I Walked with a Zombie

This second chapter of a fantasy-horror trilogy produced by Val Lewton draws on a story by Inez Wallace, a sort of shrewd cross between Charlotte Brontë’s classic “Jane Eyre” (1847) and Henry S. Whitehead’s “weird fiction” stories which were set in the Caribbean and introduced voodoo into popular culture.

A well-considered choice, given that the material fully reflects Lewton’s rather unnerving vison of the world as a realm dominated by indescribable forces, where everything is fatuous appearance and every form of control turns out to be an inescapable mirage (“Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand. Those flying fish, they’re not leaping for joy. They’re jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies“).

Thus we get another inevitable clash between reason, symbolized again by scientific knowledge, and arcane practices, this time expressed by voodooism, with the two competing conceptions of life and reality openly battling it out (“The ‘houngan’ has his prescription, and Dr. Maxwell and I have ours“). Obviously, it’ll be the side of rationality that gets the worst of it. In fact, Lewton, always a poetic advocate for an inextricable cosmic relativism (“I don’t know. I’ve gone over it and over it, and I don’t know!“), gets particularly worked up over western science’s characteristic presumptuous ambition to achieve a nearly unequivocal and all-encompassing understanding of the subject matter at hand (as a matter of fact, a similar pretention mirrors positions common in the 18th and 19th centuries).

This translates into a journey of loss and disorientation that particularly assails the character of Mrs. Rand, who after hiding behind reassuring logic (“The ‘houngan’ cured her by giving her a little practical psychology“), finds herself forced to admit the possibility of a supernatural element (‘I’ve often talked a little voodoo to get medicine down a patient’s throat.’ ‘But it was more than that, Doctor. I entered into their ceremonies. I pretended I was possessed by their gods. But what I did to Jessica…’).

A remarkable film both on the technical front as well as for the way the story unfolds. Director Jacques Tourneur – who in a couple scenes seems to have taken inspiration from (German director) F. W. Murnau – skillfully alternates between melodrama and thriller, ably exploiting the exotic milieu (consider the crescendo of suspense produced by the beat of Rada drums in the shadowy plantation), while Mark Robson’s film editing and Curt Siodmak’s screenplay are surefire indications of high quality.

The trilogy will be brought to a worthy conclusion with the upcoming “The Leopard Man” (1943).