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Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ Liked

There's almost no use in writing about it.....still, how Tourneur at least gets to the form is important - pulling down the veil of exoticism to reveal a history of colonialist exploitation... But at the end of the day you just have to experience it - one of the most abstract films ever made in Hollywood. So much is pulled together here in its brief 68 minute runtime: the aforementioned historical aspects, the doomed romance, the borderline surrealist visuals (this has some of the most stunning & expressive black and white lighting), the supernatural aspects, Jane Eyre, the linking of supernatural to the vengeful ghosts of slavery, once more linked to the atmospheric images...all convalescing into, uh, whatever the hell this movie is

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ Liked

It remains the highest point of suggestive horror as a source of troubling dread. I find fascinating how I Walked with a Zombie revisits so much of the strategies of Cat People but expand it by presenting its romantic quadrangle of destructive desire into a much larger world than the previous film.

4

There’s nothing like this movie. It feels like accidentally walking into someone else’s bad dream and trying to wake them from it with no success until finally accepting that that very hopeless feeling is just your own version of a bad dream.

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ Liked

Val Lewton tasks Jacques Tourneur with a Haitian voodoo/plantation slavery Jane Eyre and—instead of turning in the exploitation B-picture that premise suggests—makes a genuinely lyrical, haunting gothic horror melodrama. One that reckons with the psychological and spiritual ramifications of that colonial history, as well as our broader relationship to the past (and the dead) in such a sad, unsettling and dreamy way that it rivals the best Henry James adaptations and is as heartbroken as it is eerie and ominous. Wind and drumbeats have never been used to such atmospheric effect and the supernatural, tropical locale lends itself to all the incredibly elemental tone poem imagery that is designed to force its rational and scientific white protagonists to reckon with…

7

External cultural artifacts made malleable so as to always fit within the parameters of the colonial, the foreign made just familiar enough to curtail unease to tolerable levels: tolerable as opposed to none at all because it is inherently contradictory and thus the malleability required to minimize such necessity, and tolerated to begin with because it is massively profitable of course. The land becomes a backdrop for white anxieties to play out but all the while reminding them of their abject hypocrisy. The wrongful inheritance of Saint Sebastian's suffering; the wrongful annexation of Haitian voodoo. A land of contradictions naturally breeds more: the living dead are born.

16

Major spoilers ahead. 

In a 1971 interview with Positif, Jacques Tourner shared the following:

I've always refused to caricature [B]lacks. ... I've always tried to give them a profession, to have them speak normally without drawing any comic effect. ... Several times I've been accused of being an "[n-word] lover," and for long months I was out of the studios for that reason. It was sort of a gray list.

This unusually sensitive treatment of people of African descent (recognizing, of course, that portraying people as human beings shouldn't need to be considered "unusual," but the reality is that, in Hollywood, it was, for many decades) is on full display in I Walked with a Zombie, Tourner's second collaboration with…

Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ Liked

"They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?"

"If you say, Miss. If you say."

1

Tropical malady

1

So lyrical that watching it is like running your fingers through gossamer. Howling wind blows through stalks of sugar cane. Ceremonial drumming is audible far off in the night. Moonlight pours between the slats in the window shades, inscribing a broken pattern of horizontal light onto every surface in the room. (Noir lighting in the middle of the Caribbean.) The horror lies in these and other sensory details, gradually amassed over the film's slim run time. The plot is someone dreaming Jane Eyre, twitching in their slumber as intimations of romance give way to voodoo rituals. Unlike the bulk of Hollywood's 1940s output, I Walked with a Zombie acknowledges (if only marginally) the legacies of colonialism and slavery. But then, a Lewton/Tourneur collaboration isn't really like anything else. It's wind and drumming and moonlight and then you wake up.

1

Spare close-ups merely cap the overwhelming sense of unease, even dread, that Tourneur can put into long and medium shots. He begins the film with shots of empty rooms, static but active with tropical humidity, and the sense of misery and stagnation of those shots is only expanded when he finally turns to people. Tourneur filters ambiguous supernatural forces through the more visible effects of post-imperial interaction, wherein whites feel as trapped as the indigenous population they continue to control, in some cases literally. It always upends expectations, particularly when it reaches a Wizard of Oz-esque revelation of the person controlling the island's voodoo. Tourneur's crisp films work best for the unknown shaded into the crystal-clear frame, and none of his films is as troublingly unknowable as this.

4

and if you were on pain of death to follow orders, to submit yourself unwillingly to the will of another, to lose control of your body and your mind -- the movie begins and history doesn't end, it gets abandoned. the system of power craves the zombie as the ideal model citizen, and it is used to getting what it wants; who gives a fuck about a beautiful island paradise if there's no freedom to enjoy it? the colonizer hollows out everything, makes it all vapid, especially herself -- only a zombie has use for more zombies.

4

The unsettled past returns to haunt an equally fragile present in Jacques Tourneur’s atmospheric horror classic, focusing on a young Canadian nurse arriving on a remote Caribbean island to treat the catatonic wife of her employer; shadows of slavery and oppression add extra texturing to this brooding tale, positioning it in an unusual place for a 40s film.

A few aspects might seem dated in attitude now, but the fact that this injustice is even acknowledged to some degree at that time feels quite bold, the story weaving in elements of the voodoo religion through its Caribbean setting to shed light on a criminally underrepresented culture for audiences of the time.

This gives a unique perspective to the film that’s…