In addition to being Dracula, Bela Lugosi was the villain in Hollywood's first zombie movie, the 1932 "White Zombie"

This is only one year after Dracula.

As he was in Dracula, Lugosi is the bright spot in "White Zombie." He is plausibly mezmorizing.

"White Zombie," in contrast to later zombie movies and especially to the post-Romero tradition, is set in and even explicitly about Haiti. The zombies are not contagious and they don't eat the flesh of the living. Instead, they're a pretty direct metaphor for slavery.

Lugosi's character is an evil sorcerer who abducts, murders, and hypnotizes his enemies to turn them into zombies who then work in his mill.

It's very explicit that he makes zombies partly for revenge but also as unpaid labour. They were once free living humans but are now labourers without control of themselves. Turning them into slaves denies them their humanity and even life.

And the threat of violence from zombies is the threat of a slave revolt. The movie is frightened of the zombies, but also largely on their side, because we want Lugosi to be punished.

The racial dynamics of "White Zombie" shouldn't be lost on anyone, of course. The specific horror of the plot is that this zombiism gets directed toward a white woman, and the subtext is that all of this is bad but ultimately acceptable when the victims aren't white.

The subtext of slavery and revolt, the sense that for some people to be dehumanized is more of a tragedy than it is for others, the connection of that tiered value system with race specifically, these are all themes that stay in zombie stories long after "White Zombie"

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Oh, one last thing in this thread: it's a crime how Universal mistreated Bela Lugosi. He shines in every role.