,
List of zombie films
Zombies are fictional creatures usually portrayed as reanimated corpses or virally infected human beings. They are commonly portrayed as anthropophagous in nature—labelling them as cannibals would imply zombies are still members of the human spe ...