A young nurse is sent to the West Indies to care for a plantation owner’s wife, a woman who will follow simple directions but seems to have no will of her own. Once there she finds a tragic, meandering tale of two brothers and the zombie they both love.

First let me say if you expect some action, scares, deaths, or the like in your horror, you’ll probably be disappointed with I Walked with a Zombie. On the other hand, if you like some Jane Eyre in your horror, check it baby, your prayers have been answered! That’s right, this is basically the classic novel about two brothers love for one woman, with a zombie thrown in. As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s actually a well-respected and positively reviewed film, but not by me.

The problem with this movie and it’s ilk, they really expect the audience to believe anything they toss at ’em.

The love story aspect, for example, the part so many people cherish in this movie, is so ridiculous I can’t understand how an adult couldn’t feel insulted. A woman meets a guy twice for a matter of minutes, he’s somewhat distant, then she’s thinking to herself “I realized I loved him dearly.” Believable in a short story your nine year old makes up, but surely people in the forties had a little grasp on reality? No? Based on their films, I guess not.

These “voodoo zombie” movies are interesting, though, even though not the type of zombie I like. Voodoo came from Haiti, a mix of African religion and Catholicism. Haiti was scary as hell to Americans for a long time because the slaves all rose up and butchered the white people, a fear deeply rooted in the south.

Both entertaining and disturbing is the attitudes of the world back then. While admiring the beautiful island the nurse comments to the driver, referring to the slave ships that brought his ancestors to the island: “They brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?”

Of course, he agreed. I’d have been more entertained by, “Yes ma’am, and the less than half of us that didn’t die chained and in a puddle of our own shit were overjoyed to be worked to death because it was cheaper to buy replacement slaves than to even give us basic care and nourishment.”

Another time after preaching some dumb shit to a black kid about voodoo and Christianity not mixing (showing she has no idea what voodoo is, since it’s literally just that) she then calls his religion “ridiculous native nonsense.” Let’s be honest, there’s some pretty ridiculous ideas in all religions, and he’s not a native, as mentioned earlier, he’s the descendant of a slave. Anyway, nobody said a chick had to be smart in the forties.

The good parts of this flick is the mood and setting is really great, and there is a true feeling of foreboding once the drums start. There‘s also a really great and surprisingly creepy confrontation with another zombie, which ends anticlimactically and unfortunately turns out to be the high point of scariness in a movie that barely qualifies as horror at all.

The ending is pretty good, but overall if you’re watching this thinking it’s a horror flick, prepare to be unimpressed.

3 out of 10 times I was reminded that subtlety wasn’t invented until the sixties

My initial reaction to I Walked With a Zombie was mixed. One of the problems, as The Horrorist described succinctly, was the heroine Betsy’s love story, which was pretty much just thrown in and pointless, as well as unbelievable. Typical dialogue relating to this was something like:

“This scenery is so beautiful!”
“Don’t let it fool you. Everything you see around you is dying.”
“Oh, don’t be so serious.”
“Death. Disease. Hopelessness.”
[Voiceover] "He made me want to kill myself. And yet, I could feel myself falling in love with him.”

There's a more interesting love story/triangle besides that, but it's left rather unresolved. Along those lines, another problem I had initially was the myriad plot threads that were started but left dangling. By the end of the film, I was thinking things like “Wait a sec, wasn’t she supposed to...?” “So none of that bit meant anything?” But the more thought I gave it, the more I realized that director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton knew what they were doing. The film’s lack of resolution tied very carefully into the overall tone of ambiguity, and the film seemed to work... in a truly unusual way.

In an opening voiceover, the character Betsy notes that “a year ago, I’m not at all sure I would have known what a zombie was.” By the end of the movie, I wasn’t so sure myself.

Much like Val Lewton’s other films (the better ones, at least), virtually everything about I Walked with a Zombie was deliberately ambiguous. Were these zombies alive or dead? Were they the product of voodoo, sickness, or something else? Are people creating their own destinies, or are they caught in a stranglehold by the past? And what exactly happened in the past? Many questions are left unresolved, or the answers are only suggested.

The ambiguities are only accentuated by various ironies throughout the film. For example, the opening shot of Betsy literally walking with a zombie does not depict anything that actually occurs in the movie. Betsy’s apparent obliviousness to the racial and historical realities of her new surroundings -- that bugged the Horrorist during a truly ironic bit of dialogue -- show her naive foreignness to a world in which she is now at the center, another contrast that adds to the deliberate overall uncertainty of the film.

This sense of uncertainty is perfectly supplemented by the film’s extremely evocative atmosphere, which is full of lovely but disquieting music, haunting visuals, and strikingly symbolic and metonymic imagery. The racial issues are often coded by such images as a slave ship’s figurehead of Saint Sebastian -- blackened, weeping, and impaled with arrows. The rich, often stark contrasts between light and shadow (note, for example, the light filtering through window blinds) emphasize what is really a liminal space between worlds (more on that below).

As an aside, the movie stands out for its time in the number of serious, respectful roles it gave to black actors. It also treated the subject of voodoo with a certain dignity -- if not realism -- that's generally lacking in the sensationalized version found in most American horror.

The Zombies (and Other Thoughts)

I Walked with a Zombie features only two zombies, and don’t expect any fleshmunching or even real violence. The zombie “Jessica Holland” is so ghostlike that her very presence is spooky (especially by the standards of the ‘40s). She’s haunting, sad, and regal beyond the zombified damsel found in other zombie films of the era. The zombie “Carrefour,” played by Darby Jones (who would again show up as a zombie in 1945’s Zombies on Broadway), is one of zombiedom’s most striking, memorable figures -- right up there with Bub and Big Daddy, in my opinion. The lean, towering figure exudes both menace and dignity. His appearances and role in the film, as well as his very name (“crossroads” in French), all illustrate the essential liminality that is at the film’s core.

What the film really deals with are the various “crossroads” between Life and Death, between Self and Other, between Black and White ethnicities, between social mechanization and Free Will. These issues have been represented in some form or another by zombies ontologically (in their very nature and being) since White Zombie and even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and persist in zombie cinema to this day (see Romero, for example). But in I Walked with a Zombie the issues broaden to paint an entire world between worlds, pervading the background and teasing the audience along with all the characters, finally becoming embodied by the zombies themselves in direct, uncanny confrontation with the characters/audience.

The film may not be very scary (especially by today's standards), but it is spooky and well crafted, at least in terms of artistry and signification. As a reward to the viewer with patience and the ability to put up with some plot absurdities and narrative reticence, I Walked with a Zombie should offer an unsettling, haunting, and thought-provoking experience.

Review Rating
7.9 out of 10 random hanging dog corpses(?)