I Walked with a Zombie

A film set on a Caribbean island. Betsy is a nurse. She comes from Canada and takes a post at a sugar plantation. The patient is the lady of the house. Jessica walks, stops, looks, but does not speak and responds to nothing. The doctors say it is the result of a fever. The islanders say something else. There are two brothers in the house. Paul is Jessica's husband; Wesley is his half-brother and both of them drink. The mother is there too. She has lived on the island a long time and knows the local beliefs. From there the film is a story about a walk. Betsy believes she can cure Jessica and takes her to a ceremony at night. They cross a cane field. Wind, the sound of the cane, and a man standing in the middle of the path. That scene is the centre and is almost entirely silent. What the narrative is interested in is not horror but guilt: its idea is that the plantation is itself an inheritance of violence and that the people in the house carry it. The structure comes from a classic. The story uses the skeleton of Jane Eyre: a woman newly arrived, a closed room and a secret. The title was taken from a magazine article and imposed by the studio from the start; the production team had to fit a film to it. Val Lewton's approach to production is evident. The monster is not shown, the tension is built from shadow and sound, and the budget is low. The character of Carrefour barely speaks and remains only a look. Song is inside the narrative. A calypso singer on the island tells the family's story by singing it. The running time is under seventy minutes. James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Edith Barrett and Darby Jones are in the cast. Jacques Tourneur directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1940s RKO horror and narrative built on atmosphere. Who it is not for: anyone looking for open horror; the film shows almost nothing, and its period depiction of the island is uncomfortable today.