Review of I Walked with a Zombie (1943) by Alex G — 05 Jun 2013

You would think that a movie called I Walked With a Zombie would be a god awful movie. Not so. As a fan of B movies, I did have a bias coming into this film, but overall, it was a good movie. Let me repeat that. I Walked With a Zombie is a good movie.

I think the best part of the movie is the storytelling. It's a rather intelligent, well devised plot of a nurse who is assigned to tend to a female patient on an island in the West Indies. She soon meets the husband of the patient and his half-brother. I don't want to give too much away, but it involves love, voodoo, and a vast degree of complexity for a horror film. Historically, the director Jacques Tourneur is no stranger to making intelligent horror films. His earlier film, Cat People, had a similar degree of intelligence. I honestly would be hard pressed to call this a horror movie. It's more of a drama that has some horror elements to it, which is I guess what horror is when it comes down to it. The acting is also rather good. No one in particular stood out as exceptional, but none were bad either. I do have to give praise to the guy who played the wordless big eyed Voodoo guy. He was definitely the creepiest part of the movie in every single way.

Although I did praise the storytelling of it, it became the problem for me of this movie. The movie itself spent so much of its time on the plot and character relationships/developments that it left very little room for horror and setting up a creepy atmosphere. Sure, there are some creepy moments, such as the Voodoo guy I mentioned, and some scenes that take place at the Voodoo village. The creepiest scene is when the Voodoo guy comes to the house at the end, and at first you only see his shadows. Compared to Tourneur's Cat People, this movie does not do as great of a job at balancing a well plotted story and a well created horror atmosphere. And even despite the great storytelling, the climax is rather lame, with the main characters talking it out when we pretty much already knew it anyway. Again, not giving away plot spoilers. It just felt arbitrary at times, taking care of itself to take care of itself. It didn't always seem to flow naturally in other words. The ending was also strange and I didn't really feel it fit with the rest of the movie. If only this movie had a longer running time than its current running time of 68 minutes.

Despite these criticisms, I did like it. Overall, an intelligent, well acted story that knew that and focused so much on working its plot out that it didn't leave enough time to develop a horror atmosphere, despite some creepy moments.

Note: I must point out that the "zombie" is not in the way we think of zombies now. In this movie, a zombie is thought of as just someone who is undead. Which is what a zombie is, minus the cannibalistic, deformed look that modern zombies have now. It was just looked like a normal person who just happened to be undead, with a little makeup to show the dead aspect of it.