October 14
#11 I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

“It’s not beautiful…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, the glitter of putrescence.  There’s no beauty here, only death and decay.”

This cheery monologue is delivered not by Werner Herzog (although he says something very similar in Burden of Dreams), but by Paul Holland (Cat People’s Tom Conway), standing upon a ship bound for the West Indies, gazing cynically at young nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who has gone to work for him on his St. Sebastian sugar plantation.  Betsy is naive, he insists, because she thinks that nature is beautiful.  He has the more clinical eye.  But he’s been greatly wounded by an incident in the recent past: his wife Jessica is mentally ill, catatonic, given to wandering in a white dress with vacant eyes, and all because–he believes–of a single harsh confrontation between them.  His half-brother Paul is also wounded, but by long-festering jealousy over Jessica and resentment toward Paul.  The plot does not simmer much more than this.  There is a gloom which hangs over the proceedings that also touches every one of the productions overseen by the great Val Lewton.  Everyone seems stuck in place.  Nothing can be changed, because it is already in ruin: doom is in every character’s gaze, most dominantly in the perfectly round, neatly spaced globes set into the head of one eerie giant named Carrefour, who may or may not be one of the walking dead, if those rituals practiced by the locals produce real magic.  And Betsy has begun ruminating over those ceremonies, because if the voodoo is real, perhaps it can bring Jessica back from the brink.  This is complicated by Betsy’s newfound love for Paul, as well as the possibility that Jessica, still wandering the plantation, might not actually be alive.

The most important fact in I Walked with a Zombie, explicitly stated, is that the apparently-beautiful island has a history of pain and misery: it was built on the backs of slaves, and continues to be worked by the descendants of slaves.  Prominent in the plantation is a statue of Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows and tied to a post (how he was said to have been killed by the Roman emperor Diocletian); but this statue was actually a figurehead from a slave-ship before it was set up in the garden for decoration.  This uncomfortable history hangs over the inhabitants both white and black, just as does the spectre of death.  Betsy, arriving with the intention of healing others, finds herself swimming against the tide.  How can anything be restored in such a place?

Every film in the Val Lewton catalogue (available in a fine box set from Warner Bros.) features at least one key scene which stands tall above the others, the Val Lewton Moment, and a classic example of how fear and dread can be generated through suggestion.  Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past) here delivers a doozy.  Betsy leads Jessica through tall fields of sugarcane while the drums of the voodoo ceremony beat in the distance, and silently they encounter ill omens and obstacles: a skull in the ground, a dead rabbit hanging from a tree, and eventually Carrefour, alliteratively like the boatsman Charon.  In a panic Betsy realizes she has lost the ribbon which would have allowed safe passage, so she clings to Jessica (who still has hers).  She might as well be clinging to a corpse to infiltrate the Underworld.  They are allowed to pass.

In Val Lewton’s films, death is inescapable, and it chokes and it suffocates.  In being handed the title I Walked with a Zombie, he famously decided to use Jane Eyre as his source text, and emerged with a more literate and lyrical B-movie than anyone could have expected.  But his film is honest, disconcertingly so.  It is a film about zombies: a story about death and this limbo isle which seems to be perched upon the boundary of death and life–a place where nothing can live, and yet nothing, least of all the past, remains buried.