One of the few films dealing with the zombie concept before the genius of Romero. So, they're not reanimated, flesh-eating evil dead, but rather magically in a trance due to Voodoo spells.

I was quite impressed by this film, it is very short, but manages very well to bring forward its story. The characters convinced me, dialogue was good and there were some generally very moody moments.

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.

Eat your heart out, Seth Grahame-Smith. Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur were busy mashing up Regency literature with supernatural monsters long before you were born, and with much more worthwhile results.

I Walked With A Zombie borrows from a section of Jane Eyre, transplanting the action to the Caribbean and throwing in voodoo zombies. Betsy Connell is a Canadian nurse who's hired to care for Jessica Holland, a "mental case" living out on a sugar plantation on the island of St Sebastian. When she arrives, Betsy meets and is instantly smitten with Paul Holland, and sets about trying to restore his wife's mind - first through medicine, and then through black magic. Cue some amazing creepy nighttime sequences, all shadows and menace and intrigue.

Val Lewton was pretty much a genius. This movie is perfect. Fuck Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Watch this instead.

I started filling in my Val Lewton shaped cinematic blind-spot with I Walked With a Zombie. It was everything I had been led to expect from Lewton and Tourneur; atmospheric, inventive, suggestive and creepy. Definitely a slow build but the pay off justifies the somewhat languid pace of the oepning.
Can't wait to explore more Lewton/Tourneur collaborations.

#97 of Top 100 Best Horror Films

I understand its ambition, but this is a very weak horror movie. There's no sense of danger, no suspense, no fear. Is this even horror?
I have a lot of problems with this movie. I don't understand how this is part of the top 100 horror list, just because it's a zombie movie in the 40's smh

A nurse sent to a plantation on a Caribbean island to care for a sick woman. While there she discovers the voodoo rituals that go on and how the woman she is caring for is somehow attached to them. One of the best Jacques Tourneur / Val Lewton collaborations.

I wish I liked this movie more but it really does bore me. I don't like the acting and even though the movie is merely 60 minutes long it's so dragging that it feels like a lifetime.
Too little happens.
Too little suspense.
I respect it for what it is: a film with a zombieconcept in the 40s. But to me it's really nothing more than that.

Wonderfully eerie voodoo-themed spin on Jane Eyre, with masterfully atmospheric direction and much strange, dreamlike imagery from Jacques Tourneur.

Surprisingly eerie.

Do not fool around on your husband. Not in this family anyway.

A foreign white woman's feverish journey into the heart of fear of the other. Rendered with atmospheric darkness by Tourneur.