Critics reviews

This is not a film about common or garden fears, like being afraid of the dark, something that Betsy most certainly isn't. Its success comes from the way it plays with much more deep-seated psychological anxieties about freewill, life and death.

I'm not easily frightened," insists Betsy Connell, the intrepid heroine of I Walked with a Zombie. Over the course of its 69-minute running time, Jacques Tourneur's 1943 film will find plenty of ways to challenge that assertion. At once the most pungently atmospheric and narratively unusual of the films Tourneur famously directed for producer Val Lewton at RKO in the early 1940s, I Walked with a Zombie has endured as a genre touchstone and pop-cultural reference point.

Though “I Walked With a Zombie” is technically a horror film, the horror itself derives from the film’s lighting and atmospherics rather than traditional scares or vibrant gore. It’s mainly a mood piece that establishes an uncanny eeriness early in the film which lingers until its very last moments.

Notions of reform are particularly relevant to I Walked with a Zombie, which offers an unusually nuanced portrait of the legacy of colonialism... much of the film’s extravagantly dense plotting is devoted to defining spheres of power that exist between the descendants of white colonialists and the ancestors of African slaves who live in a world that appears to be hidden and self-contained, yet informs mainstream white society in countless fashions.

The romance that's meant to flourish between Dee and Conway is stilted and unconvincing, but it's clear that Tourneur's interests lie in the shadows. Even at 68 minutes, the movie is a slow burn, but once Dee walks into the sugar-cane fields on her way to a voodoo ceremony, the fluid play of black on black is mesmerizing to behold.

Guilt and superstition, the penitence of sinners and the murmurs of gods, a wealth of tenebrous material woven most gracefully by Tourneur, who contemplates the native congregations with respectfully fascinated tracking shots and achieves a devastating effect with a cut from a pin pushed into a voodoo doll to an act of lethal sacrifice.

I Walked With a Zombie is one of the triumphs of the Val Lewton unit at RKO. Zombie (along with such films as Cat People and The Leopard Man, all of which were directed by Jacques Tourneur), is a great example of the Lewton style, which emphasized foreboding and dread over viewed horror.

With its voodoo rites and perambulating zombie, "I Walked With a Zombie" probably will please a lot of people. But to this spectator, at least, it proved to be a dull, disgusting exaggeration of an unhealthy, abnormal concept of life.