I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE 1943
As I embark on the modest yet ambitious “150 Days of Classic Horror” project, I aim to delve more deeply into the remaining Val Lewton films that have yet to be explored in my work – Bedlam, Cat People, The Body Snatcher, and Isle of the Dead. I’m drawn to the shadows and subtleties that have made his work a touchstone for generations of cinephiles and scholars alike. To cover these films extensively isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s an act of cinematic devotion, a way of tracing the delicate threads Lewton wove between fear and beauty, suggestion and revelation. His films are not simply stories; they are poems in motion, each frame layered with meaning, mood, and unspoken longing. In the more extensive continuing series, (refer to the link above where I cover I Walked with a Zombie, The Ghost Ship, The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man) I want to move beyond the surface chills and explore the artistry of Lewton and his collaborators: the directors who shaped the atmosphere, the actors who breathed life into haunted characters, the cinematographers who painted with shadow, and the composers who underscored every heartbeat of dread. These films deserve a careful, thoughtful analysis, for they are not only milestones in horror but also windows into the anxieties and desires of their era. To understand them fully is to appreciate the power of cinema to unsettle, to enchant, and to reflect the world’s complexities back at us through a glass darkly.
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie: A Hypnotic Dance Between Colonial Shadows and Gothic Desire
In 1943, Val Lewton—Hollywood’s poet of the unspeakable—crafted I Walked with a Zombie, a film that transcends its B-movie trappings to become a haunting meditation on colonialism, cultural dislocation, and the fragility of reason. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, whose collaborations with Lewton (Cat People, The Leopard Man) redefined horror as a genre of psychological suggestion, the film transforms Inez Wallace’s pulpy article about Haitian “zombies” into a dreamlike trance of repressed desires and historical guilt. With its chiaroscuro cinematography, Roy Webb’s primal score, and a narrative steeped in the legacy of slavery, I Walked with a Zombie is less a horror film than a séance, summoning the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried.
The story unfolds through the eyes of Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a Canadian nurse whose wide-eyed idealism masks a quiet determination. Hired to care for Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), the catatonic wife of sugar plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway), Betsy arrives on the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian—a name heavy with martyrdom—to find a world where the line between science and superstition blurs like sweat on skin. Jessica, once Paul’s vibrant bride, now sits motionless in a tower, her condition unexplained by Western medicine. “There’s no death here,” Paul tells Betsy, his voice dripping with colonial fatalism. “Only life that shouldn’t be lived.” The plantation, a relic of the Dutch slave trade, is haunted by the specter of Ti-Misery, a statue of Saint Sebastian repurposed as the figurehead of a slave ship, its arrow-pierced body a silent witness to centuries of exploitation.
Tourneur and cinematographer J. Roy Hunt cloak the island in shadows that seem to breathe. The sugarcane fields, shot in ethereal moonlight, sway like a chorus of restless spirits, while the houmfort (Vodou temple – meaning “abode of spirits” In Haitian Vodou, the hounfour is the sacred space where rituals, ceremonies, and veneration of the spirits (lwa) take place, pulsing with the rhythm of drums that echo the island’s fractured heartbeat. In the film’s most iconic sequence, Betsy leads Jessica through these fields at night, past animal skulls and hanging hides, to seek “better doctors” at the houmfort.
The walk is a descent into the subconscious: the camera glides alongside them, the wind whispering through cane stalks as Darby Jones’ Carrefour—a towering, silent guardian with eyes like polished obsidian—emerges from the darkness. His presence, neither fully human nor wholly supernatural, embodies the film’s central tension: the white characters’ fear of the “primitive” and the Black community’s resilience in preserving their traditions under colonial rule.
In the garden of the Holland estate stands Ti-Misery, the sorrowful figurehead salvaged from a slave ship, arrows bristling from its wooden flesh. It is both relic and warning, a mute witness to centuries of suffering. The moonlight glances off its face, catching the anguish carved there, and the air around it seems to shimmer with the weight of unspoken history. This is the island’s true heart: a place where beauty and pain are forever entwined, and every shadow is thick with memory.
There is the unforgettable midnight procession through the sugarcane fields, where Betsy, in her pale nurse’s dress, leads the somnambulistic Jessica on a pilgrimage for hope. The moonlight weaves silver threads through the whispering cane, and the air is thick with the pulse of distant drums and the hush of the wind—a world suspended between waking and dream Animal skulls and ritual talismans hang like omens in their path, and then, from the shadows, Carrefour appears: an imposing watchman, his eyes wide and unblinking, as if he is both gatekeeper and ghost. The very earth seems to hold its breath as the women pass, the scene unfolding with the logic of a half-remembered nightmare, each footfall a step deeper into the island’s mysteries.
At the houmfort, Betsy witnesses a Vodou ceremony that Tourneur films with a documentarian’s curiosity and a surrealist’s eye. The Vodou ceremony unfolds in a fever of rhythm and color. The dancers move in trance-like unison, their bodies answering the call of the drums, while the congregation’s voices rise and fall like a tide.
While the houngan (priest) slashes Jessica’s arm with a saber, when she fails to bleed, the crowd gasps: “Zombie!” This moment crystallizes the film’s critique of the colonial gaze. Jessica’s condition—a product of Mrs. Rand’s (Edith Barrett) desperate invocation of Vodou to stop her from destroying the family—becomes a metaphor for the zombification of Black bodies under slavery. The film doesn’t romanticize Vodou; instead, it frames it as a lived resistance, a language of power that the Hollands dismiss as “superstition” even as it dismantles their illusions of control.
The camera lingers on faces caught between ecstasy and terror, and when Jessica’s bloodless arm is revealed, the word “zombie” ripples through the crowd like a chill wind. The ceremony is both spectacle and sacrament, its power undeniable, its meaning layered with centuries of resistance and longing.
Elsewhere, the restaurant scene becomes a stage for another kind of ritual: Sir Lancelot’s calypso song, with its sly lyrics, exposes the Holland family’s secrets to the island’s gaze. The music is gentle, almost mocking, and the words cut deeper than any knife, turning private shame into public lament. The Holland brothers’ faces flicker with anger and humiliation, and the air is charged with the knowledge that nothing can remain hidden for long.
Finally, the torchlit climax by the sea: Paul’s half-brother Wesley, driven by guilt and grief, carries Jessica’s unresisting body toward the surf, the flames of the villagers’ torches flickering in the night. Carrefour follows, implacable as fate, and the waves close over the doomed lovers. The scene is at once an exorcism and a requiem, the island reclaiming its dead, and the past refusing to be laid to rest.
Each of these moments is woven from shadow and suggestion, from the poetry of what is seen and what is only felt. Lewton and Tourneur conjure a world where every breeze and every silence carries meaning, and where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the beautiful and the damned, are as thin and fragile as moonlight on water.
The performances are studies in restraint. Frances Dee’s Betsy oscillates between Florence Nightingale resolve and trembling vulnerability, her crisp nurse’s uniform a stark contrast to the island’s humid sensuality. Tom Conway, Lewton’s recurring leading man, plays Paul with a weary magnetism, his colonial guilt masked by a sardonic wit. Yet it’s Darby Jones’ Carrefour—wordless, spectral, and endlessly imitated—who lingers in the memory, a monument to the film’s unspoken subtext: the Black body as both feared and fetishized.
Roy Webb’s score is a character in itself, weaving calypso melodies (courtesy of Sir Lancelot’s haunting vocals) with dissonant strings that mirror Betsy’s unraveling sense of security. The film charts her psychological journey from confident professionalism to a state of deep uncertainty and emotional vulnerability. At the outset, Betsy arrives on Saint Sebastian with a sense of purpose and optimism, but as she becomes enmeshed in the island’s mysteries and the Holland family’s tragic history, her rational worldview is steadily eroded. The failure of conventional medicine to cure Jessica and Betsy’s subsequent decision to seek help from the Vodou houmfort marks a pivotal moment where her “professional carapace is shattered, and she enters a liminal state”. She is shaken by the island’s atmosphere, the eerie rituals, and the supernatural possibilities that challenge her belief in science and order.
The music peaks in the climax, as Wesley Rand (James Ellison), Jessica’s tormented brother-in-law, carries her body into the sea, pursued by Carrefour. Their deaths, framed against Ti-Misery’s arrow-riddled form, offer no catharsis—only the grim acknowledgment that the sins of the past are as inescapable as the tide.
Lewton and screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray infuse Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre with a postcolonial ache. The mansion’s secrets—a madwoman in the attic, a brooding patriarch—are reframed through the lens of racial and cultural collision. When Mrs. Rand confesses to using Vodou to “kill” Jessica, she embodies the film’s central irony: the colonizer’s reliance on the very traditions they despise.
I Walked with a Zombie was dismissed by some critics as schlock, but its legacy lies in its audacity. Lewton, working under RKO’s constraints, turned a sensational title into a poem of light and shadow, where horror emerges not from monsters, but from the rot festering beneath imperialist façades. In an era when Hollywood reduced Black cultures to exotic backdrop, the film grants them a gravity that still feels radical. Tourneur’s camera doesn’t exploit; it observes, finding in the houmfort’s flames and the cane fields’ whispers a truth more unsettling than any zombie: that the real horror is the silence of history, and the stories we refuse to hear.
ISLE OF THE DEAD 1945
Whispers Among the Cypress: Shadows and Superstition on the Isle of the Dead
In the haunted hush of Isle of the Dead (1945), Val Lewton’s gift for conjuring dread from the unseen and the unspoken reaches its most elegiac form. Directed by Mark Robson, who had apprenticed under Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur within the Lewton unit, the film unfolds like a fevered meditation on mortality, superstition, and the thin, trembling veil between reason and terror. Lewton, ever the poet of shadows, draws from an Arnold Böcklin painting for his title and from the horrors of war and plague for his atmosphere, creating a work that is as much a lament as it is a ghost story.
The film is set during the Balkan Wars of 1912, on a desolate Greek island whose marble tombs and cypress silhouettes seem carved from the very marrow of myth. General Nikolas Pherides, played by Boris Karloff with a stony, haunted gravity, arrives with American war correspondent Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) to visit the grave of his long-dead wife. The island is already a place of the dead, but soon becomes a prison for the living as a mysterious plague—called septicemic fever—descends upon the small group sheltering in the villa of Swiss archaeologist Dr. Albrecht (Jason Robards Sr.).
Boris Karloff moves through Isle of the Dead like a figure carved from ancient stone, his presence both commanding and mournful, as if he carries the weight of centuries within his bearing. As General Pherides, Karloff’s every gesture is measured, his voice a low, deliberate rumble that seems to echo from the crypts themselves. There is a haunted dignity in the way he surveys the island’s marble tombs, a man who has seen too much death to believe in easy comfort, yet who clings to order with a desperate, almost childlike tenacity. His eyes, at once cold and searching, betray the slow unraveling of certainty as superstition seeps into the cracks of his rational mind. In moments of doubt and fear, Karloff’s face becomes a landscape of sorrow and suspicion, the stern lines softening into something achingly human. When he succumbs at last to the very terror he sought to banish, it is with a tragic grandeur that lingers long after the final frame—a performance that feels less like acting than like an invocation, calling forth the restless spirits of both the living and the dead. This is where Boris Karloff’s true mastery lies—summoning a quiet ache from deep within, he delivers a performance so nuanced it shimmers at the threshold between reason and terror, inhabiting a narrative that trembles with both intellect and dread.
Lewton and Robson paint the island not just as a setting, but as a state of mind: the air is thick with the scent of cypress and decay, the moonlight is cold and pitiless, and the marble mausoleums cast shadows that seem to move of their own accord. The cinematography by Jack MacKenzie is a study in chiaroscuro, each frame sculpted from darkness and uncertain light. The camera lingers on the faces of the trapped guests as fear and suspicion take root; the villa becomes a crucible where rationality and superstition are forced into collision.
As the fever claims its victims, the group fractures along lines of belief and doubt. Dr. Drossos, the Greek military doctor, insists on quarantine, while Pherides, a man of rigid discipline and secular faith, finds himself increasingly drawn to the island’s folklore, particularly the legend of the vorvolaka, a vampiric spirit said to rise from the grave and spread pestilence. The superstitious housekeeper, Madame Kyra (Helen Thimig), fans these fears, her whispered warnings and furtive glances fueling the sense of encroaching doom. The American, Davis, clings to his journalistic detachment, but even he is not immune to the island’s spell.
At the heart of the film is Thea (Ellen Drew), the young Greek woman whom Madame Kyra accuses of being a vorvolaka.
Ellen Drew, who brings a heavenly vulnerability to her role as Thea in Isle of the Dead, was a versatile actress whose career spanned both film and television. Among her other notable roles are Betty Casey in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940), Huguette in If I Were King (1938), and Sofia de Peralta in The Baron of Arizona (1950) alongside Vincent Price. She also starred opposite Bing Crosby in Sing You Sinners (1938), George Raft in The Lady’s from Kentucky (1939), and Dick Powell in Johnny O’Clock (1947). Drew’s beauty was the kind that seemed to catch and hold the light—a delicate, sculpted face framed by soft waves, her eyes deep and expressive, with both longing and resolve. On screen, she radiated an ethereal grace, a gentle yet magnetic presence.
Thea’s luminous innocence and quiet strength stand in stark contrast to the mounting hysteria around her. Drew’s performance is all trembling vulnerability and quiet dignity, her wide eyes reflecting both terror and compassion. As the deaths mount and the survivors grow ever more desperate, Thea becomes both scapegoat and symbol, a living vessel for the group’s collective dread.
Karloff’s Pherides is a portrait of authority undone by the very forces he seeks to control. His transformation from stern rationalist to a man possessed by fear is rendered with tragic inevitability. The moment when he, convinced of Thea’s supernatural guilt, stalks her through the crypts with a lantern, his face gaunt and wild-eyed, is one of Lewton’s most chilling set pieces. The crypt itself is a masterpiece of set design and lighting: marble slabs gleam in the darkness, and the air is thick with the silence of centuries.
The suspense is almost unbearable until Mrs. Mary St. Aubyn, who suffers from catalepsy, is mistakenly thought dead, entombed alive by Pherides’ paranoia, claws her way out of her marble prison, awakens, her white dress torn and her eyes wide with terror, a living ghost staggering into the moonlight, and escapes the tomb in terror, her ordeal culminating in violence and tragedy.
The supporting cast is a gallery of haunted souls: Jason Robards Sr. as Dr. Albrecht, the humane skeptic; Katherine Emery (who navigated the sinister hedge labyrinth of Craven Castle only to discover the Scottish amphibious noble in The Maze, 1953) as Mrs. St. Aubyn, whose own brush with premature burial years before has left her fragile and haunted; and Skelton Knaggs as the consumptive Andrew Robbins, whose death is marked by a wind that rattles the shutters and a silence that presses on the heart. Each character is drawn with the economy and empathy that mark Lewton’s best work, their fates entwined with the island’s inexorable pull.
Leigh Harline’s score is a mournful tapestry of strings and woodwinds, weaving Greek motifs with the universal language of unease. The music swells and recedes like the tide, underscoring the film’s rhythms of hope and despair. The script, by Ardel Wray and Josef Mischel, is spare but eloquent, its dialogue laced with philosophical inquiry and fatalistic poetry. “Laws can be wrong and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.” In Lewton’s world, death is everywhere: in the wind that rattles the olive trees, in the shadows that pool around the crypts, in the fear that turns neighbor against neighbor.
The film’s climax is a symphony of terror and release. Mrs. Mary St. Aubyn is “resurrected” from the crypt, not in a supernatural sense, but because she was mistakenly entombed alive due to a cataleptic trance. Mary St. Aubyn, who suffers from catalepsy (a condition causing death-like trances), is believed to have died during the plague quarantine on the island. Despite her fears of premature burial, the others, except for Thea, think she is dead and entomb her in the family crypt. This act is driven by the mounting panic, superstition, and the threat of plague, with the General and Kyra convinced that supernatural forces (the vorvolaka) are at play.
As the sirocco winds finally arrive, signaling hope for the end of the plague, it is too late for Mary. She awakens in the tomb, driven mad by her ordeal, and escapes. In a state of insanity, she returns to the house, kills Kyra (who had tormented Thea with accusations of being a vorvolaka), and stabs General Pherides (who is already showing signs of the plague) as he attempts to kill Thea. Ultimately, Mary flees and leaps to her death from a cliff. The tomb is both literal and symbolic—a triumph of life over superstition, but also a reminder of how easily fear can turn the living into the dead.
Pherides, consumed by his own demons, succumbs to the plague, his authority and certainty dissolved in the moonlit ruins. The survivors emerge, changed and chastened, as dawn breaks over the cypress groves—a fragile hope trembling on the edge of despair.
Isle of the Dead is filled with atmosphere and suggestion, of the horrors that bloom in silence and shadow. At its heart is Boris Karloff’s intense and beautiful portrayal of a tormented soul whose presence seeps into the film’s meditative power. Through Karloff’s haunting performance, the film becomes not just a visual spectacle but a deeply felt exploration of inner torment, embodying the fragile boundary between reason and superstition, faith and doubt, control and chaos, sanity and madness. It is a meditation on the limits of reason, the persistence of myth, and the ways in which fear can become its own contagion. Lewton, with Robson as his sensitive collaborator, crafts a work of haunted beauty—a requiem for the dead, and a warning to the living. In the end, the isle is not just a place, but a state of being: a liminal space where the living and the dead, the rational and the irrational, are forever entwined in a dance as old as time.
