I Walked with a Zombie: Guilt in the Antilles

“Put the planter on a horse, and he’ll ride to his own death.” So says the matriarch of the Holland family, descendants of the white slave-owning settlers who came to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian centuries ago. She speaks of her own son, Wesley Rand (James Ellison), who drinks too much and bickers with his half-brother, Paul Holland (Tom Conway). The two once loved the same woman, Tom’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon). She, now catatonic, sleepwalks around their palatial sugar plantation as the voodoo drums of their workers beat out over nighttime sugarcane fields. As Tom remarks early in this film: “This place is evil.”

The unspoken fact, hinted at only by a Black carriage driver though known and repressed by all, is that slavery is that evil. Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the matriarch’s, second husband was a missionary. She now runs the local clinic where she castigates, not unkindly, youths to take off their voodoo charms and seek the help of modern medicine. She knows that this distrust of doctors and shots is a product of this legacy of bondage. Indeed, she’ll resort to trickery to try and overcome the chasm yawning between her do-gooder attitude and the beliefs of the people.

It’s all evil, as Paul says and everyone else knows. The ending is tragic, as it must be. Jessica’s new Canadian nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) will find herself stuck between the brothers, exploring voodoo, and desperately doing what she can for her patient. Surviving such a situation might be worse than succumbing to it. Or, as Paul says, the locals cry when a baby is born and laugh at funerals. Why? What good could birth mean in the days of slavery? What could be better than release from bondage, even by way of death?

In front of the estate stands an old slave ship masthead, the arrow-ridden body of Saint Sebastian, writhing for God. Tourneur, the director, never shows us what this means, except to involve one of the arrows in the final death. In their way, the people of the island are martyrs for no cause, the Holland family condemned to rote sugar planting and harvesting, cursed to die one by one or to live in the shadow of what they have wrought. There are plenty of arrows to go around.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is impressive for all the obvious reasons: it’s moody, beautifully shot, and remarkably non-racist for a movie about voodoo from the 40s. But what struck me most of all was its unflinching commitment to the moral rot wrought by slavery. Even as white characters form our troupe of protagonists, the film never wavers from the degrading suffering—internal and external—that haunts the fictional Saint Sebastian and the real jungles and hills of the Western Hemisphere.

Betsy leaves snowy Canada longing for beaches, for beauty. What she finds is colder and darker than any Canadian January evening. Would that we had eyes to see as she learns to when we people resorts and keep out of the shanty towns and villages.