Zombies are kinda big in fiction these days. Granted, the idea of the undead flesh-eating thing is a more recent interpretation, and older stories about zombies tend to focus more on the aspect of some poor soul turned into some kind of mindless slave through the use of voodoo. That would be more or less where movies like I Walked with a Zombie came from.
I liked the previous movie I saw from producer Val Lewton, namely Cat People. Would I feel the same way about this one?
Canadian nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) gets hired to care for an invalid, essentially comatose woman, the wife of the owner of a Caribbean sugar plantation. En route, she meets the owner’s brother Wesley (James Ellison), a rather bitter man, and when she arrives, the owner Paul (Tom Conway) is a bit quick to point out the general misery attached to the place given the history of the place involved slavery. There is a large, local black population, many of whom work for Paul, and they have some local customs including the voodoo religion.
As it is, Betsy throws herself into her work, caring for the seemingly unresponsive Jessica (Christine Gordon). There’s some additional intrigue as rumors swirl about Jessica’s relationship with Wesley before whatever disease she had turned her into a vegetable, and Betsy herself falls for Paul to the point that she vows to somehow cure Jessica (despite the fact she’s a nurse and not, you know, a doctor). But what about the locals and their voodoo practice? Does that explain the large, silent man who walks around at night, and may perhaps even explain Jessica’s condition?
Oddly enough, this story was somehow inspired by Jane Eyre. That may explain why Betsy falls for a moody control freak type like Paul.
So, Cat People was something of a tense, shadow-filled exercise in psychological terror. Did I get that from I Walked with a Zombie? A little, but mostly I wondered about the use of voodoo in the movie. Voodoo is an actual religion, and while I don’t know much about it, and the movie didn’t necessarily cast it as evil magic, it still made me wonder about the use of a practiced religion in a work of fiction, particularly a movie that is something of a horror film. Was it respectful? It seemed to be to me all things being equal for a 40s horror flick, but I don’t practice voodoo, so I don’t really know. Questions like that did effect my enjoyment of the overall movie, and that was something of a problem.
But there was some nice music in this one, I’ll say that much.
Grade: C+
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