I Walked With a Zombie (1943) marks Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's second collaboration. As usual, they enrich a chintzy B Movie set-up with remarkable depth and ambition. Zombie borrows its basic plot from, of all things, Jane Eyre. Nurse Betsy Connell (Francis Dee) arrives at the West Indian island of Saint Sebastian to treat comatose sugar heiress Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon). Her husband Paul (Tom Conway)seems more interested in wooing Betsy than curing his wife; Wesley Rand (James Ellis), Paul’s half-brother, a resentful drunk. Unable to cure Jessica, Betsy takes servant Alma’s advice (Theresa Harris) that the island’s voodoo rituals may hold a cure. Instead, the natives shun Jessica as a zombie, doomed to a living death in punishment for her family’s transgressions.
I Walked With a Zombie couches its horror as racial-colonial critique. Voodoo is the defense mechanism of an oppressed culture; Saint Sebastian's natives use it both as unifying cultural touchstone and defiance to the sybaritic, exploitative whites. Their subversive unity contrasts with the Holland family's tawdry melodrama, from Sir Lancelot's troubadour mocking Paul to a St. Sebastian figurehead pierced with arrows. If Lewton typically treats superstition as humanity's Achilles heel, it's no more destructive than mundane pettiness.
Lewton and Tourneur reprise Cat People's horror by inference, cast in suggestive shadows and half-believed myths. Jessica's somnambulism seems psychological rather than magic, destroyed by family guilt and betrayal from her faithless husband. Yet zombified reality bleeds into the story, from Darby Jones' bug-eyed factotum or a creepy climax involving a voodoo doll. Ultimately, privilege and power can't save the Hollands from supernatural vengeance or their own frailty.
Francis Dee struggles to rationalize events while growing engrossed in the island soap opera; she's endearingly sweet and smart. Tom Conway plays an agreeably charming cad, with Sir Lancelot stealing his scenes as a cheeky singer. Other players act with varying degrees of broadness; Theresa Harris and Edith Barrett give fine turns, but James Ellis overplays his drunken jerk.
Casual viewers wouldn't think a movie entitled I Walked With a Zombie to be any good. Credit Lewton and Tourneur yet again for transcending their budget and genre with a remarkably spooky chamber piece.
