I Walked with a Zombie: Better Doctors

The commissioner appears just once, in a medium long shot from the point of view of Alma and Betsy. Tourneur’s flattening of the visual presentation of the authorities on the island is deliberate. At stake in I Walked with a Zombie is the power to effect change in the lives and conditions of people. This power is closely connected to ways of seeing and interpreting appearances, as the early scenes indicate. At Betsy’s job interview, she is asked a question designed to exclude applicants who might prove receptive to supernatural interpretations of Jessica’s illness. On the ship that brings her to San Sebastian, the nurse’s impression of the beauty of the sea and sky is countered by Paul’s insistence on the omnipresence of “death and decay.” Paul seeks to impose his rationalism and pessimism on Betsy and, through her, on the story, which her voice-over narrates. The film resists his attempt, as it goes on to undermine all its white characters’ pretensions to authority and even agency.

It’s notable that the white characters who show the greatest ability to cross over into the world of the Black ones are women: Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), Paul’s mother, who administers the benefits of modern medical science under the guise of the gods of Vodou; Betsy, who seeks to reverse that process by submitting Jessica to therapies available at the houmfort; and Jessica, who ends up floating between the houmfort and gated Fort Holland. These women’s adaptability and their weak ideological adhesion to sources of power and protection align them with Lewton and Tourneur, poets working undercover in the commercial film industry.

A striking example of the power of women occurs in the scene of Betsy and Jessica’s visit to the houmfort. While Betsy is inside a hut with Mrs. Rand, Jessica remains among the celebrants. A Black woman looks at Jessica, then at the sword dancer, or sabreur (Jieno Moxzer), who plays a leading role in the rites. He looks at the woman; the woman looks back at Jessica and picks up a sword from a table, which she hands to the sabreur. Though the sword is wielded by a man, the direction for its use comes from a woman. Here, I Walked with a Zombie hints at the matriarchal elements within Black Caribbean culture, of which Tourneur, Lewton, and Wray were undoubtedly aware (in her research for the project, Wray personally consulted Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1938 book Tell My Horse, about Vodou practices, also addresses this subject). This detail was clearly meaningful for Tourneur, who later made several films that hinge on the female assumption of prerogatives for action, including Out of the Past (1947), Easy Living (1949), and Anne of the Indies (1951).

In the triumphant sequence of Betsy and Jessica’s walk from Fort Holland to the houmfort, I Walked with a Zombie epitomizes the contradictions that structure its narrative. These contradictions, crucial to Lewton’s conception of the film, also have to do with the visual imperatives of flow and evenness of tonality in Tourneur’s direction. Jacques Lourcelles saw how Tourneur “slips a hint of the fantastic” into each of the genres in which he works, and that this element can be found “in the rhythm of the narrative, consisting of an irregular, depressing, and nondynamic succession of moments of weariness and moments of terror.” One notices this rhythm, once one has become sensitized to it, in all Tourneur’s films. It has much to do with what Manny Farber described, writing on The Leopard Man, as “a way to tell a story about people that isn’t dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure.” Tourneur emphasizes long shots, angles in which characters turn wholly or partly away from the camera, and lighting schemes that heighten the effaced and remote quality of their presence.

When, in I Walked with a Zombie, Betsy expresses her love for Paul in voice-over, Tourneur films her from a great height as she stands on a cliff overlooking the shore. This aestheticized shot is revelatory of Tourneur’s style, as is the diagonal composition near the end of the film in which a wave dissipates on the beach under the feet of Carre-Four (Darby Jones), the sublime guardian of the crossroads. Earlier, Paul’s half brother, Wesley (James Ellison), stands in shadow deep in the background as Paul and Betsy converse in a doorway in the foreground, before he emerges to reproach Paul in resigned tones. As he performs Wesley’s final actions—opening the Fort Holland gate to release Jessica, pulling an arrow from the statue of Saint Sebastian in the courtyard, rising over Jessica’s dead body, staggering as he carries her into the surf—Ellison’s inexpressiveness makes it undecidable whether Wesley is under the control of the Vodou practitioners (of whom he has said, “They can make anyone do what they want”) or whether he surrenders to their drum in order to pretend to himself that he has no choice but to kill Jessica and himself.

Tourneur liked subdued acting. He told interviewers that he instructed actors to speak their lines twice as softly as they had done during rehearsal. When Mrs. Rand explains, to general disbelief, that she had a spell cast on Jessica to make her a zombie, Edith Barrett’s calm and quiet delivery hints at the power of this approach. The other actors in I Walked with a Zombie are also admirable. Frances Dee is excellent in a role that starts as central but eventually becomes only one among several characters wandering through the wreckage of the story. James Bell’s mildness in the role of the local doctor is crucial to the sense of attenuation of authority in the film, while Teresa Harris’s Alma, kind, gentle, and intelligent, with eyes that gleam when she talks of her religion, and Sir Lancelot’s calypso singer, sly, witty, and fiercely protective of his dignity, bring elegance and solidity to their portrayals of Black characters. Tom Conway could never rival his brother George Sanders’s preeminence in suave roles; called on to play the more dominant of two brothers in I Walked with a Zombie, Conway seems almost to apologize with his very soft-spokenness for lacking an air of authority he perhaps inwardly rebels against assuming.