Dr. Maxwell: “She makes a beautiful zombie doesn’t she?”
In 1942, RKO set up Val Newton as the head of their new horror division to produce low budget B movies. . . he promptly released Cat People with Jacques Tourneur directing (for more information, feel free to track down my review of the film from back in 2017). A massive critical and financial success, the very next year he reunited his team to release I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
This time bringing in the successful Universal The Wolf Man (1941) writer Curt Siodmak to come up with the premise (asked to loosely base it upon Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Inez Wallace’s original source material article), it was then reworked a bit by Newton and Ardel Wray into the finished product.
Somber and haunting, the story follows a Canadian nurse from Ottawa, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who has been hired to travel to the (fictional) Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to take care of the wife of plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway – Cat People).
His wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) is a mute shell of herself following a bout with tropical fever. Living on the massive estate along with Paul’s teetering on alcoholism younger half brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison – Charley’s Aunt), their frequently in town mother Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), as well as some servants, it does not take long for the nurse to hear of the family’s past of bringing in a slave population to work the fields.
With plenty of in-fighting between the brothers, Betsy quickly hears of the rumours swirling around about how Wesley and Jessica may have been planning on running away together right before she got sick. . . and that maybe Paul had something to do with her illness.
Further complicating Betsy’s job, eerie drum beats and chanting occurs each night due to the witchcraft and voodoo that the locals practice. Infrequently aided by Dr. Maxwell (James Bell – Dial 1119; Crime Wave) and in house servant Alma (Theresa Harris), one has to wonder if the Canadian nurse will be able to ignore the possible threats coming from both inside and outside of the abode.
As Betsy tries to settle in, she does start to fall for the rather formal and somewhat grim patriarch of the family, but also becomes a bit seduced by the superstitions of the island culture. Might her love for the man who is still married to the zombie-like Jessica complicate things? Could Betsy lean into the local witchcraft to try and save her patient? Is Jessica actually a zombie as rumoured? And is any of this hoodoo actually real?
Strikingly lit with strongly contrasting chiaroscuro lighting, I Walked with a Zombie sets an uncanny mood that lingers somewhere between life and death, with the seemingly cursed family (centered on Jessica) having a grim pallor that sits upon them and their estate. A haunting wind always seems to blanket the property which lingers on the edge of the plantation, meaning the island drums play an indelible tune that cannot be ignored. It doesn’t help that massive zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) lingers on the plantation, doing the bidding of the voodoo priest Vodou which means that he even sometimes wanders onto their property at night.
A melodramatic horror tinged poetic mood piece, I Walked with a Zombie, despite the exploitative title, is anything but. Deeply researched in its uses of voodoo, as well as cleverly integrating aspects of slavery (the garden statue that depicts Saint Sebastian that sits at the front of their property was once the figurehead of one of their slave ships and symbolically comes into play by the end), its loose basing upon “Jane Eyre” also adds more class. It is also worth highlighting the stunning poster art done to promote the film – for its popularity has never waned and still fetches at least 3000.00 dollars US at auctions to this day (see the original US one sheet movie poster to your right). So, no voodoo curse is needed to persuade you to watch this horror classic, its arrow certainly hits the mark.