I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

• Directed by Jacques Tourneur
• Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, based on an article by Inez Wallace
• Starring
  • James Ellison
  • Frances Dee
  • Tom Conway
  • Edith Barrett
  • James Bell
• Produced by Val Lewton

I Walked With a Zombie didn’t exactly come hard on the heels of White Zombie (1932), and there were other movies in the interim which dealt with the living dead, but those are the two movies which more or less cemented the image of the motion picture zombie for decades, pretty much up until Night of the Living Deadchanged everything in 1968. Kids these days, they don’t even remember a time when zombies weren’t rotten, when they followed orders, when they didn’t fondle and munch rubbery intestines.

They also probably don’t remember a time when a movie could be classified as “horror” which was essentially a melodrama with some few macabre touches. I Walked With a Zombie is an important piece of film history, but don’t run it as part of your Halloween movie marathon; people are liable to either complain or fall asleep.

“No handrail? How did this ever pass Code?”

The confessional tone of the title blends well with the opening voiceover, as Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) admits that, yes, she did walk with a zombie. How did it happen? Well, she’ll tell you…

Betsy is a Canadian nurse who takes the assignment to go to the West Indies island of St. Sebastian to care for a sugar plantation owner’s sick wife. When she gets there, she discovers that a) the plantation owner is one Paul Holland (Tom Conway), Britain-educated scion of the family that originally settled the island with African slaves; b) Holland’s younger half-brother, America-educated Wesley Rand (James Ellison), is charming but drinks heavily; and c) Fort Holland, the ancestral home, is a courtyward built on a soundstage with an ever-present wind machine that helps disguise its interior character.

Sure, it’d be simpler just to use a normal scarecrow, but the zombies have a good union.

As she also discovers the first night, Holland’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) is a beautiful, ethereal figure who lolls about motionless unless commanded to do simple actions – but who occasionally sleepwalks, eyes sunken and unblinking, and waits by the gate to the outside. She is, Betsy is told, the victim of a tropical fever which has shorted out her conscious mind and willpower.

Of course a modern audience immediately figures out what the movie tries to save for a late reveal, that Jessica is a zombie, but I think even a contemporary audience would have been several steps ahead of the script. The movie’s called I Walked With a Zombie, after all, and while zombie films weren’t as swing-an-undead-cat common in 1943, moviegoers still had a half-dozen movies under their belts to familiarize them with the dead-eyed, soulless servants who show up in Caribbean sugar plantations.

Note that, even in the middle of a voodoo frenzy, the drummers still have their neckties done up to the top button.

But that’s okay, because the movie doesn’t so much spend its time trying to keep us from guessing ahead as jump with both feet into melodrama. For no apparent reason, Betsy and Holland start falling for each other. Meanwhile, Wesley (who, being both single and charming, is by rights the proper target for Betsy’s affections) is revealed to have been secretly in love with Jessica, and had almost persuaded her to come away with him when the “fever” struck. Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Brand (Edith Barrett, who was only three years older than the actor playing her son), works at the dispensary with the island’s doctor and tries to keep her family together. A long side note: Betsy learns most of this when a local singer in the village (Sir Lancelot, the legendary calypso singer) sings a song about the Hollands’ travails with the repeated chorus, “Ah woe, ah me / Shame and scandal in the family.” Sir Lancelot wrote the song for the movie, but sometime thereafter the tune and chorus were appropriated for a humorous calypso-folk song about rampant infidelity in Trinidad. (“He found a girl who treated him nice / So he went to his papa to ask his advice / His papa said, ‘Son, I gotta say no / ’Cause the girl is your sister but your mama don’t know.’”) This is the version that I was familiar with before I saw the movie, and I can’t get through this mildly ominous scene of music-borne exposition without a little giggle.

Don’t you appreciate it when I warn you that I’m about to go off on a tangent? I’ll try to do it more often.

“No, I’m not sweating like a stuck pig in this wool suit here on a Caribbean island. Why do you ask?”

The centerpiece of the soap opera is when Betsy hears enough about the voodoo powers available on the island and, despite Mrs. Rand’s attempts to dissuade her, takes Jessica by night through the cane fields toward the homfort, the sacred space where the blacks dance and chant and drum into the night, to see if the houngan can cure her. Most of what makes this scene so memorable is Carrefour (Darby Jones), a tall and skinny black man who is, I suppose, a zombie himself, with his unblinking prosthetic eyes bugging out (which would also explain his slow, shuffling pace). He defined the role of the Caribbean zombie so well that he appeared again in Zombies on Broadway (1954), playing an identical zombie under the control of mad scientist Bela Lugosi.

It’s in scenes such as these, where the dreamlike atmosphere of the sets and cinematography and minimal music take over, that I Walked With a Zombie really excels. The soap opera parts are very Jane Austenesque, and a look backwards from the vantage point of the closing credits reveals plot holes the size of Horta tunnels. “Wait – if she was… but why… Gaah!”

“I wonder how much this would go for on eBay?”

Nevertheless, the movie and its reputation survives on the atmospherics and details of setting. The black islanders all seem a happy sort, until you discover how well they keep in memory their beginnings as slaves; they cry at births and laugh at funerals, and they seem to take great delight in following the sordid goings-on of their patron Holland clan. The voodoo ceremonies go far beyond the usual “boogah-boogah” antics ascribed to those labeled “primitive” (producer Val Lewton hired a consultant to get it right); the jerky, fevered dancing of those caught up in the drum dance are startlingly alien to WASPish ideas of worship, and the precise, sinuous movements of the sabre dancer (the houngan’s ritual assistant, perhaps?) fill his silent gestures with import – especially when those gestures are aimed toward a small blonde doll that represents Jessica.

If this is a classic, it’s a minor one, with too much soap opera mixed in with the horror to be entirely effective at either. But for one or two scenes, it fills the audience with a sense of dreamlike dread that’s uncommon in any horror film, then or now.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0