Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur followed up 1942’s Cat People with this racially charged horror flick, set in the West Indies and loosely based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The zombie of the title isn’t a flesh eater, but the mute, sleepwalking mistress of a sugar plantation (Christine Gordon), whom our nurse heroine, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), has been hired to assist. Some say the woman’s “mental case” is the result of a fever; others suggest darker forces are at play. Betsy tries to figure out which, while being buffeted by the two men who run the plantation: Paul Holland (Tom Conway), the patient’s husband, and Wesley Rand (James Ellison), his step-brother. The foundational dark force of this story, one that I Walked with a Zombie both interrogates and exploits, is the legacy of slavery. Even as the movie acknowledges this history—the carriage driver who delivers Betsy to the plantation tells her that his ancestors were brought there “chained at the bottom of a boat”—it’s also happy to lean on “voodoo” imagery for scares (including Darby Jones as Carrefour, a lanky, bug-eyed villager who shuffles through the sugarcane fields in a zombified state of his own). Tourneur’s imagery, as in Cat People, casts a spectral spell: the shadows cut by the plantation’s copious venetian blinds; the sight of Gordon, in a flowing white gown, floating in silence across the courtyard; a climactic, tragic walk into the waves. And then there is the statue of Saint Sebastian that rests in that courtyard, which Paul says was “once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people came from.” The figurehead is now the centerpiece of a fountain, water dripping down it like a flood of tears. Tourneur’s camera returns to it repeatedly throughout the movie, suggesting that the curse the family is suffering from can be traced back to the boat from which “our people,” as Paul describes them, came.
(6/23/2022)
