Film Review I Walked with a Zombie

FILM REVIEW – I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

Spoiler alerts apply here.

Anyone who thinks all zombie stories and films are the same hasn’t seen this short (a mere 69 minutes in length) unforgettable classic. Don’t expect massed armies of ghouls shuffling around turning anyone they bite into another of their kind until no one survives here. The film is actually done as a very dark noir study of one woman who may or may not even be a true zombie. Made by Jaques Tourbeur, who also made the original and vastly superior version of Cat People. The walker, and narrator is a Canadian nurse called Betsy, played by Frances Dee, who is offered a dream assignment in the Caribbean, looking after a near comatose patient, given to mysterious bouts of somnambulist sleep walking. The patient, wife of a sugar plantation owner on a small island, populated by the descendants of African slaves, and a few Christian missionaries. The patient is silent (crying attributed to her proves to come from an independent source), and the Nurse gradually discovers that her catatonia is due to events relating to her affair with a man called Wesley, her husband’s half-brother. This has shocked Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Rand, who has set herself up as a voodoo priestess with the natives. Mrs. Rand doesn’t believe in zombies herself, but uses psychology and ritual to help the natives in the guise of their own cultural practices. Her voodoo curse on Jessica has led to the girl’s apparent fever-driven condition. The nurse knows Jessica is not a zombie but that she lives. Her heartbeats, but she defies medicinal help. She takes the patient to the natives to see if their rituals can help her and discovers Mrs. Rand is leading their cult. With the outcry drawing outside attention to the native practices, matters reach a peak. Wesley contemplates euthanasia for Jessica, before a mysterious silent and ever staring native figure is seen watching as the high priest of Mrs. Rand’s sect, known as the Sabruer, uses a voodoo doll to lure Wesley to murder Jessica, walking her and himself into the sea to drown. Their bodies are found and the nurse’s job is completed. The exact nature of Jessica’s condition is never explained. Science and magic are equally likely even to the end. There’s a great deal of strange symbolism. The centrepiece of the voodoo shrine being a St. Sebastian figurehead from an old slave-ship. Major plot development and exposition is given in strange Calypso rhythm songs as if the story is becoming folklore to the natives as events unfold. There is no blood, no special effects, and no clichés. The most chilling scenes are near the beginning of the film as the nurse, filled with romantic notions of working in the tropics is told by a cheerful doctor that star-light is from long dead suns, while the blue sea gets its glow from dead things giving off chemical reactions. Here all love and romance leads to death. The story draws much inspiration from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and makes an outstanding change from any film about rampaging armies of corpses.

Arthur Chappell