I Walked With a Zombie (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Seventh Victim TCM reached back two films in the Lewtonian canon and showed I Walked with a Zombie, which director Jacques Tourneur described as “a horrible title for a very good film -- the best film I’ve ever done in my life.” It began as a magazine article by Inez Wallace that was simply a travel piece about going to Haiti, but RKO studio head Charles Koerner saw box-office gold in that thar title and bought the rights to it even though the piece was basically unfilmable. Lewton, Tourneur and writers Curt Siodmak (a surprising name to see on the credits of a Lewton film since he had written The Wolf-Man and many of the other Universal horrors Lewton was setting himself up against) and Ardel Wray decided to make it a knockoff of Jane Eyre relocated to the West Indies. (Ironically, when Jean Rhys wrote her 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre, The Wide Sargasso Sea, she set it in the West Indies and made Antoinette Rochester, the mad wife, a half-Black Creole.) The opening scene takes place in winter in Canada -- we can see that because snow is falling outside the office where nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is being interviewed for a new job -- and she agrees to take it but is somewhat taken aback when she learns it’s going to be nursing the mentally ill wife of a plantation owner in the West Indies. (Well, at least it’ll get her away from all that snow.) She meets the man who, as yet unbeknownst to her, is going to be her employer, Paul Holland (Tom Conway), when she’s approaching the island on a sailing ship (itself a marvelous symbol of her heading to a job with people obsessed with their pasts) and he tells her all the ugliness and cruelty behind the superficial beauty of the place.

It turns out the Hollands have been running a sugar plantation on this island for at least two centuries and they originally made their fortune on slave labor. It’s amazing enough that a Hollywood movie made just three years after Gone With the Wind tells us up-front that slavery was evil and there was nothing noble or romantic about it -- no wonder Val Lewton didn’t want David Selznick to make Gone With the Wind! -- but the racial politics of I Walked With a Zombie get even farther ahead of their time than that. As she works into her job Betsy encounters not only Paul but his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison, top-billed -- and for someone who looked like an empty suit in the Busby Berkeley musical The Gang’s All Here it’s a surprise to see him give a rich performance as a complex character under Lewton’s and Tourneur’s auspices!) and their mother (Edith Barrett). Paul explains that “Mrs. Rand” (her only identification in the character list) first married his planter dad and then, after the senior Holland died, married the local missionary and had Wesley -- who’s grown up to be a self-hating drunk. From various sources, including a calypso song written for the film and sung by a performer named “Sir Lancelot” (and later recorded in the late 1950’s by the great African-American woman folksinger Odetta) called “Shame and Scandal,” Betsy learns that Wesley tried to hit on Paul’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon), and the night he tried her to run away with him was the night she went crazy.

Torn between her own growing love for Paul and her belief that restoring Jessica to sanity will make him happy, Betsy first tries the services of a Western doctor, Dr. Maxwell (James Bell), on the island and then,when his “insulin shock” treatment fails (the idea was to use insulin to induce a coma and then shock her back into consciousness and hopefully into sanity). Then, on the advice of her servant Alma (Theresa Harris), she goes to the voodoo hougan to see if their magic will work where Western medicine has failed. The titular walk with a zombie takes place among tall, slender, strikingly lit sugar cane and features Betsy taking Jessica to the voodoo camp, led by the tall Black guide Carrefour (Darby Jones), who when we first see him is standing so still we think he’s a statue and only later, when he moves, do we realize he’s a living person. Though the voodoo ceremony depicted in I Walked with a Zombie is probably not that authentic, it’s done with a lot more sensitivity, taste and cultural respect than Hollywood’s norm for depicting non-Abrahamic religions at the time. The voodoo congregation is composed of serious people who hold down jobs (albeit as servants) elsewhere on the island and are not the sorts of primitive Black savages that earlier films like Roy William Neill’s Black Moon (1934) did. (When Charles and I saw Black Moon I said it was probably the most openly racist movie Hollywood had made since The Birth of a Nation -- and that’s not just 21st century hindsight either: in 1934 the Motion Picture Herald warned owners of theatres with large Black clienteles not to show it.)

One of the things I most admire about Lewton is his extraordinary sensitivity towards people of color -- I remember how shocked I was when I saw Sir Lancelot appear in a 1943 Dick Powell musical at Paramount called Happy-Go-Lucky and saw him cast as the typical stupid shuffling servant stereotype, a far cry from the way Lewton used him here and again in The Curse of the Cat People (where he’s a servant but one who’s emotionally part of the family and is treated with dignity and honor) -- which perhaps came from his own childhood and his feelings of isolation. I Walked with a Zombie is one of Lewton’s best, J. Roy Hunt’s cinematography is the sort of luscious, rich, high-contrast black-and-white that makes you wonder why anyone thought the movies ever needed color; the dazzling shots he and Tourneur come up with make this film one painterly scene after another; Lewton’s use of sound (both Roy Webb’s musical score and the voodoo drums and other sounds of the hougan ritual) is superb as always, and though the plot really doesn’t make much sense (we learn that Mrs. Rand has actually taken a leadership position in the hougan, at first merely to use voodoo to get the local Black population to boil their water and take other basic sanitation measures, but later we find that she actually was the one who “zombie-ized” Jessica Holland to keep her and Wesley Rand from fleeing the island together, and at the end Wesley and Jessica do a Star Is Born-style walk into the ocean -- jarringly obviously Malibu -- so the wastrel and the white zombie both die and Paul and Betsy are free to get together), the movie has been such a visual feast -- and the characters so richly brought to life, especially by Conway and Ellison --it doesn’t matter.

I Walked with a Zombie is first-rate filmmaking by any measure, and an example of the artistry with which horror films used to be made before audience tastes coarsened and today the horror audience just wants blood, gore and carnage -- forget artistry and imagination. I remember when I saw Wes Craven’s Scream I quite enjoyed the first hour and a half of the movie -- I found myself wishing Craven could have lived in the 1940’s and had Lewton as his producer -- and then in the last half-hour Craven, all too aware of what his audiences expected and wanted, brought the knives out figuratively and literally and splashed the screen in the rivers of blood modern-day horror fans want.