Jacques Tourneur - I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

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Jacques Tourneur - I Walked with a Zombie (1943) [DVDrip]
English | Subtitles: EN/FR/ESP (optional) | 1:08:39 | 720×528 | 23.976fps | XviD | Audio: MP3 - 128kbps | 695 MB

A young Canadian nurse comes to the West Indies to care for Jessica, the wife of a plantation manager. Jessica seems to be suffering from a kind of mental paralysis as a result of fever. When she falls in love with Paul, Betsy determines to cure Jessica even if she needs to use a voodoo ceremony, to give Paul what she thinks he wants.

Don’t expect I Waked with a Zombie to be a horror movie. It’s a far more gripping and perceptive film about the unknown that’s all around us that we’re just too blind to see and believe. Until it’s jolting effects hits us, like it did to those in the movie, right between the eyes. IMDB review

The movie has what’s become a trademark in Lawton/Tourneur movies with it’s use by director Tourneur of light and sound as well as the audience imagination to build up the tension. The tension reaches a point where it almost becomes unbearable to those watching without having a stiff drink to settle them down. The scene with Betsy and Jessica walking through the dark sugar cane field is a good example of how Tourneur can scare the hell out of you without any special effects like the way it’s done in horror movies by todays movie makers. IMDB review

Though the earlier Universal horror films of James Whale (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein) and Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks) are better-known, RKO’s smaller-budgeted horror pictures produced by Val Lewton, including I Walked With a Zombie, have had perhaps a more lasting influence on American cinema. Relying on moody psychological terror rather than special effects, Zombie and its precursor, Cat People, are purely cinematic in building suspense through atmosphere. With these two films, director Jacques Tourneur proved himself most capable of bringing Lewton’s vision to the screen. While Cat People is revered more than any other Lewton film, Zombie, despite its garish title, is every bit as mesmerizing. Essentially the story of Jane Eyre with some voodoo thrown in, the film has a remarkably rich, evocative visual style. Lewton would spend a few more successful years making horror films at RKO before breaking away to try his hand (mostly unsuccessfully) at more romantic mainstream movies. AMG review

RKO producer Val Lewton seemed to thrive upon taking the most lurid film titles and coming up with pocket-edition works of art. Saddled with the studio-dictated title I Walked With a Zombie, Lewton, together with scripters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, concocted a West Indies variation on Jane Eyre. Trained nurse (Frances Dee) travels to the tropics to care for Christine Gordon, the wife of seemingly abusive Tom Conway. At first, Dee merely believes her patient to be comatose. But as the drums throb and the natives behave restlessly, Dee tries to bring her patient back to life by jungle magic. Conway is racked with guilt, believing himself responsible for his wife’s condition; his guilt is stoked by Conway’s drunken brother James Ellison, who has always loved Gordon. Utilizing very limited sets and only a handful of extras, director Jacques Tourneur manages to evoke an impression of an expansive tropical island populated at every turn by voodoo worshippers. Many of the sequences, notably Frances Dee’s first languid stroll into the midst of the native ceremonies, have an eerie dream-like quality that pervades even the most worn-out, badly processed TV prints of I Walked With Zombie. AMG review

IMDB review - AMG review - DVD description (Val Lewton Boxset)

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