I Walked With a Zombie

I Walked With a Zombie, from 1943, was Val Lewton's second picture, and as with Cat People it was directed by Jacques Tourneur. As usual, Lewton was given a title and then had free rein to create a story--this one has echoes of Jane Eyre.

Frances Dee plays a young Canadian nurse who takes a job on a Caribbean island where she is to attend to the wife of an aristocrat. He's Tom Conway (the psychologist in Cat People), who strikes me as the poor man's David Niven. Conway's wife seem to be catatonic--she wanders the halls of the tower connected to Conway's mansion, where Dee finds her and screams.

Conway has a half-brother, James Ellison, and it seems there was a love triangle between the brothers and the wife, and it's possible that the wife is now a zombie, both dead and alive (she is not in any way similar to the George Romero, brain-eating zombies we know today--she just stares straight ahead). Dee attempts to cure her by taking her to the locals who practice voodoo, to no avail.

This film has a lot of creepy atmosphere, but not a lot of frights. It is, however, very respectful of the Afro-Caribbean culture and voodoo in general. There's lots of talk how the island was populated by slaves, and their misery still haunts the place (a figurehead from a slave ship, a sculpted St. Sebastian, is a promiment bit of the scenery).

The only really unnerving aspect of the film is an actor named Darby Jones, who plays a tall, lanky, and scary-looking native, with bugged out eyes and a hungry look. He so resembles the current actor Orlando Jones I wonder if there's a relation.