FOLIO
Looking forward to the upcoming season of The Walking Dead, I thought about the evolution of zombies in film from their first appearance in 1932’s White Zombie to today’s reanimated cannibalistic cadavers haunting the big screens, the boob tube, and soon even Jane Austen in the upcoming Pride and Prejudice … and Zombies.
Recently out on Blu-ray, the granddaddy of them all — White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi — is dreadful stuff indeed. Though the film had some popular success upon its initial release in the early ’30s, a time when audiences thrilled to the great Universal monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, contemporary critics mostly agreed in their disdain. A gap of 80-plus years on, and White Zombie still fares no better — even on Blu-ray.
The only acceptable elements of the film today (or back then, for that matter) are the occasionally impressive sets (borrowed from better Universal films) and one early scene in which Lugosi’s satanic eyes are superimposed on the screen. The rest of it — plot, screenplay, and especially acting — is simply execrable, as ludicrous as the much-maligned Plan 9 from Outer Space, but not as entertaining.
Still, White Zombie is the species’ cinematic figurehead, inspiring at least one sequel (Revolt of the Zombies, 1936) and setting the template for celluloid zombies (there were quite a few, mostly bad) for the next 35 years. And then a young independent filmmaker from Pittsburgh, George Romero, made Night of the Living Dead (1968), turning the plodding blank-eyed victims of voodoo magic into the infected munching corpses that have eaten at the modern imagination ever since.
Curiously, Romero never used the word “zombie” in his film nor does The Walking Dead, but their millions of fans still know a zombie when they see one, by any other name or not (to paraphrase the Bard).
While today’s zombie films rely heavily on special effects, big budgets, and gore for maximum impact (for better and worse), there’s one example from the golden days of yesteryear (pre-Romero) when imagination and design crafted a masterpiece with a minimum of resources, at least by today’s standards. Released in 1943 during WWII, I Walked with a Zombie delivers the promise of its clever title and constitutes the second of two superior horror films director Jacques Tourneur made with producer Val Lewton. The first was the previous year’s Cat People.
Buoyed by good scripts and fine performances from the mostly B-grade casts, both films depend largely on lighting, shadows, and inventive camera angles for the desired effect. Unlike Cat People, though, Walked is more ambivalent about the nature of its supernatural elements. Whether it’s actually the dead doing the walking in the second film is ultimately beside the point. What we experience is a moody evocative family drama laced with voodoo, romance, and tragedy against the backdrop of the historical slave trade.
Frances Dee (wife of Joel McCrea) plays Betsy, a Canadian nurse hired to care for the near-catatonic wife of sugar planter Paul (Tom Conway, younger brother of George Sanders) in the West Indies. The place is laced with history, domestic and otherwise. Paul’s brother is in love with his corpse-like sister-in-law; and, oddly, the figurehead from a slave ship, pierced with arrows, decorates the courtyard.
And then there’s the threat of voodoo, summoning the characters, who are compelled to answer. Director Tourneur traces the details of their various journeys with some of the creepier, more memorable scenes from mid-’40s cinema.
Tourneur went on to direct the film noir masterpiece Out of the Past (1946) and the British horror classic Night of the Demon (1967), but I Walked with a Zombie doesn’t lurk in their shadows — it’s a very sinister stroll all on its own.
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