Zombie films first came to America in the 1940s. At this time of war anxiety, zombie films centered around mind control and invasion from afar. Themes like those in Revenge of the Zombies, in which a mad Nazi scientist, Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann (John Carradine), uses technology to secure power over Lila’s mind.

Lew Landers’ The Return of the Vampire (1943) plays almost like an Aesop’s fable told by the Grimm Brothers, set against a backdrop of wartime London. There is the typical Gothic villain, an occultist turned vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi); his reluctant henchman caught between good and evil; a religious and righteous force of good; an arc of moral redemption; and a bomb-ruined, foggy backdrop simmering with creeping vengeance.