Black Moon (1934)

Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burges) is a dutiful and loving wife and mother, but she feels a call back to the island of her birth, back to the voodoo rituals in the jungle. She decides to take her young daughter and visit the plantation, currently run by her uncle, Raymond Perez (Arnold Korff). Her husband Stephen (Jack Hold) encourages her as he’s noticed that there is some past issues she needs to confront. Her uncle doesn’t want her to come, and sends a family friend to stop her, but he is murdered. This gets Stephen just concerned enough to send his secretary, Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray) with his wife, never noticing that Gail clearly has a crush on him. On the island, Juanita fits in immediately, but both her uncle and Gail are nervous. When the natives start having more and more influence over mother and daughter, Gail panics and sends a wire insisting that Jack come, which he does on a charter boat captained by ‘Lunch’ McClaren (Clarence Muse). What follows is voodoo and death.

There’s fewer voodoo films than pop culture seems to think there are, and when you eliminate zombies, you’re left with only a few. This is one of the better ones. It’s also complicated. I’ve seen it called extremely racist and I’ve seen it labeled the least racist film of the era. It has a strong feminist vibe while at other times promoting a very traditional family. The patriarchy is supported as it promotes survival, but also painted as creating a dull, passionless world hardly worth staying alive for. McClaren is black, but an equal to Stephen, with his own motivations and choices. Ruva may have been the nanny for a white girl, but she’s strong and has her own agency. The black natives are dangerous and carry out blood sacrifice, but colonialism is the evil that has caused much of the worlds racial unrest. Yeah, this one isn’t going to allow for any easy answers.

And that’s true of the plot and characters as well. The story meanders for a time, though it is never boring, and it could have gone any number of directions. It ends up going several places at once.

As for the characters, they are the heart of things. Juanita is the protagonist, though she gets less screen time than Gail, who may be the lead (her or Steven). Gail is pleasant, kind, hard working, and nearly obsessive with keeping children safe. Juanita is prickly and dangerous. And it’s Juanita I’d want to hang around. She’s fun, alive, and has depth. Gail is a pretty empty glass. There’s nothing to her. Outside of her drive for safety she’s passionless. You might not live as long with Juanita, but you might have never lived with Gail. They are opposite sides of life and of society.

Steven is given the chance to choose between them, not that he ever would as that wouldn’t be proper. He’s a good man. A steady man. A successful man. He loves his wife and daughter and is a far better father than your average 1930s movie businessman. It’s also clear that Steven is an idiot. He starts an “uprising” by shooting one guy (and not killing him) during a sacrifice. And then he leaves. How does this solve anything? They can still sacrifice the girl, but now they’re pissed. If he had some kind of plan, some idea of rushing in to save the girl, and whisking her away, or alternatively killing all the voodoo practitioners (if he had explosives or a machinegun, which he doesn’t), than he could claim the badge of hero. But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t save anyone. He just shoots. Now his intentions are good in that he’s opposed to human sacrifice and feels compelled to do something about it. That’s the thing with him; his intentions are always good. He’s even given a chance for an ultimate sacrifice that would absolutely save what he cares for most of all, and he says he’d do it, but of course when being more of a he-man pops up, off he goes. He just doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing because he’s a nice, pleasant, boring man.

Raymond Perez is our icon of colonialism and he’s easy to hate—although he is smarter and more self-aware then Steven. At one point our colonialist icon relates that there’s been 12 white people who’ve fallen into that pit, and all of them were interfering with the blacks. Maybe they should stop interfering. Maybe all these white folks ought to stop claiming someone else’s land and telling them how to behave, and instead get the hell out of there. When asked why he stays considering the danger, Uncle Raymond has no good answer. His people took it, and lived here and he’s not running away. He wants the power for no reason other than to have it. Am I reading too much into him to make him the villain instead the voodoo practitioners? Nope. In the source material it is spelled out even clearer with Raymond and Steven ending up chasing each other across the island in a gun fight. That sort of adventure has been removed from the film, but Raymond is still a villain. Of course it isn’t just Raymond, but the whole Perez line down through the years, and the result of that is clear. Raymond lives in the one nice building on the island, but it is fenced and barred, and as the film goes on, those bars can no longer keep anything out, but instead only keep him in.

There’s a strange feeling throughout this film, less frightening than eerie. This is another place, another time, and if you belong there, then it is a kind of paradise. But if you don’t belong, you should run far away as quickly as you can. Ruva and the voodoo priest and Juanita belong. Everyone else does not, and all the suffering comes because it takes everyone too long to figure that out. For a 1934 horror film, that’s a hell of a message.