I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) B/W 69m dir: Jacques Tourneur

w/Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones, Jeni le Gon

Canadian nurse Betsy (Dee) goes to the West Indies to attend to Jessica (Gordon), the catatonic wife of a rich American planter (Conway), and gets involved with voodoo. Sounds terrible, huh? Well, it's a gem. This film was produced by Val Lewton, a master at making wonderful films using not much money and with not very well-known actors.

From The Movie Guide: "I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE was the second in the series of thought-provoking, literate horror films produced by Val Lewton in the 1940s (the first was THE CAT PEOPLE [sic]), and under the masterful direction of Jacques Tourneur, it is an unqualified horror masterpiece. The story idea and title were borrowed from a series of newspaper articles that detailed voodoo and witchcraft practices in Haiti, hung on an off-the-wall adaptation of Jane Eyre! ...

"Lewton's horror was based on the suggested, the psychological --- not the visceral, tangible 'monsters' that characterized the Universal horror series in the 1930s and 40s. The terror was presented in a shadowy, low-key atmosphere that allowed the audience to imagine and feel the unease instead of showing it to them, making the chills much more effective. The most outstanding example of this approach here is director's Tourneur's beautiful realization of the lengthy, haunting, and elegiac sequence in which Betsy walks through the sugar cane fields with the silent Jessica to the voodoo ceremony. The scene is played in silence, save for the distant sound of drums and the gentle rustling of the wind. Visually, it is filled with gentle, floating movements --- of Jessica's white gown, of the sugar cane in the wind --- that are abruptly halted with the appearance of the massive zombie guard (Jones) whose presence signals the women's arrival at their destination. The scene is unforgettable, as is the entire film. Essential viewing."

Joel E. Siegel in his book on Lewton's career, The Reality of Terror, has this to say: "There are two Lewton masterworks: I Walked With a Zombie (visually the more eloquent and elegant) and The Seventh Victim (the more poetic and profound). Neither film employs a conventional narrative structure although the subjects, [respectively] voodoo and devil worship, are the stuff of traditional horror movies. For both these films, Lewton devised a fragmented, mosaic-like structure, a series of tiny, precise vignettes which do not so much tell the story as sketch in its borders and possibilities. This technique, in some ways similar to the way in which [Robert] Bresson 'tells' Au Hazard, Balthazar, transcends conventional narrative by establishing a number of tensions and possibilities which the audience must connect and interpret for itself. ... Much of the success of I Walked With a Zombie stems from Jacques Tourneur's extraordinarily sensitive direction. Of the Lewton directors, only Tourneur was of the first rank, able to realize the writer-producer's intricate vision. I Walked With a Zombie is probably the apex of Tourneur's career to date: certainly he never surpassed the visual poetry of the film's wordless sequences. Betsy's first, silent encounter with Jessica is a rather conventional scene which is more than redeemed by Tourneur's skillful handling. But the supreme visual achievement is the walk which the two women take to the Houmfort, the voodoo outpost where Betsy hopes to have Jessica cured. The episode begins with Alma, a servant, drawing a map for Betsy in cornmeal on a stone floor. From that point, the film becomes a symphony of graceful movement as the women, armed only with voodoo patches for identification, begin their journey through the reeds and the sugar cane."