Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"I Walked With a Zombie" packs a major cinematic, horrifyingly dreamlike punch with its brazen atmosphere of sugar cane fields and voodoo ceremonies in a vast plantation. In terms of its often frightening and poetic imagery of shadows lurking in the night, this is no average RKO horror picture. This is directed by the phenomenal Jacques Tourneur ("Cat People") and produced by the great Val Lewton and it is the stuff of repressed nightmares - the kind that leaves you gasping for air whenever a zombie appears with bugged out eyes appears.
That particular zombie is none other than CarreFour (Darby Jones), a very tall, striking figure, a zombie guard of sorts, who is often commanded to grab Jessica (Christine Gordon), a seemingly comatose and emotionless woman who walks at night in some sort of trance. Jessica is married to Paul Holland (Tom Conway), who owns the plantation and is as emotionless as Jessica. Truly the problem with Jessica isn't her spinal cord, based on the local doctor's findings, but that she is the walking dead! That's right, she is a zombie herself. Paul has to contend with her sleepwalking and with his half-brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison), who is practically an alcoholic in the making. Paul has hired a Canadian nurse, the nurturing Betsy (Frances Dee), who wants to cure Jessica unaware of her actual, shall we say, issues. She also falls for Paul although it is such a muted love story that it never occurred to me she had any feelings for him - the nurse gets along more smashingly with James. The "Jane Eyre" influence is not immediate in this alleged re-telling.
"I Walked With a Zombie" might give the Z generation pause for its plantation setting but it shouldn't - the black residents of this Caribbean island are not slaves, though many came from slavery. Carre-Four might be seen as a racist stereotype but he is simply devoid of humanity - just a zombie who never kills anyone. The performances are effectively restrained and the atmosphere gives off otherworldly, supernatural vibes (complemented with a constant drumbeat) that you would never feel in a George Romero "Dead" film. Influential and elegantly made with breathless, intoxicating scenes that may put you in a fixated trance.
