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If Jacques Tourneur hadn’t already stamped his indelible credentials on the horror genre with Cat People, only a year later he went and did it again with I Walked With A Zombie, a film that allowed him to take the dream-like tone of his earlier film to stunning extremes. Of course, with a release date of 1943, the zombies that we’re strolling with aren’t the flesh eating ghouls we saw in George Romero’s 1968 Night Of The Living Dead, but instead the type affiliated with the practices of voodoo.
Voodoo has had something of a checkered representation in movies, usually being used as racially questionable motivations for villains who want to make their enemies mindless slaves and has entire villages slaughtering farm animals to the sound of pounding drums. But while many movies have exploited voodoo in ways that have become shorthand for some fairly dated representation, I Walked With A Zombie approaches it’s subject with a lyricism not usually found in films of its kind.
After being interviewed for a job to travel to a Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for the sickly wife of a sugar plantation owner, Canadian nurse Betsy Connell soon finds herself on a boat marvelling at the view. However, the owner, Paul Holland, strangely warns her about the beauty of the place being misleading – but despite seemingly being something of a buzzkill, Betsy finds herself drawn to him even though it’s his wife she’ll be caring for.
Not long after arriving a Fort Holland, Betsy soon discovers the lay of the land. Paul’s wife, Jessica, has apparently been rendered mindless thanks to a tropical fever that caused irreparable damage to her spinal chord and causes her to wander aimlessly if left unchecked; Paul’s half-brother Wesley Rand seemingly resents Paul, and turned heavily to drink round about the same time Jessica got sick; and finally, Paul and Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Rand, works closely with the villagers, often tempering their religious beliefs with medical facts in order to manipulate them into complying with her medical and sanitary suggestions.
Of course, all this drama tends to lead to some wagging tongues, and word on the street is that Jessica was planning to run away with Wesley just before she got sick; but even though it seems to point a sizable finger at Paul, Betsy still finds herself drawn to him. Vowing to prove her love by curing his wife (okay then), the nurse starts exploring various methods to shock her patient out of her state of living death and when a native maid suggests voodoo, Betsy considers taking her charge to the temple known as the houmfort to see if the voodoo priest can help. But is that what afflicts Jessica actually medical, or has someone performed a ritual upon her to render her a mindless zombie, much like the blank-eyed Carrefour who guards the crossroads leading to the houmfort?
The first thing that strikes you about I Walked With A Zombie is how unwilling Tourneur is to turn his film into an exploitative exercise that, in other hands, could have seen the film just slip into typical racial stereotypes in order to see a white woman menaced by a dark-skinned monster. However, for virtually the entirety of its slight runtime (a ridiculously lean 69 minutes), the director impressively refuses to take the easy route, instead delivering a dream-like, almost surreal, adventure that takes full effect of Tourneur’s eye for lighting and shadow. Dropping us into this world via the doe-like eyes of Frances Dee’s optimistic nurse who sails into the midst of a tropical paradise, it somehow balances the undead and curses while never fully treating its subject matter as full-blown horror.
Much like how Cat People kept it’s genre leanings at the outskirts of the frame while using its plot to examine psychosexual repression, I Walked With A Zombie rolls its sleeves up to tackle themes of colonialism and multiple forms of slavery both psychological and physical. And yet, remarkably, at no time does the film punch down on its subject matter despite the fact that it’s 1943 – yes, there’s some unavoidable details concerning the native population engaging in “simpler” beliefs and the sight of Darby Jones’ poster grabbing, blank-eyed Carrefour, is used to generate dread with his disturbingly lifeless stare, but he is no more used as a “monster heavy” than the population of Saint Sebastian are treated as “lesser-thans” by the script. Rather it’s the family tribulations of house Holland that draws the main focal point of the film and the tangled mystery that’s wrapped up in the illness of Jessica Holland proves to be the real meat in this trippy sandwich.
Going full gothic (is Tropical Gothic at thing? It feels like it should be.), the tragedy rotting at the heart of the family is almost Poe-like. Half-brothers at loggerheads? Rumours of attempted infidelity? A mysterious malady binding them all together when the family would do well to each be on different continents? Betsy’s well-meaning ray of light wanders into the middle of it all and is immediately put on a path to try and fix it – but to do so will take her on one of the most spellbinding visual journeys of that decade. While other directors attempt to leech fear out of subconscious xenophobia, Tourneur embraces the dreadful beauty of it, enlisting breathtaking uses of silhouette and unleashing a jaw dropping pallet of contrasting shades. Christine Gordon’s entrance is a cracker, slowly advancing on Betsy through a gloomy staircase in a brilliant white dress; later still, an ominous sight of a goat hanging from a tree elicits both dread and wonder and even though the appearances of the hulking Carrefour are used sparingly, there’s something powerfully tragic about the looming zombie that stick with you for long after.
Interestingly enough, in the end it’s the foolish behavior of the wealthy, white family, and not the alleged spells of the natives that set the wonderfully melodramatic climax in motion. As the truth comes out, it’s still amusingly pooh-poohed by a pompous doctor who decides to try and defuse the family dysfunction with a patronising attitude – but Tourneur chooses to be deliciously vague in his denouement. Yes, there seems to be a logical explanation here that dispels any notions of hocus pocus and zombified harlots, but after what we’ve experienced with Betsy and the way the director has pumped every scene with ridiculous amounts of atmosphere, there’s no way we can entirely deny the terribly, wonderous secrets we’ve experienced.
Tourneur would go on to ultimately deliver a horror classic hat trick a decade later when he took Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie and added the similarly thoughtful, and downright stunning, Night Of The Demon. However, while Cat People may be more thematically rich, and Demon may be more striking, it’s Zombie that remains the most visually haunting as we take an exhilarating stroll with darkness.
