Rent I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim (1943)
3.6 of 5 from 47 ratings
2h 20min
- 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.
I Walked with a Zombie
Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated the horror film to new heights of poetic abstraction with this entrancing journey into the realm between life and death. When she takes a job caring for a comatose woman on a Caribbean island, a young nurse (Frances Dee) finds herself plunged into a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and witch doctors have the power to summon the living dead. Sugarcane swaying in a moonlit field, the hypnotic beat of voodoo drums, the relentless pull toward death - the otherworldly atmosphere of this bold reimagining of Jane Eyre is as close as studio-era Hollywood ever came to pure dream-state surrealism.
The Seventh Victim
"Death is good" is how producer Val Lewton summarized the message of his films, a credo that received its most explicit expression in this strikingly nihilistic shocker, the first film directed by regular Lewton editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding-school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York's bohemian Greenwich Village, where she uncovers a sinister shadow world of devil worshippers and murder. And what about that mysterious room furnished with nothing but a chair and a hangman's noose? With its daring treatment of depression and queerness, 'The Seventh Victim' has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, its radical bleakness undiminished by time.- 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, Thrillers
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 14/10/2024
- Run Time:
- 140 minutes
- Languages:
- English
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
- 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 critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith
- Audio essays from Adam Roche's podcast The Secret History of Hollywood
- Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; author Neil Gaiman; actor Sara Karloff; and others
- Trailers
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 14/10/2024
- Run Time:
- 140 minutes
- Languages:
- English
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- DVD Regions:
- Region 2
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
- 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 critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith
- Audio essays from Adam Roche's podcast The Secret History of Hollywood
- Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; author Neil Gaiman; actor Sara Karloff; and others
- Trailers
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