Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

The most elegant of Val Lewton's low budget horrors for RKO, an imaginative updating of Jane Eyre which anticipates Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea by transposing the action to the Caribbean, with Rochester's first wife not mad but the victim of a voodoo spell. The script, weaving a delicately intricate web of local superstition around a litany of oblique references to the relativity of good and evil, does wonders in creating an ambiguously unsettling atmosphere. But it is Tourneur's caressingly evocative direction, superbly backed by Roy Hunt's chiaroscuro images, that makes sheer magic of the film's brooding journey into fear by way of voodoo drums, gleaming moonlight, somnambulistic ladies in fluttering white, and dark, silent, undead sentries.

Author: TM 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Producer: Val Lewton

Cast: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, Christine Gordon, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones full cast

Genre(s): Horror

Duration: 69 mins

Related articles


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.