I Walked With a Zombie (RKO, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 3:45 p.m. I started the Hallowe’en horror movie marathon with a film my husband Charles had specifically requested, I Walked With a Zombie (1942, though imdb.com insists on 1943), one of Val Lewton’s unquestioned masterpieces and a film whose director, Jacques Tourneur, said it was “a horrible title for a very good film – the best film I’ve ever done in my life.” It was Lewton’s and Tourneur’s next project after the incredible success of Cat People, and the source for that awful title was a magazine article by Inez Wallace that was just a travel piece about Haiti. RKO’s marketing department thought I Walked With a Zombie would make a great title for a horror film, so they bought the rights to Wallace’s story even though it didn’t have a plot. Lewton, Tourneir and writers Curt Siodmak (on loan from Universal, where he’d become a star writer through the 1941 film The Wolf-Man) and Ardel Wray decided to graft a story already in the public domain onto Wallace’s title, and they hit upon Jane Eyre: a young woman goes to work at a remote location inhabited by a brooding older man and his invalid wife, whom he keeps locked in a tower and never talks about.

In Zombie the young woman is nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who lives in Ottawa, Canada and in the opening scene is offered a job as a live-in nurse to take care of Jessica Holland (Charlotte Gordon), wife of sugar planter Paul Holland (Tom Conway) on the (fictional) Caribbean island of “Saint Sebastian.” Lewton and Tourneur beautifully and economically establish the contrast between cold, snowy Ottawa and the warm, lush climate of the West Indies as a metaphor for the culture shock Betsy is going to experience in her new environment. The last time I saw I Walked With a Zombie was two years ago during a Turner Classic Movies Hallowe’en marathon in which the next day I wrote a moviemagg blog post on it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/i-walked-with-zombie-rko-1943.html) and I was typing out the famous story that as West Coast story editor for David O. Selznick, Val Lewton had urged him not to buy the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s lost-cause Southern novel Gone With the Wind, and as penance Selznick ordered Lewton to keep a tally of how many people used the theatre restrooms during its preview screening. (Selznick wanted that information because he was having an argument with Al Lichtman, MGM’s head of distribution, and he wanted to document that so many people would need to use the bathroom during the film’s long running time that an intermission would be necessary.)

I was in the middle of telling that story when it suddenly hit me that if I Walked With a Zombie was the movie Lewton wanted to make about the legacy of slavery and the plantation system, no wonder he hadn’t wanted Selznick to make Gone Wtih the Wind! Though slavery had been abolished in the British West Indies in the early 19th century, well before the 1942 setting of this film, the legacy continues to infect the Holland family. In fact, in a particularly chilling bit of exposition I hadn’t noticed before, we’re told that all the Black people on Saint Sebastian are descended from the original slaves brought there by the Holland family on a ship whose masthead, a statue of a Black version of the original Saint Sebastian, still rests in the garden of the Holland plantation house, complete with arrows sticking out of it to represent the torture and martyrdom of the real Saint Sebastian. (Charles read the above and thought the line was just a metaphor, but even if he’s right the film is still saying that the Holland family brought the poison of slavery to the island.) Betsy meets Paul Holland on the boat bringing her across the Caribbean to Saint Sebastian, and she and we are both admiring the beauty of the ocean and the islands the boat is passing (the cinematographer is J. Roy Hunt), and Paul Holland breaks into her thoughts to tell her the islands are not beautiful, that all the beauty is just surface and below it is misery and horror. When she finally arrives at Saint Sebastian Betsy hears the crying of Black women, and Paul tells her that they cry when one of them gives birth because they’re so used to their lives being miserable they regard anyone born into their community as cursed.

The point of the film is that the entire Holland family – Paul, his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison, top-billed – and for someone who seemed to be just walking through the other movie of his I’m familiar with, Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here – in which he seemed to be there just so Alice Faye’s character would have a nice young man to end up with at the end – he turns in a marvelously multidimensional performance here and vividly dramatizes the self-hatred that has turned Wesley into an alcoholic), and Edith Barrett as their mother (she married the planter, had Paul by him, then when he died she married the local missionary, Wesley’s dad; ironically, a year after she made this Jane Eyre knockoff she’d be in the real Jane Eyre, the 1943 movie with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles) – all live under the moral corruption of slavery and the fortune they asassed from it. The film is a deep, rich work that grows on me every time I see it – a good working definition of a classic – and it’s far more than just a horror film with a lurid title. In its depiction of voodoo as a legitimate religion and its healing ceremonies as equivalent to Western medicine (Dr. Maxwell, played by James Bell – who would play the killer in the next Lewton/Tourneur movie, The Leopard Man – tries an elaborate and dangerous therapy called “insulin shock” to attempt to restore Jessica’s sanity, and when it fails Betsy decides to take the suggestion of her maid, played by the marvelous Black actress Jeni LeGon, to take her to the voodoo homefort to see if they can cure her).

It also turns out that Mrs. Rand, mother of both Paul and Wesley, has taken up voodoo herself, originally just to get the Black islanders to practice proper sanitation, but ultimately she becomes a full-fledged practitioner, experiences possession by the voodoo gods, and is the one who turns Jessica Holland into a zombie to keep her from running away with Wesley Rand. I Walked With a Zombie is famous for the long tracking shots through the Saint Sebastian jungle – as I’ve noted before, in other horror films the characters run away from death; in Lewton’s, they literally walk with it – all built inside a soundstage but by that very fact, both more beautiful and more terrifying than the real ones would be – and though there were, I suspect, a few location shots from Catalonia (Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for tropical islands) and Malibu (its all-purpose substitute for rocky beaches), for the most part I Walked with a Zombie is a testament to the beauties of studio “exteriors.” About the only thing I might have wished for at the end is that the film could have finished with a climax like the ending of Rebecca (another Jane Eyre knockoff!) in which the plantation would have burned down and forced Paul Holland and Betsy Connell to make their new lives as a couple somewhere else (it would have symbolically ended the hold slavery and lts legacy had over the Holland family), but I suspect that even with models that would still have been beyond Val Lewton’s budget.