I Walked With a Zombie

“These people are primitive. Things that are natural to them might shock and horrify you.” In Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with A Zombie, we never get a definitive answer whether Virginia Holland (Christine Gordon) is actually a zombie or just the victim of a spinal cord injury that has rendered her pallid and speechless like a phantom floating across the lawn at night. Virginia is the wife of John Holland (Tom Conway), a sugar plantation owner living on the fictional equivalent of Haiti, quite near a vodou temple where distant drums and foreboding chants are regularly heard. Holland hires Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) to care for the deathly Virginia, whom his half-brother Wesley (James Ellison) has been not-so-secretly in love with. Driven by both occupational duty and her own attraction to John, Betsy tries to uncover the truth of Virginia’s condition, including taking the advice of the brothers’ mother (Edith Barrett), who encourages Betsy to traverse the eerie jungle with the “zombie” one night to solicit help from the Vodou priests. While the subject matter must have been slightly shocking in 1943, the main appeal for many is the uniquely dense atmosphere Tourneur creates along with cinematographer J. Roy Hunt; this is a film where lighting is practically the story’s dominant character. Venetian blinds light oppresses every interior night scene, day for night shooting paints an ethereal sheen to the beach setting, and a low-key closeup on a creepy watchman (Darby Jones) creates an aesthetic shock. The sepulchral tone of the proceedings (“Everything good dies here”) combines with exotic subject matter and otherworldly atmosphere to produce one of the most unique and memorable films of the noir cycle.