I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
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- Synopsis:
- Betsy Conell (Frances Dee), a young nurse, accepts a job in a sugar plantation at San Sebastian, in the Antilles, where she will have to take care of the powerful landowner Paul Hollands wife (Christine Gordon), who suffers a mysterious illness that condemns her to a vegetal life. The exoticism and beauty of the place charm Betsy. But the dark past around the mansion that affects Holland (Tom Conway) as well as his stepbrother Wesley Rand (James Ellison), both are in love with Betsy, will change the course of her placid life, affected by the local superstition, the voodoo rites and the each time more guilty verification of the existence of zombies.
- Actors:
- Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones, Jeni Le Gon
- Directors:
- Jacques Tourneur
- Writers:
- Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray
- Genres:
- Classics, Horror
- Collections:
- A History of Films Inspired by Magazine Articles
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Reviews (1) of I Walked with a Zombie
Lewton Horror. - I Walked with a Zombie review by Steve
With Cat People not yet released, producer Val Lewton was given another lurid title by the bosses at RKO and told to make a horror based on a magazine article about voodoo. But Lewton took as his premise the idea of making 'Jane Eyre in the Tropics'.
Frances Dee plays a nurse who leaves the snows of Canada to work in San Sebastian in the Caribbean. She cares for Jessica, the insentient wife of a sugar plantation owner (Tom Conway). The doctor says Jessica suffered a disease like meningitis. Her maid says she was made into a zombie by a voodoo ceremony. On this island, science and the occult have become entwined.
I Walked With a Zombie is a work of unusual imagination. The dramas in the family before the nurse arrives are not revealed through exposition, but in a calypso. There are so many eerie, unforgettable images; like the night walk through the plantation with the vision of the gaunt zombie-guardian of the cross-path. The script is poetically sensitive to human suffering. The film is as mournful as a spiritual hymn.
What is most unusual and profound about I Walked With A Zombie is the depiction of the local people, the heirs of the shame and despair of slavery. There was nothing equivalent to this in 1940s Hollywood. The film is relentlessly sorrowful; a sad/beautiful vision of characters who always feel like they are about to be swallowed up in the shadows.