Villain(s)  Zombies

Actor(s):  André Morell, Diane Clare, Brook Williams, Jacqueline Pearce

Brief Description  The Plague of the Zombies is a seminal 1966 Gothic horror film produced by Hammer Film Productions and directed by John Gilling. Set in 1860 in a remote Cornish village, the movie is historically significant as one of the last major "voodoo-style" traditional zombie films before George Romero redefined the genre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. It famously shifted the zombie archetype away from simple blank-eyed, hypnotized living people toward visually decaying, rotting corpses rising from their graves.

Plot:
The story begins in a small Cornwall village where a mysterious, fast-acting illness is killing the local working-class men. Local physician Dr. Peter Tompson is unable to diagnose or treat the disease. Desperate, he contacts his former medical mentor, Sir James Forbes, who travels to the village alongside his daughter, Sylvia. Upon arrival, Sir James and Peter decide to exhume the bodies of the recently deceased to conduct autopsies. They discover to their horror that every single coffin is empty. Meanwhile, Peter's wife, Alice, falls victim to the disease, dies, and is buried. That night, a distressed Peter wanders near the cemetery and experiences a terrifying, hallucinatory dream sequence where decaying corpses burst from the soil. He witnesses the freshly undead Alice rise from her grave, forcing Sir James to behead her with a shovel to release her soul.

Sir James tracks the roots of the crisis to the local aristocrat, Squire Clive Hamilton. During an extended stay in Haiti, the Squire became a practitioner of voodoo and black magic. Hamilton has been intentionally using voodoo curses to induce a death-like coma in the townspeople, burying them, and then resurrecting them. His ultimate goal is pure greed: he uses the unthinking, unfeeling zombie workforce as slave labor to operate his unsafe, defunct tin mine. In the climax, Sylvia is abducted by the Squire's cultists to be sacrificed in a voodoo ritual. Sir James and Peter track her to the underground tin mine. During a chaotic struggle, a fire is accidentally ignited within the voodoo sanctuary. The fire disrupts the Squire's magical control, causing the zombies to turn on their masters as the entire mine complex burns to the ground, saving Sylvia and freeing the village.