1001 Club - I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

#175. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Why It's In The Book: "The second Val Lewton – Jacques Tourneur horror film, I Walked With a Zombie transposes the plot of Jane Eyre into the West Indies… As in many of Lewton’s films, the most memorable sequence is a night-time walk, with Dee leading the blonde zombie through the cane fields, coming up against an unforgettable bug-eyed island creature (Darby Jones). I Walked With a Zombie uses Caribbean folklore and weird religious imagery… to spice up a romantic tangle… About as far from Bela Lugosi in The Corpse Vanishes as could possibly be imagined." -1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Member Ratings

Adolytsi - 8/10
"I Walked with a Zombie is not what one would think of a ‘zombie flick’. There’s no gore, or other physical effect extravaganzas, and there’s only one zombie, and even that one stretches the definition as we know it today. While zombie films of today opt for gross-out effect and splatter-fests, this instead offers a supreme sense of the eerie."
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Michaël Parent - 8/10
"The strength of the film resides in the atmosphere of the superb contrasts of lighting and shadows."
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Nicolas Krizan - 8/10
"A drowsy atmosphere of eternal suffering affects everyone"
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marie_dressler - 7.5/10
"This superbly shot and lit psychological horror film from the Val Lewton shop at RKO falters in the story department."
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Siochembio - 7.5/10
"Dare I say it, Tourneur seems to treat voodoo culture with a modicum of respect.  By the end of the film, it is the white family that seems to be foolish, not the locals."
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Squish - 7.5/10
"...for those of you who don't know what a ‘voodoo’ or ‘plantation’ zombie is as opposed to a ‘Romero’ zombie, well these came first so don’t go gettin' upset cause it didn't try to eat Betsy's brain when you thought it would."
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Kim Wilson - 7/10
"I Walked with a Zombie takes an amusing and unusual look at the world of voodoo. It is one of the better B-films to come out of Hollywood in the 1940s, but it surely isn’t one of the movies I had to see before my death."
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Movie Guy Steve - 7/10
"What works in this film is the atmosphere."
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TSorensen - 7/10
"This may not be the biggest production ever or the deepest analysis or even the scariest horror film, but it is a beautiful representative of old school noir horror and I certainly felt the darkness creep in on me."
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Lindsey - 6/10
"Overall, this is a meh film with great lighting and cinematography."
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Sunny D - 6/10
"Whatever power it once held to introduce viewers to an eerie world hidden in the shadows of our own has long since been demystified."
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Jay Cluitt - 5/10
"the bug-eyed keeper of the crossroads is hauntingly terrifying"
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Overall Rating: 6.9/10