The Dawn Of The Living Dead: I Walked With A Zombie

By Chelsea Spear

The year was 1942, and the producer/director team of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur were riding high. Cat People, the first feature released through Lewton’s B-horror division at RKO, had saved the studio from bankruptcy and was on its way to becoming a cornerstone of contemporary horror. Before they’d finished counting the receipts, RKO studio heads gave the pair their next assignment.

Someone in the licensing department had gotten the film rights for a headline in a Weekly World News-style tabloid, which they handed off to Lewton with a straight face: “I Walked With A Zombie.” The phrase has since been derided as one of the worst film titles of all time, with no less a wag than popular sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison mocking it in a 2005 documentary on Lewton. When the producer got the title and concept for Cat People, he reportedly told its scenarist DeWitt Bodean “If you want to back out now, I won’t hold it against you.” One can only imagine his initial apoplexy over having to make a movie called—I repeat—I Walked With A Zombie. However, any initial pain caused by such a lurid title gave way to the creation of a truly memorable picture.

The film opens in Ottawa, Canada, as nurse Betsy Connell (played by Frances Dee) is assigned to work on a sugar plantation on the fictional West Indies island of San Sebastian. Her patient, Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon) is an elegant somnambulist who remains alive and ambulatory—if unconscious—after contracting a fever that has burned her nerve endings. In her work with “Miss Jessica,” Betsy falls in love with Paul Holland (regular Lewton player Tom Conway), Jessica’s handsome, brooding husband, and vows to prove her love by bringing his wife back to him. Her efforts encompass both traditional medicine and the voudoun rituals that take place on the island.

Another director might have taken this in a far different direction. While the flesh-eating zombie phenomenon didn’t exist in mainstream pop culture at that point (and wouldn’t have passed muster with the Production Code), one can only imagine how directors at Universal would have incorporated the concept of “the living dead” into their stable of monsters. Lewton, instead, drew from the writings of Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë. (The script was loosely based on Jane Eyre, and Lewton had written an uncredited script polish on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)

In spite of Cat People‘s financial success, the B-horror unit still had a microscopic budget with which to work. Lewton had revolutionized horror scares in his previous film. Audiences of the day found certain scenes in Cat People almost unbearably scary because of a technique Lewton created. Known as “the bus,” it is still used in contemporary horror films. “The Sultan of Shudders” extended his use of atmosphere and suggestion to create an eerie world for his characters.

The look of the film might seem more suited to film noir than to horror. Tourneur’s features were known for their innovative use of light and shadow, which gave them an uneasy feel in features such as Cat People and Out of the Past. In I Walked With A Zombie, he and cinematographer J. Roy Hunt lit the interiors through Venetian blinds, a technique frequently used in film noir. The slanting, contrast-heavy light drew viewers’ eyes to parts of the screen where nothing was happening, and created a secretive mood.

In other scenes, the use of shadow gave an eerie sense of foreboding, as in a scene late in the film in which Carrefour, a zombie-like member of the tribe (Darby Jones), pays a visit to the house. Before we see him enter the house, we see his silhouette projected over Betsy’s sleeping body. Though the film moves at a brisk clip, the scenes unfold at a seemingly deliberate pace—several scenes consist of one or two wide shots instead of using a lot of quick editing.

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