Excellent but underrated film

Best movie ever!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I often wonder what war-time audiences of the forties thought after leaving "...Zombie". Who could have been prepared for what lay behind the penny-dreadful title, surely one of the most poetic renderings of horror in genre history. Books have been written about its creator Val Lewton, and deservedly so. But what's on screen is traceable to the unerring pictorialism of director Jacques Tourneur, and his mastery of the fluid camera. Forget the plot and dialogue, too much of which is half-baked philosophizing, and the performances which, excepting Sir Lancelot's lovely sing-song, are largely secondary. Focus instead on the lyrical scenes that unfold like a shadowy dream as the camera pulls back to reveal the poetic beauty of atmosphere. This is the perfect antidote for viewers max'ed out on the over-FXed, overly literal staple of today. "Zombie" shows that Tourneur grasped what Lewton and Hitchcock already knew - that the greatest fright repository is your own imagination.

This is a clever take on Jayne Eyre by a great producer-director team Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur who made several films for a stick of gum in the early forties and obtained 90 per cent of their effects by allowing the viewers imagination to stand in for cgi which was still decades in the future. Tom Conway may have only had a voice and suavity in common with his brother George Sanders but he makes a half-decent fist of the Rochester role and it's a great chance to catch the elusive Frances Dee as the Jane Eyre figure. She married Joel McCrea in the early thirties and didn't work nearly enough post-nuptials despite being a talented actress and a looker with it. Decent B-picture.

This is not a bad zombie film - it's actually fairly good for what it is. Nurse Betsy is from Canada and she is hired to go to the West Indies to care for Jessica, a woman who's mind seems inflicted with a type of paralysis. Jessica is the wife of Paul Holland - Betsy and Paul fall in-love and Betsy is determined to help Jessica because she believes that is what Paul is wanting.Jessica is believed to be a zombie and some believe that voodoo is the only cure for her. Is Jessica a zombie or is she simply sick as a result of a high fever? This would be a great double feature with films like White Zombie (1932), Revolt of the Zombies (1936) or the comedy-horror film King of the Zombies (1941).6.5/10

After watching I Walked With A Zombie I was shaken a bit, a little unnerved as it were. But when I started to analyze the film I was wondering just what did I see?Frances Dee has been hired to look after Tom Conway's wife Christine Gordon who is in a coma, but this is the sleepwalking type of coma and the natives have identified here as a zombie. Here illness whatever it is has cast a pall on the household. Conway and his mother apparently make a nice income which is half brother James Ellison drinks a lot of it away.One thing that was interesting and highly unusual. The natives are the descendants of escaped slaves and the heritage there is one of reverting back to their tribal beliefs as an act of defiance. Slavery with few exceptions is rarely dealt with from the slave or former slave point of view.Edith Barrett plays Conway and Ellison's mother. She likes Dee and views here as an ideal daughter-in-law for one of her kids. She also has another role on the island, one I can't reveal here. Val Lewton produced and Jacques Tourneur directed I Walked With A Zombie. It's not great, I think it was butchered in the editing department. But the mood that is created will linger with you. And the ending is decades ahead of its time, something you might see in a Stephen King work.