Review: I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

"I walked with a zombie...does seem an odd thing to say."

Was producer Val Lewton tweaking the noses of his bosses at RKO with this line of dialogue, the opening bit of narration spoke by Betsy (Frances Dee) in Lewton's second teamup with director Jacques Tourneur? Maybe so. But Lewton, Tourneur and screenwriters Curt Siodmak (who had written The Wolf Man for Universal) and Ardel Wray take the title that RKO gave them to work with (lifted from a magazine article) and create a lovely, poetic voodoo yard by way of Jane Eyre.

Young, beautiful Canadian nurse Betsy is hired to go to the island of St. Sebastian and take care of Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon, with one of the thinnest waists in the history of the silver screen), wife of sugar plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders). Sounds simple, doesn't it? But is it? Of course not. It never is. Jessica fell ill after trying to run off with Paul's alcoholic half-brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison). Calypso singer Sir Lancelot (who actually gets to play a Calypso singer in this movie, as opposed to a servant or a deckhand) helpfully sings a song detailing the whole sordid affair.

Paul is a brooding man, taking even the most placid scene and finding despair and morbidity in it. In a beautiful, foreboding monologue, he says to Betsy on the ship ride to St. Sebastian, "That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here...only death and decay." (Wesley later says that words are his half-brother's great weapon: "He uses them like other men use their fists.")

And then there's Jessica, who just stares blankly off into space, seemingly catatonic. Betsy suggests electroshock therapy to bring Jessica out of it, but it doesn't help matters any. But wait...what about those voodoo drums in the distance? If medical science can't cure Jessica, maybe native magic can! Then again, maybe not...

I Walked with a Zombie is, in many ways, different from any of the other eight horror pictures Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946. Its setting is far removed from the effective urban settings and empty streets of Cat People and The Seventh Victim and Tourneur makes good use of the modest tropical sets and allows the sounds of the island--the tropical breezes blowing through the sugar cane fields and the distant beat of voodoo drums (heard when Betsy leads Jessica-with-the-Thousand-Mile-Stare toward the native village in a desperate attempt to save her patient)--to take the place of Roy Webb's usual elegant musical score in spots to great effect.

But like all of the Lewton films, the most unnerving moments happen when characters are by themselves, when long, dancing shadows cast on walls or sounds piercing the pervasive darkness that seem to come from things darker still, take on greater weight. When the imagination--of the character in question or the viewer in the relative comfort of a theater or living room--can provide more horrific details to the mind open to such suggestion than all the latex appliances and computer-generated special effects in the world ever could.

That was what Lewton and his collaborators always did best: Help us scare ourselves.