I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

I Walked with a Zombie
(Jacques Tourneur, 1943, USA, 35mm, 69 min)

The collaboration between RKO producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur is one of the most celebrated in the history of horror, and I Walked with a Zombie may be the pair’s masterpiece. This subtle and unnerving supernatural tale, inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, unfolds on a West Indies sugar plantation, where a voodoo curse seems to possess the soul of the plantation owner’s wife. The film’s mesmerizing low-key cinematography conjures an atmosphere of exotic dread and uncertainty, but the darkest shadow cast in this Gothic melodrama is the one cast by the island’s ugly history of slavery and colonialism. Print courtesy of the Library of Congress.

James J. Hodge, Associate Professor of English and the Humanities, and Ashley R. Smith, doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures, will introduce the film