I Walked With a Zombie
(1943, Jacques Tourneur; from the Val Lewton Horror Collection, Warner Bros.)
RKO producer Val Lewton was an undisputed master of suspense and psychological, internalized horror. Working with a stock set of actors, writers and directors throughout the 1940’s, and known to have taken a heavily hands-on and detail-oriented (and often uncredited) approach to the scripts, his films are impeccably designed on miniscule budgets. Cat People from 1942 is his most recognizable title (especially after the light-years-more-graphic remake in 1982), but I Walked With a Zombie must run a close second. Essentially Jane Eyre reset on a South Seas island, a nurse played by Frances Dee has come to a wealthy sugar plantation to care for the catatonic wife (Christine Gordan, in a nonspeaking role) of owner Tom Conway. His younger brother James Ellison is a troubled drunk; the matriarch Edith Barrett indulges her sons while hiding an odd relationship to the island natives and their voodoo-based religious ceremonies. Dee is attracted to Conway, but as a honorable person she decides to channel her energies into helping Gordan recover and Conway restore his marriage. Of course, she can’t help but run up against several family secrets, long-held grudges, and cracks in the community’s façade.
For anyone unfamiliar with Hays Code 1940’s horror, Walked might be difficult to get into. It’s got very few scares, no special effects, little supernatural content, and no real villain. To enjoy this (or any other Lewton film), the viewer has to become an audience member of 1943, when the “exotic” voodoo content was new and exciting, and the calypso music was almost completely foreign to Americans (in fact all evidence indicates that the Sir Lancelot performances here are the very first appearance of calypso music in a film). To that end, the sets and art design are gorgeous and never betray the low budget. Walked is beautifully filmed in rich contrasts of light and dark; despite the almost completely soundstage-based setting, there always seem to be breezes stirring from off-screen. Not only does this contribute immeasurably to the illusion of being on location, it also causes the viewer to remain uneasy, scanning the dark recesses of the screen, watching for something to emerge.
The characters and performances are remarkable as well. Barrett as the mother (despite being the same age as the actors playing her “sons”!) has a particularly natural style. After meeting the stiff and formal elder and the morose younger brother, her confident and easy way with Dee makes it easy to believe that she is holding the island’s inner workings in the palm of her hand. Sir Lancelot was a hugely influential calypso singer/composer and Walked is the first place most people saw him, with his own song “Shame and Sorrow” figuring heavily in the plot; he plays an unnamed town-troubadour type paid to entertain diners in the square who sings ballads about the plantation’s past (and puts ideas in Dee’s head). It’s an innovative and effective form of exposition in a show that has lots of information to convey in what is an astonishingly compact story. There’s also a weird Dee voiceover that vanishes halfway through the movie, just as the story is turning to its creepier content.
In retrospect, the zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) is not only completely benign, but he is the person who can be seen in the opening footage under the credits, in a long shot on a well-lit beach on a peaceful shore; this scene, which doesn’t appear again in the movie proper, establishes the exotic location but certainly is not menacing or scary. That would seem to imply right up front that the native culture is nothing to be feared, which turns out to be true — the “demons” are entirely within the history of the white family of plantation owners. In fact, the whole native culture is handled with (relative) respect; yes, it is invented and non-authentic, but it is not exploitative; compared with most popular films of the same year, African-American actors are shown as equivalent to caucasians, and not used as comic relief. And the made-up details are evocative and effective as metaphors for slavery and other racial-imbalance-of-power issues that are not otherwise openly addressed: the village custom of gathering to weep and mourn when a child is born (a tradition, we are told, that stems from their slave ancestors) might seem silly, but upon reflection is a clever way to indicate a strong community awareness of (and audible disapproval of) the overlords’ past status as slaveholders. The driver that picks up Dee at the dock and brings her to the Hammond estate is a gentle and dignified corrective to Dee’s initial wide-eyed acceptance of the island. The wooden ship’s figurehead that graces the grounds, a remnant from the slave ship that brought the original residents to the island, is so striking that we almost expect it to fulfill some supernatural function in the story — perhaps it will animate like Mozart’s accusing Commendatore statue; this is a horror film after all! — but in the end it is exactly what it is: a completely non-metaphorical reminder of the blood and inhumane toil that allowed the foreign plantation owners to thrive, no matter how benignly they try to treat the island now.
Reminds me of:
I haven’t really seen any other contemporary movies which attempt to depict this kind of subculture (the ones that try do a mostly poor job, apparently). Jungle cultures do put me in mind of Werner Herzog’s three astounding collaborations with Klaus Kinski that are jungle-set; the best of these (and one of the greatest movies I’ve ever experienced) is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but the one that is probably closest to the island culture here is Cobra Verde. Needless to say, Herzog’s recreations in the 1970’s and 1980’s are far closer to the real thing than this or any other 1940’s take, not to mention shot on location. (Though that said, the voodoo sequences here are reported to be well-researched and are presented to be taken seriously.)After commenting on the effectiveness of the Mystery Man played by Robert Blake in Lost Highway, I have to note that Jones’s Carrefour is rendered ultra-creepy by exactly the same no-tech trick: His character holds his eyes wide open and is never seen to blink, even in lengthy shots. (Of course Jones had a build and look that kept him playing a similar character for most of his career, perhaps not to his satisfaction.)
All right, this descends into the “mere coincidence” category: As it happens I watched this and the previous Living in Oblivion on the same night. Oblivion ends with a credit block that I reproduced in the last entry. Mere minutes later, in the opening credits for Walked, I caught this:
Too fun. (And you can even see the “I” and the “zombie” doing the “walk” of the title, just behind this text block.)
But then — the guilt!
I will admit that I was unprepared for Walked’s light touch and literary tone when I began the movie — the lurid title had me expecting something more B-movie like a William Castle or Roger Corman film. Of course those campy movies come later, in the late 1950’s and the 1960’s; the movies produced by Val Lewton and his contemporaries were high-class (despite the titles, which were apparently pre-selected by RKO). I should have remembered that I had the same experience with Cat People several years ago — expecting it to be more thrills ’n’ chills, it took me a while to get into the groove.I listened to the Steve Jones and Kim Newman commentary on this one (both are Lewton and horror genre experts), and their work as well as the tribute site by Erik Weems were very helpful. I tried to keep all of the observations that I made above my own, but I’ll admit that I did not really notice or appreciate the lighting effects on my first viewing; once clued in by Jones and Newman, the lighting artistry was very apparent (nothing, particularly peoples’ faces, is ever broadly lit without filtering shadows from vegetation, blinds, or ironwork). All in all I came away with a higher level of appreciation for Lewton, and I’ll need to both re-watch Cat People and also complete his other 1940’s output at some point (The Seventh Victim and Bedlam sound particularly — troublesome).
Pitch:
I’ve already mentioned Sir Lancelot’s calypso ballad which provides exposition, heightens dramatic tension, and is beautiful all at once. He actually sings this in two halves, in separate scenes, and the second of these — as he advances on Dee and the passed-out Ellison, emerging from that darkened background, all traces of his earlier subservience gone — is the menacing highlight of the film.
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