By Oliver Longden
April 2013 marks 70 years of Jack Tourneur’s psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Underneath the layers of 1940s reserve and casual racism, there’s quite a charming little movie that probably deserves to be better remembered. Back in 1943, zombies weren’t the horde of shambling undead cannibals we know today: they were the product of voodoo magic, and rather than representing a distorted mirror to our own consumer culture as our current crop of zombies do, they sprang from a deep rooted fear of Afro-Caribbean culture. This earlier voodoo zombie has the primal fear of death about it but also has a concept of otherness; something not just dead, but foreign as well. It hints at powers that white men and women cannot access, and raises the possibility of the social order being reversed, of the voodoo priest becoming the master of white people instead of the other way around, something which would have a peculiar horror for white audiences in 1943. If these colonial anxieties seem quaint and distasteful today that’s because the world has moved on to a more explicitly post-colonial set of collective neuroses. I’m hopeful that one day zombies as a metaphor for mindless consumption will seem equally quaint to future critics.
In I Walked With a Zombie, a nurse named Betsy (played by Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean to help look after Jessica, the wife of a plantation owner called Paul Holland (Tom Conway) who has been left profoundly mentally disabled after a serious injury. She finds her patient strange and unsettling, and at the same time finds herself drawn to the aloof master of the house. She meets his brother Wesley (James Ellison), a man on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, and Mrs Rand (Edith Barrett), the level-headed mother of family doctor. The family life is fractious and mystery surrounds the circumstances leading up to Jessica’s illness and her current state. As Betsy finds herself falling in love with Paul Holland, she decides to try and help cure his wife to make him happy. She hears that a local voodoo priest may be able to help Jessica and takes her to see him. She witnesses a voodoo ceremony but is shocked to find that Mrs Rand is involved in the voodoo rites. Gradually she begins to suspect Jessica may actually have died of her illness and been brought back as a zombie. In the final scenes Mrs Rand becomes hysterical and takes responsibility saying that she brought Jessica back. It is also revealed that Jessica was having an affair with her husband’s brother. The film ends in an orgy of melodrama with Wesley and Jessica dead and Betsy and Paul able to be together thanks to his wife’s final death.
The film never explicitly comes down on one side or the other on whether Jessica truly is a zombie, and this is one of the film’s great strengths, another being the performances of the supporting cast. While Tom Conway as the male lead is doing the classic distant unavailable thing that women in romance stories seem incapable of resisting, James Ellison is chewing the scenery as his unstable brother. Ellison’s performance reeks of danger and regret and it is clear to the audience that he is nursing some dark secret. Edith Barrett too is excellent; first appearing as the prim and proper woman of medicine it becomes steadily more obvious that she has been seduced by voodoo. Initially she takes a classic colonial line on voodoo, that she takes part in the ceremonies and uses the form of the religion to convince the local people to take their medicine, seeing it as a tool to help the ignorant savages. Over time it becomes clear that her relationship with voodoo is much more complex, that she has been sucked into using it as the local people use it.
There are some lovely set pieces in I Walked With A Zombie. The plot is foreshadowed when Betsy encounters a calypso singer outside a cafe who sings a song that hints of the dark secrets in the Holland family’s past. Calypso music had been introduced into the United States in the 1940s and here the singer (played by the brilliantly named Sir Lancelot) strikes a fine balance between the swinging rhythms of the music and the dark content of his song that makes the whole sequence surreal and unsettling. When Betsy decides to take Jessica to the voodoo priest there is a long sequence covering her approach to the houmfort where the voodoo worshippers gather. The journey is framed as a sequence of claustrophobic vignettes detailing the macabre experiences they have as they approach their destination. They walk through cane fields as dark and close as a forest and emerge to see a dead dog hanging from a tree. They pass strange voodoo accoutrements and have to pass the guard, a tall black man with staring eyes who may (or may not) be zombie himself. These sequences are shot on a sound stage rather than using externals which really adds to the sense of being trapped in an unfamiliar world. The voodoo sequences themselves are energetic and exciting all conducted to the wild beat of ritual drumming. Seeing the ladies throw themselves about and dance with the celebrant must have been shocking to 1940s eyes used to stultifying images of more decorous women.
If you strip away the voodoo and the colonial trappings, I Walked With a Zombie is a film about people going mad far away from home. It’s a film about how secrets and regrets can destroy a family and how superstition breeds in isolation. It’s a well made film, although not without its flaws. The lack of externals may add to the claustrophobia but it makes it very hard to believe in the island as a living, breathing place. It is a product of a more racist time and never regards the social iniquities displayed on screen as any kind of real problem. Betsy, the main protagonist is defined solely in terms of her relationship with men, cast as a lover to Paul and a kind of surrogate mother figure to his troubled brother. Despite these problems, this is a film with real psychological depth that artfully walks the tightrope between showing voodoo as real and showing it as base superstition. That we, the audience cannot say for certain whether voodoo is real or not allows us to better empathise with the characters grappling with that same issue. Finally, there is something refreshing about seeing a zombie movie that dates back to the old days before Romero redefined what it meant to be the walking dead.