Ouanga

Ouanga (1935)

Strange loves of queer people!

In Haiti, a black female plantation owner enacts a voodoo curse, and revives zombies for revenge on a white male neighbor, who has chosen a white woman over her for marriage.

Date of release
1935-12-03
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (6)
Runtime
56m
Genres
Horror
Director
George Terwilliger

Casting

Interesting facts

Ouanga, also advertised as The Love Wanga, is a voodoo-themed 1936 American film starring Fredi Washington. George Terwilliger wrote and directed the film. The film's themes include miscegenation and it features various racial stereotypes and portrays the people who practice voodoo as primitive. The movie is considered to be perhaps the second zombie film ever made after White Zombie.

Production

Ouanga is the second film to feature zombies, after the 1932 film White Zombie. Black actress Fredi Washington was cast to play the "tragic mulatto" role of Klili Gordon while white actor Sheldon Leonard was cast as LeStrange, the black man who looks over Adam's plantation.

It was planned for the production crew to hire dancers and drummers from Haiti, but the plan did not happen due to the papaloi, male voodoo priests, objecting and the director was threatened with a wanga placed in his car. The person in charge of props stole sacred objects including stuffed snakeskins and skulls for the film's production from Haiti.

The film was not released in the United States until 1942. Ouanga was remade into the 1939 film The Devil's Daughter to appeal to a black audience despite it being created by whites. The UCLA Film & Television Archive restored the film in 2015. On June 10, 2021, UCLA held a virtual screening of the restored film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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