Rent I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim (1943)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread. As head of RKO's B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic 'I Walked with a Zombie' and the shockingly subversive 'The Seventh Victim' are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness. - Actors:
- James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones, Jeni Le Gon, Richard Abrams, Doris Ake, Rita Christiani, Vivian Dandridge, Alan Edmiston, Kathleen Hartsfield, Norman Mayes, Jieno Moxzer, Clinton Rosemond, Arthur Walker
- Directors:
- Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson
- Producers:
- Val Lewton
- Writers:
- Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, Inez Wallace, Charlotte Brontë, Charles O'Neal, DeWitt Bodeen
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 14/10/2024
- Run Time:
- 140 minutes
- Languages:
- English Mono
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.37:1
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
- Bonus:
- Audio commentary on 'I Walked with a Zombie' featuring authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
- Audio commentary on 'The Seventh Victim' featuring film historian Steve Haberman
- Interview with film historian Imogen Sara Smith
- Audio essays from Adam Roche's podcast 'The Secret History of Hollywood' featuring stories about the casts, crews, and productions of both films
- Shadows in the Dark: The Vai Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Vai Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; actor Sara Karloff; and others
- Excerpts from "The Origins of the Zombie, from Haiti to the U.S.", an episode of the PBS series 'Monstrum', hosted by scholar Emily Zarka
- Trailers
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 14/10/2024
- Run Time:
- 140 minutes
- Languages:
- English Mono
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- DVD Regions:
- Region 2
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.37:1
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
More like I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim
Reviews (1) of I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim
Zombie Review (spoiler). - I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim review by Steve
The RKO bosses intended Val Lewton- the head of their B horror unit- to produce a picture based on a magazine article about voodoo. But he took as his premise the idea of making 'Jane Eyre in the Tropics’. A film poetically sensitive to human suffering. As mournful as a spiritual hymn.
An inexperienced nurse (Frances Dee), leaves the snow of Ottowa to work on the Caribbean island of San Sebastian to care for the insentient wife of a sugar plantation owner (Tom Conway). Before his wife's sickness, she was planning to leave with his half brother (James Ellison).
This is a dreamworld of superstition, where science and the occult are entwined. Jacques Tourneur creates so many eerie, unforgettable images: the night walk through the plantation; the torch flames on the sea as the islanders look for the wife’s body; the vision of the gaunt zombie-guardian of the cross-path.
It is relentlessly melancholy; a sad/beautiful vision of lonely people about to swallowed in the darkness. The depiction of the heirs of the shame and despair of slavery is unique in ‘40s Hollywood. This is the best of Lewton's low budget horrors and one of the all time great genre films.