I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

 

The Hollywood B movie was originally intended, literally, as filler. Filler (particularly in the context of, say, pet food) is intended to give the illusion of 'more' -- and therefore better value for money -- without actually providing added nutrition. Likewise, the B programmer was intended to give Depression era movie goers a longer evening at the movies without really giving them two movies for the price of their ticket. Thus, the movie substitute was born: the B as questionable bonus for paying to see the A, produced on a penurious budget and shooting schedule, with a truncated running time that made it the missing link between the short subject and the feature. These films weren't actually meant to be good; they certainly weren't meant to be better than the headliner, just the warm up for the real show. Like the homely friend of a pretty girl, the B made the A look even better by comparison. Give the audience a good B and they might start to expect it. 

They didn't reckon on Val Lewton's inability to waste an opportunity.

When RKO gave Lewton an essentially free hand, artistically, to produce cheap horror films in competition with Universal, I wonder if he knew he was eventually going to have to make one called I Walked With A Zombie. If he did, he might very well have thought twice about leaving his dead-end position as right hand man to prestigious David O. Selznick at MGM. After all, Lewton considered himself a man of taste, and O. Selznick productions might have tended a bit toward the antiseptic and dull, but they were always classy. Still, Lewton was all about rising to the challenge, and I firmly believe that he would never have created films of anywhere near as much interest if it weren't for the adversity he had to face. In fact, given his rather genteel tastefulness, I suspect his films would have been quite as slick and unengaging as most Selznick product. 

For me, the most fascinating genre stuff often comes from authors and film makers who do not consider themselves primarily 'of the genre'. Comics writer Warren Ellis freely admits to disliking superheroes, yet his Planetary series mined superhero comics for archetypes and produced something truly special. My absolute favourite Cthulhu Mythos story -- superior, in my opinion, to the originals penned by H.P. Lovecraft -- is The Return Of The Lloigor (anthologised in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos), written by Colin Wilson (still best known for his first and best received book, The Outsider) on a dare from August Derleth, who took exception to his criticism of pulp fictioneer Lovecraft and his followers. Wilson, champion of existential optimism, considered Lovecraft to have been a depressive and essentially anti-life, but acknowledged a certain visionary power in his work; that of his emulators, on the other hand, he considered largely worthless. He didn't connect with the material at all, but took up the challenge anyway, and in order to find his way in he had to work to discover some aspect of it that did appeal to him and that he could work with. In doing so he essentially subverted elements of Lovecraft to the concerns of his own body of work, applying the personal stamp that is most often the difference in genre fiction between rank imitation and something of genuine interest. 

(This was such a successful medium for discussing what might seem to the uninitiated like dry philosophical ideas that Wilson did it again the same year in his marvellous The Space Vampires, which was later made into an over-the top space zombie disaster movie (in both senses of the term) called Lifeforce (1985) by Tobe Hooper and Dan O'Bannon. Complete with a chesty lady vampire who walks full-frontally naked through all of her scenes, it's a prime example of wretched excess that for some reason I consider one of my best ever DVD purchases and will be discussing in due time.)

Where the hell was I? Oh yes. So, in 1943 Val Lewton found himself saddled with a title ripped from the headlines of a supermarket tabloid, but if RKO thought they could beat his anti-genre tendencies out of him this way, they were mistaken. As ever with him, it was modern psychology rather than the supernatural that provided an entry point into the material, and he zeroed in on the power of suggestion/superstition over the victims of hex 'magic'. The result is a West Indies island recasting of Jane Eyre in a voodoo setting, complete with the now standard gothic romance set-up of the pretty private nurse who comes to the isolated mansion to care for the disabled (in this case apparently catatonic but prone to night time sleepwalking) wife of the brooding and handsome husband. Jacques Tourneur, having done such a nice job on Cat People, is again under strict orders to restrain the hysteria of the accursed title, which they get out of the way in the opening lines of Frances Dee's voice-over. To paraphrase: "I walked with a zombie. Sounds idiotic, I know, but let me explain..." The theatricality inherent in the very concept of zombies is further diluted by the strategy Lewton devised for working with the stock company of contract players he had at his disposal, which was to force them to deliver their lines in muted conversational tones, dialing it down, down, down, rather than playing, Bela Lugosi style, to the cheap seats. Always, always striving against the sensationalism RKO was counting on to put Frankenstein fans in seats. 

There isn't much more to say that hasn't already been said repeatedly elsewhere, except that I Walked With A Zombie becomes even more interesting in the context of Lewton's small ouevre of 'little movies that could'. It is primarily remarkable in that it shouldn't be possible for it to have come out of that system at that time, just as it could never have come out of any other system at any other time or combination of circumstances. In its own steadfastly low-key way, it is as miraculous a feat of B film making as Richard Fleischer's wonderful The Narrow Margin (1952), Edgar Ulmer's poverty row masterpiece Detour (1946), or the Ranown Productions sequence of Randolph Scott adult B-westerns (1956-1960) directed by Budd Boetticher. 

All of these are stunning proofs that less money -- and thereby less studio interference -- is often good for the movies, if not necessarily in the short run then certainly in the long, as indy film makers have since gone on to demonstrate time and time again. Fewer cooks mean a single personality has more ability to assert control and imprint itself. Hitchcock neatly achieved his obsessive need for control by undershooting, getting exactly the footage he needed and no more, thus depriving the studio of anything they could cut or add or otherwise meddle with, and managed to impress so identifiable a personal style on the product of an assembly line system that he came to be recognised by the new wave of young French critcs as an auteur -- literally the author of his films, a theoretical impossibility in a studio film, and particularly in our current age of 'market research', test screenings and scripts typed by an infinite number of monkeys to be shot largely in front of a blue screen by Michael Bay. 

Val Lewton did it by working in a dim corner of the factory where they didn't care what was being made, just what it would be called.