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| A chilling poster for Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie |
A young, resourceful nurse gets hired in a job as a personal nurse for a woman on a plantation in the West Indies. As our nurse heroine learns more of the tragedy-torn family and the superstitious local population, she suspects that the woman's strange trance state might have an unmedical cause ...
I Walked with a Zombie is the second horror film from producer Val Lewton and great French director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People (1942), both) for RKO Radio Pictures.
The sensationalist title was forced upon the duo from the studio's executives and is not representative of the subtle, intelligent and nuanced movie they made. The film journeys to the tropic island along with its protagonist with a scientific mind, but finds itself caught up in the place's nasty cobwebs of decay and tragedy and probes the beliefs of the locals with an open mind. This progression on the part of both heroine and film as such is simultaneously fascinating and disturbing.
The script is layered and filled with great dialog, one of several fine works by the great German writer Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man (1941)), co-writing with Ardel Wray (Isle of the Dead (1945)), who took over after Siodmak left. It is based on an American Weekly Magazine article by Inez Wallace, optioned by RKO, which Lewton disliked and therefore made the writers inspire the film's structure with Charlotte Brontë's classic novel Jane Eyre (1847) instead.
I Walked with a Zombie is one of the oldest zombie movies, (although preceded by pictures like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), if you allow that it can count as a zombie film, and White Zombie (1932)), and SPOILER it does not include the meat-munching element that is essential to zombie movies of later decades.
The details:
The film appears in great condition on modern copies, and its slight but atmospheric and neat production stands out in J. Roy Hunt's (Syncopation (1942)) fine photography.
Among the cast, who all give dense performances, Frances Dee (Of Human Bondage (1934)) as Betsy the nurse and Tom Conway (Blood Orange (1953)) as her romantic interest, the gloomy Paul Holland, whose wife may be the victim of a local voodoo magic spell, should be singled out. They both drive the film forward without discords.
Sir Lancelot (The Buccaneer (1958)), who was himself a musician from the West Indies, appears as the local calypso singer in the film and enjoyed quite a hit subsequently with the fateful Shame and Scandal in the Family, which he wrote for the film. It became a #1 hit in Australia, although Lancelot was sometimes deprived of his credit for it.
At just 69 minutes, I Walked with a Zombie is a condensed horror feature, but an oppressing, intriguing one in any case, and one that can be seen over and over again.
Watch the original trailer for the film here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertainty
[But following the surprise success of Lewton/Tourneur's preceding Cat People (1942), RKO decided to rent their follow-up out to theaters not on the flat rate that was customary for low budget genre films, but against a percentage payment, which was the norm for 'A pictures', (larger studio productions). This does not reveal, however, whether or not I Walked with a Zombie was also commercially successful, although it seems likely. The critics of its day seem to have spited it, and it has only since become reevaluated critically as the great film that it is.]
What do you think of I Walked with a Zombie?
What other films by Lewton, Tourneur and/or other cast and crew members would you recommend?
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