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A professor and his daughter (Andre Morell and Diane Clare) travel to a village in Cornwall to investigate a deadly epidemic only to discover the dead are crawling back to life! Hammer Films’ only zombie flick hits a lot of the same narrative beats as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with a secretive voodoo practitioner (John Carson) luring innocent victims to spill their blood and become his zombie slaves. But when the ‘plague’ claims his daughter’s best friend (Jacqueline Pearce), the professor endeavors to find the cause of the deadly phenomenon — before his daughter becomes the next victim.

The Plague of the Zombies takes a little while to unearth its title subjects, and once they arrive, they take second fiddle to Carson’s villainous character. But the zombies themselves look very nice with their pale eyes and crispy skin, especially in a dream sequence where they slowly claw their way out of the dirt. The mystery plot isn’t terribly engaging, but the film is arguably one of Hammer’s more visceral efforts and has a climax more thrilling than most, with our heroes trying to escape a tin mine full of flaming zombies.

Andre Morell (The Hound of the Baskervilles) is suave and confident in the leading role and John Carson is as good a baddie as Hammer Films ever conjured. The reasoning behind is evil scheme — using voodoo to turn the villagers into zombie slaves — is puzzling and underexamined, but it also invites some juicy, anti-capitalist commentary to the proceedings. Co-stars Brook Williams and Diane Clare are underwhelming, but Jacqueline Pearce is memorable as one of the story’s central victims. Her zombie resurrection and decapitation by shovel is one of the film’s highlights. It’s also fun to see Hammer regular Michael Ripper in another supporting role, this time playing a cop who tries to bust Morell and Williams for graverobbing.

It’s worth noting that this film predates George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the touchstone of the entire zombie sub-genre, by two years.

Directed by John Gilling. With Alex Davion as the leader of a fox hunting gang of men who kidnap Clare and almost succeed in gang-raping her, and another great score by James Bernard.