A Canadian nurse, Betsy, arrives on a Caribbean island to tend to an invalid woman who appears to suffer from an unexplained paralysis. The horrific truth soon emerges, however—amid the haunting rhythms of the voodoo drums.

An early example of the zombie film, Jacques Tourneur’s unsung masterpiece marries the gothic dread of Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre with Haitian traditions and folklore. Haunting the recurring images of confinement and chains are no simple ghosts, but the phantoms of slavery and racism.