I Walked with a Zombie

The basic plot: A Canadian nurse arrives at the isle of St. Sebastian to take care of a plantation owners mentally entranced and disturbed wife, but once she get's there, she learns more than she should about the family secrets, voodoo , and zombie fever......

The praise: A truly poetic, hypnotizing, and creepy film experience. The poetry of the island traditions, the family mysteries and everything else about the movie is truly evocative and sensitive. There are smatterings of spooky moments throughout, all frightening suggestively, using sound , imagery and implied chills. All classically and romantically constructed and written, a flagon of longing, taste, and character in every little detail. Well-shot, especially the impressive voodoo ceremony. Very atmospheric, with black& white used to enhance the mood, as in all Lewton movies. Watch for calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who Lewton also used in " Curse of the Cat People", an equally poetic movie, which I also have reviewed. A masterpiece of the horror film, it has many scenes which take together the essential elements of suspense and atmosphere , sound and imagery , such as Dee traveling to the voodoo ceremony. A must-see. Very hard-to-find. The only way I could find it was to order a copy of an unauthorized copy of it from Canada.Truly great.

Director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton are noted for their more cerebral forays into the horror genre and this is one of the finest of their partnership. The basic story centers around voodoo in the islands and the real or imagined effects it has on one particular family. I never know whether Tom Conway is a good, low-key actor or not an actor at all but here he does a passable job as the tortured husband. Frances Dee is sweet as the nurse who gets entangled in the family problems and tries to help to no avail. Although Christine Gordon says not a word during the whole film, her image and unusual beauty is haunting. Edith Barrett, an actress who was pitifully under used in film, is outstanding as the mother who plays a rather surprising role. The whole film is based on atmosphere and great cinematography....it is chilling without showing much, therefore leaving a lot to the imagination. There is no violence,no special effects and no gore but it will hold you in suspense just the same. The choice of title is unfortunate (but so was "I Married a Monster from Outer Space" which was also a good film). I rate this movie as one of the Tourneur/Lewton masterpieces and highly recommend it to all lovers of the genre.

Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is employed by wealthy Paul Holland (Tom Conway) to take care of his catatonic wife Jessica in the West Indies. It is never said exactly where in the West Indies this is, but it is mentioned that there is a strong presence of voodoo on the island.

Betsy is told by Jessica's doctor that Jessica has been this way since she had a bad case of a tropical fever, and the catatonia was the aftermath. Jessica can walk and follow simple commands, but she is mute and doesn't seem to comprehend what is going on around her.

Betsy gets to know both her boss Paul, who is a joyless curmudgeon who proves to be secretly sensitive, as well as his brother Wesley, who is outwardly charming but dangerously embittered. But it's the permanently unavailable Paul whom she grows to love. When a voodoo-believing servant tells Betsy that voodoo has the power to cure Jessica, Betsy takes Jessica to the voodoo encampment to see if they can cause her to reclaim her sanity. Complications ensue.

The film is for sure atmospheric, like all of the entries from Val Lewton during this time period. That atmosphere includes lumbering women in billowing long white gowns, tall stone staircases, and high gray ceilings. A great sense of unease runs through the veins of this movie from start to finish.

What did I not like? Character development is very abbreviated. And the locals who inhabit the island seem more like they are sporting the accent of the blacks of the American south than the West Indies. Plus the explanation of events is delivered in just a couple of sentences at the end and left me very unsatisfied - Show me, don't tell me! But then this was meant to be a 70-minute RKO quickie, not a horror classic, so it is remarkable that with such a small budget it has managed to have such staying power over the years. I'd recommend it.

The film opens with Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) being interviewed for a home-care nursing position. Oddly, she's asked during the interview if she believes in witchcraft. She gets the position, working for Paul Holland (Tom Conway), who is a wealthy plantation owner on the Caribbean island of St. Sebastian. Holland has hired her to take care of his wife, Jessica (Christine Gordon), who is in a perpetual state that resembles somnambulance. As Betsy spends more time on the island, she learns that most of the population believes in and practices voodoo, and she learns that Jessica had a relatively tumultuous past with Holland's family.

This was director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton's second horror/thriller collaboration (the first being Cat People (1942) and the third The Leopard Man (1943)). For many viewers, it is their favorite of the three. While I like the film, I don't like it quite that much--I prefer Cat People. But still, I Walked With A Zombie ends up with a 7 out of 10 from me.

The horror aspects of I Walked With A Zombie are really very minor. They're really present only as a kind of personification of the results of complicated romantic and familial relationships. Yes, there is an admirable "haunted house"-styled scene involving a spooky stairway and creepy, distant sounds, and yes, the trek to the voodoo "home fort" is well done, but this kind of material doesn't work as well for me here as it did in Cat People, because here it's not really the focus of the story. It's ancillary material with the function of helping to solve a very different kind of mystery. Also, much of the voodoo material (such as the actual ceremony) tends to be overrated in my opinion, although the final sequence related to the voodoo theme is appropriately eerie.

But what works best for me in I Walked With A Zombie are the many dialogue-heavy scenes where the three main characters--Connell, Holland and Wesley Rand (James Ellison)--gradually learn more about one another, and where the "mystery" is gradually uncovered. A scene where a local "minstrel" sings part of the backstory while Connell and Rand are having a drink is exquisite, for example. Yet, even with this positive aspect, I never felt that the backstory was sufficiently explained. The mystery remains, and the moralizing bookends of the film do not help, either.

Still, I Walked With A Zombie is definitely worth a watch, and based on the extravagant praise that many viewers utter towards the film, you might like it much better than I do.

There are a lot of terrific elements in this movie. It is moody and atmospheric, subtly ominous, and like many Lewton movies leaves its supernatural elements ambiguous.

But the most unusual thing aspect from a 1940s movie is how it treats black people. First off, note that the West Indies natives don't speak in either the "yass ma'am" or "ooga booga" styles that represented the entire spectrum of black portrayals in the U.S. at the time. They talk in slightly accented, but perfectly normal English.

Also, the movie specifically mentions the slave industry at least twice. There is a wonderful scene near the beginning in which the main character discusses the island's history with her driver. He mentions they were brought here in chains and she says, well at least they brought you to a beautiful place. "If you say so," he says, very politely

That is such an awesome exchange. He is a servant and he's not going to argue with her, but he also won't kowtow. It is a conversation you can actually believe would happen.

The movie also shows surprising respect for the Voodoo aspects. The natives believe in it, but they aren't mocked for it, and in the ceremony they do actual African dance, instead of some weird Hollywood fakery.

The movie, again typical of Lewton, has a lovely complexity to it. Characters are more than they appear to be, and their motives are not simple.

It's not a perfect movie. Some of the acting is less than stellar and I suspect some explanatory scenes were cut, as it sometimes feels rushed and slightly disconnected. But it is not to be missed.