Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a beautiful, young nurse, takes a job on the island of St. Sebastian in the West Indies to care for Jessica (Christine Gordon), the wife of a plantation owner (Tom Conway). Is the wife sick or is she a zombie, and will her cure come from medicine or voodoo?
A strange title, but a good film. Go back to a time before George Romero, before zombies were brain eating undead, but were creations of island voodoo, and you’ve reached I Walked With a Zombie. Val Lewton has become known as one of the great names in horror, and his 1940s RKO films are one of the three legs of classic movie horror (the others belonging to Universal and “poverty row”). Lewton always had to make the most of very little, so he went with subtlety. The studio was less concerned with art then quick money, so here handed him a title. He dumped the vague idea he was given, and matched that title to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. He kept the gothic romance, with a governess falling in love with a rich and troubled married man, but instead of a mad wife in the attic, there is an undead one.
Lewton’s films exist in an ambiguous never-never land. It’s never clear if it is magic and monsters or just the natural world. It is not a matter of clarity that brings ambiguity to judging that world, but rather that the world is both a thing of beauty and wonder and of dread and death. Often these things are the same. While this is a theme in all his films, it is clearer in I Walked With a Zombie than with any other.
A slight majority of Lewton fans and scholars place Cat People as the panicle of his career, but an only slightly lesser number, including me, label this his masterpiece. It does not pretend to be going for scares, but instead it is filled with an uncomfortable atmosphere. It is creepy. There are no cheap jump scares, but an eeriness and that stays with the viewer long after the film is over. It is poetic, subtle, and shares a writer with the classic 1941 The Wolf Man. The film also bears the mark of its director, Jacques Tourneur, who shared Lewton’s vision and had worked with him the year before on Cat People.
For such a low budget film, the acting couldn’t be better, the pacing is excellent, and occasional scenes could be plucked out, framed, and hung on the wall as art. There are few good voodoo films, and this is the best.