I Walked with a Zombie is a 1943 American horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures. It stars James Ellison, Frances Dee, and Tom Conway, and follows a Canadian nurse who travels to care for the ailing wife of a sugar plantation owner in the Caribbean, where she witnesses Vodou rituals and possibly encounters the walking dead. The screenplay, written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, is based on an article of the same title by Inez Wallace, and also partly reinterprets the narrative of the 1847 novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
The film premiered in New York City on April 21, 1943, before receiving a wider theatrical release later that month. It has been analyzed for its themes of slavery and racism, and for its depiction of beliefs associated with African diaspora religions, particularly Haitian Vodou. Though it received mixed reviews upon its release, retrospective assessments of the film have been more positive.
Plot[]
On a snowy day in Ottawa, Betsy Connell, a young nurse, is being interviewed to care for the wife of Paul Holland, the owner of a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. Although she is not told much about the patient, Betsy looks forward to living in a warmer climate and accepts the job, laughing it off when asked if she believes in witchcraft.
The coachman who takes Betsy to Paul's house, Fort Holland, tells her the Afro-Caribbean population of Saint Sebastian is descended from slaves brought there by Paul's ancestors. At her first dinner, Betsy meets Paul's younger half-brother and employee, Wesley Rand, who, though good-humored, clearly resents Paul. She encounters Jessica, her patient, wandering the grounds of Fort Holland that night, and is initially frightened by the nonverbal, affectless woman, who, as Dr. Maxwell later informs Betsy, was left without the willpower to speak or act by herself after a tropical fever irreparably damaged her spinal cord.
Betsy learns from a calypso musician's song that Paul kept Jessica from running away with Wesley right before she became sick. The issues surrounding Jessica have driven Wesley to drink, and the simmering tension between him and Paul frequently threatens to boil over. Paul apologizes to Betsy for bringing her to Saint Sebastian and admits he feels responsible for Jessica's condition. Betsy, who has fallen in love with Paul, becomes determined to make him happy by curing Jessica and gets him to agree to a risky insulin shock treatment. When that fails, Alma, Paul's maid, convinces Betsy that she should take Jessica to be healed by the houngan (Vodou priest) at the houmfort (Vodou temple).
After a man dressed in black performs a ritual dance using a small sword, Betsy gets in line at the houmfort to ask the spirit Damballa to heal Jessica. Instead, she is pulled inside a hut and is shocked to see Mrs. Rand, Paul and Wesley's mother, who works with Maxwell. Mrs. Rand reveals that, with the houngan's knowledge, she has been telling the islanders that Vodou spirits speak through her so they will comply with her medical and sanitary recommendations. Meanwhile, Jessica attracts the attention of the man in black, who stabs her in the arm. She does not bleed, causing murmurs of "zombie" among the onlookers, and Mrs. Rand tells Betsy to take Jessica back to Fort Holland. An upset Paul greets them, but he softens when he learns Betsy was trying to help him and lets her know he no longer loves his wife.
The Voudou congregation demands Jessica be delivered to them for further ritualistic tests, so Maxwell and the local authorities want her sent to an asylum on a different island. Paul resists because Wesley wants Jessica to stay, and he tells Betsy to return to Canada before he makes her as unhappy as he made Jessica before her illness. At night, Carrefour, a zombie who guards a crossroads, is sent to retrieve Jessica, approaching Betsy instead after she puts on Jessica's robe, but Mrs. Rand orders him to leave.
Dr. Maxwell visits Fort Holland to report there will be an official investigation to determine Jessica's fate. Faced with scandal, and with her sons at each other's throats, Mrs. Rand says Jessica is not sick or insane, but dead, as she went to the houmfort the night Jessica tried to run away with Wesley and, possessed, asked the houngan to make Jessica a zombie. Only Wesley believes the story, and he later asks Betsy to euthanize Jessica, though Betsy refuses.
Using a small effigy of Jessica, the man in black and the houngan attempt to draw her to the houmfort. Paul and Betsy stop her the first time, but Wesley helps her the second, following with an arrow removed from a garden statue depicting Saint Sebastian that was once the figurehead of a Holland-family slave ship. When the man in black stabs the doll with a pin, Wesley stabs Jessica with the arrow and, pursued slowly by Carrefour, carries her body into the sea. Jessica and Wesley are discovered floating in the surf, and their bodies are brought back to Fort Holland. Betsy and Paul console each other.