Revenant Review Extras 2: The one with actual voodoo

 

Title: I Walked With A Zombie

What Year?: 1943

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

With the lineup for this feature well into overtime, I’ve found myself second-guessing decisions I made early on. The rule of thumb I have tried to implement is to cover gaps in my previous choices, the periods, trends and subgenres that didn’t quite make it in. What I had to admit is that there were two heavily overlapping areas I had actively avoided. The first is films from the 1940s, the second is movies based ostensibly “real” Afro-Caribbean voodoo. These works always serve as the starting point for any “serious” history of the zombie movie genre, but in my own meandering survey, I had no trouble working around them. Over time, I developed certain plans to cover early or otherwise significant movies I hadn’t deemed suitable for the feature. Even then, however, one movie stood out mockingly, which I finally acknowledged needed a full-length review. With that, I present I Walked With The Zombie, probably the best of the vintage “voodoo” zombie movies, and one that still goes over my head.

Our story begins with a woman named Betsy arriving in the Caribbean as a servant and nurse to a colonial landowner named Paul and his bedridden wife. She soon discovers that the wife is in fact the victim of a sort of waking coma, in which she wanders for long periods of time without any sign of intellect or her former personality. Meanwhile, a potential love triangle brews between the lady, her boss and his disreputable half-brother Rand. But things really heat up as our heroine discovers learns that the natives practice voodoo, and that many of them view her mistress as a zombie under a curse. Could native magic provide a cure where modern science has failed, or has she only found the dark secret that will destroy them all?

I Walked With A Zombie was a 1943 film by the legendary Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script by Curt Siodmak. The film was made as part of a wave of “voodoo” films following 1932’s White Zombie, reportedly developed around the title of a largely unrelated non-fiction article on Haiti. The film starred Frances Dee as Betsy, Tom Conway as Paul and James Ellison as Wesley Rand, with jungle-movie stalwart Darby Jones as the titular zombie. While similar movies had been filmed on location in the Caribbean, I Walked With A Zombie was shot entirely in California. It has been released on home video, including a two-pack DVD release with The Body Snatcher and at least one Blu Ray release.

For my personal experiences, what the voodoo wave of the zombie genre inevitably brings to mind are the books The Magic Island by William Seabrook and Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston. For all their problems (most obvious in Seabrook’s volume), they still come as close as any outside observer could to conveying both the realities and the internal and external “myths” that shroud Haiti, vodun and Afro-Caribbean culture in general. What I have intermittently pondered is whether Hollywood then or since has or ever could come close to portraying the subject with comparable insight. In those terms, the present film is just about Number One in a field of one, with only White Zombie and The Serpent And The Rainbow offering any ground for further comparison. Its authenticity may be as suspect as a Karl May Wild West novel, but it at least tried to dig for something deeper in its sensationalized subject matter. It’s telling enough that what it unearths is mostly a heaping helping of late-colonial “white” angst.

Now, I’m going straight to what we’re all here for, the undead. In an ironic bit of truth in advertising, we really only see one zombie, played unforgettably by Jones. He doesn’t really do much, but always looks freaky as all Hell even if he’s just standing and staring as in his first and most iconic appearance. The most unusual thing about him is that he actually has a name, Carrefour, though no further account is given of his character and backstory. When he moves, it is with the same slow gait of a Romero zombie (already present in The Walking Dead), without the uncoordinated shambling played up by later imitators. Per the “rules” of semi-authentic voodoo lore, he is rarely if ever threatening of his own accord, and will respond to commands from those who call his name. On the other hand, we never see a zombie master on the level of Lugosi in White Zombie (see… Tourist Trap?), suggesting either that he escaped or outlived his original creator or that his zombification is somehow by the collective will of the people of the island. Left to his own devices, he appears to wander aimlessly or guard the shrine where the local cult worships. The only things that seem to give him a clear and malign purpose are violence and the misuse of voodoo rites. By the finale, the proceedings start to fall into the moralizing rut of more routine fair, but the zombie remains an unusually effective agent of vengeance, still merely advancing on the sinner as he retreats toward his doom.

If it seems like I’m holding out for a “but”, that would be just about everything else in this movie. The whole love triangle(s?) is just a predictable if well-acted melodrama, with the one major twist being that we don’t actually see the heroine get together with any of her potential love interests. (And to think of the possibilities of a Betsy/ Carrefour fan fic…) In fact, on any amount of analysis, the outsider heroine is far too naïve to be a part of this world, while still remaining too bland for the viewer to be invested in. What keeps the film interesting is the contrast between the troubled family and the natives. There is tension here, comparable to if not an improvement on the sexualized allegory of Lewton’s Cat People, and for once, there’s no pretense that the pagans are necessarily in the wrong. If anything, there’s an implicit reversal of the whole setup of the voodoo horror narrative. The zombie master, after all, is merely amoral, using his powers for rational ends. It takes western/ Christian "civilization" to bring the concepts of guilt, betrayal and willful evil to full flower.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and I’ve already been flying blind here. As often happens, though, one sequence did indeed stand out. Partway in, Rand makes his big play by taking Betsy out to lunch in the middle of the town. He proceeds to give the newcomer an unflattering account of his brother, soon hinting that the mistress’s illness is the product of abuse. In the middle of it, they hear a singer performing a ballade about a man running off with his brother’s beautiful wife, which we will learn is the story of Rand and the mistress. It’s a genuinely beautiful song, if you aren’t paying attention to the words, and impressively dark if you are. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Rand becomes upset and confronts the singer. The balladeer insists that he didn’t know the other man was there, which we definitely have cause to doubt. But then, of course, there would have been no problem at all if the rich guy hadn’t reacted in front of his date. It’s a clever snapshot of the taut relationship between native peoples and their colonial rulers that’s still reasonably relevant, and a fair demonstration of why the film remains worth watching at all.

In conclusion, I must once again come to the rating. I started this review as a much shorter summary, and at that point, I was quite ready to give this movie the lowest rating. After writing out my thoughts at greater length, I knew that that was a little too harsh, especially for a film this far in the past. However, I still couldn’t talk myself into giving it a rating much higher than that, which in hindsight is a non-trivial reason I hadn’t planned on covering this one at all. In the final analysis, this is a movie where being a product of its time is more a con than a pro. Its thoughtfulness and overall quality remain impressive, considering the state of the culture then and long after. But it still falls well behind many other works from the same time frame, though most are in other mediums and genres. To me, the biggest mark against it and indeed the whole voodoo subgenre is that The Walking Dead had already proved that you could have an at least conceptually interesting “zombie” without any of the voodoo trappings in the first place. What was needed was either to offer a realized and dignified portrayal of Caribbean culture, or move on to a more modern concept of the undead, yet the studio system spent the next 20 years doing neither. This movie may have been the best of its kind, but it was also the surest sign that it was time for something else.