Review of I Walked with a Zombie (1943) by Kevin N — 13 Apr 2012

Val Lewton and his band of ambitious genre directors were a big part of my formative years, and this quiet little shocker boasts some of the most memorable images from any of the films he produced. In a twisted rendition of Jane Eyre, the story concerns a young woman named Betsy (Frances Dee) who takes a job as a personal nurse on a West Indies island, only to find herself mixed up in a strange land where voodoo holds a power that has overshadowed medicine, and dark secrets keep the doctors and educated men cowering in their mansions behind drink and loneliness.

The film contains a terrific performance by Lewton regular Tom Conway, an actor I've always loved watching. He has a natural charm about him, yet in this film he displays wonderfully controlled undertones of anger and fear.

He is the movie's most complex person, stuck in a limbo between delusion and reality, chained by things that he believes but cannot understand. Jacques Tourneur, the great underrated director of such masterpieces as 'Cat People' and 'Out of the Past', helmed this project with both his dependable eye for artistically lit composition and his no-nonsense sense of pacing.

It is a tight and concise horror film which shows us some terrifying things and suggests some far stranger than anything we see.