Horror Watch: I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jacques Tourneur

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is @#$%ing *great*.  Holy cats.  I'm mad at myself I took so long to see it.

Fun fact:  apparently I finished watching this movie on the 82nd anniversary of the film's release.  How about that?

More than a decade after White Zombie - an okay movie that I think drags - RKO put this one out.  It's considered part of a retrospective high point for RKO as Val Lewton was producing cheap and effective thrillers.  

Apparently the title is lifted from an article by journalist Inez Wallace who spent time in Haiti and met people who were basically without will thanks to drugs.  It also borrows a bit from Jane Eyre, one of my favorite reads from college days.

The movie is a Gothic mystery set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian.  The beautiful wife of a sugar plantation owner has fallen into an odd stupor, able to be given commands, but she's otherwise lifeless, emotionless... mostly still unless directed to move around.  Frances Dee plays a nurse brought from Canada to care for her - and expects she's being asked to live in paradise, but like a character from Bronte, Byron or Poe - the husband of the "zombie" sees only death on the island. 

There's a riddle for what really happened.  Two brothers at war.  A mother who is remote from them.  

The location of the plantation leans into the history of the cruelty of slavery and the family's part in what happened, keeping the haunting figurehead from one of their slaveships on the premises, a tortured man impaled with arrows - a reminder of what they did.  Pretty wild as elected leaders are, in 2025, trying to erase slavery of all things from our history books.  The family has tried to make amends now in the mid-20th Century, seeing themselves as stewards of the history and the people here, not interfering, but making sure people are healthy and the plantation provides an economy.

The movie is shot in expressionistic shadow, the language of noir written in light and shadow that would serve RKO well as they pivoted to crime movies after the war.  And, of course, the movie was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who would give us Out of the Past, 

A highlight for me was Theresa Harris as the all-purpose maid/ woman around the house for the Hollands.  She was a screen veteran, and had been a major supporting character in Stanwyck's Baby Face and Jezebel with Bette Davis - here she kind of ties together the worlds of the movie.

But the movie is mostly famous, I'd guess, for vibes built on spooky set pieces.  We get an info-dump via a local musician singing about what happened to the zombified Mrs. Holland - and that is amazingly effective.  There's a spooky tower where Mrs. Holland is kept, a midnight walk to a voodoo ritual through the sugar cane, a seemingly giant voodoo zombie, and more.  

And, most importantly, it doesn't outstay its welcome at a tight 69 minutes.  Like a short story brought to life.

I'm sure others have written plenty about this film, and I know I'll watch it again.