I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim

Produced by Val Lewton

The legacy of producer Val Lewton rounds out on videodisc, with the last of his nine RKO horror chillers arriving, not just in High Definition, but in 4K Ultra HD. The odd thing is that the final two titles to be given the quality upgrade, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim are considered by many to be Lewton’s most refined works. Zombie shows director Jacques Tourneur at his very best, and Victim has one of the most radical screenplays ever to come out of Hollywood. Val Lewton didn’t give himself writing credits on his pictures, but they’re his creations all the way. Wartime Universal horror was serving up Mummies and Mad Ghouls; RKO’s Lewton pictures specialized in existential dread. These two shows best express his dark, moody outlook on life and living.

These two Lewton efforts use different approaches to express similar themes. Zombie shows the artisans at RKO creating a convincing tropical atmosphere in the studio; Victim’s screenplay hones in on ‘dangerous ideas’ that Hollywood normally wouldn’t touch.

We’ve long been told that the film elements for Lewton’s features were in terrible condition, but all of the Blu-ray remasters have arrived looking splendid. Criterion ports over several extras from the old Warner DVD set, adding quality input from Imogen Sara Smith plus pieces on Val Lewton’s production unit and ‘real life’ zombies.

Much like the writer-director Preston Sturges, in the 1940s Lewton had a brief but productive run of personal productions that all but eclipsed the efforts of others in his field. He was put in charge of his own producing unit almost by accident, through a recommendation from David O. Selznick. Lewton’s instructions were to make inexpensive horror thrillers to compete with Universal’s monsters. RKO gave him a certain amount of autnonomy as long as his pictures made money. When his initial show  Cat People became an unexpected hit, Lewton turned his imagination to more dark thoughts about fear and the unknown, and strove to make quality products.

An intellectual movie cult began to build around Lewton not long after his death in 1950. Curtis Harrington extolled Val Lewton’s artistry in one of the first serious essays on horror films. When genre criticism spiked in the 1960s, Lewton’s work was given top-rank status.

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I Walked with a Zombie
69 min.
Starring: James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones, Jeni Le Gon, Vivian Dandridge.
Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt
Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller
Film Editor: Mark Robson
Makeup artist: Maurice Seiderman
Original Music: Roy Webb
Screenplay by Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray story by Inez Wallace
Produced by Val Lewton
Directed by Jacques Tourneur

“Ah, woe, ah me!  Shame and sorrow for the family!” 

Val Lewton could make his horror films as he saw fit, but the RKO front office dictated what their titles would be. ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ sounds like something invented to get Lewton to quit. But the secretive producer and his talented director Jacques Tourneur instead came up with the series’ most poetic installment.

Eager to find adventure and get away from the snow, Ottawa nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) takes an assignment in the West Indies to look after the ailing wife of sugar planter. On the sailboat to the island of San Sebastian, she meets her employer Paul Holland (Tom Conway) and gets a sample of his brooding, pessimistic outlook. The wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) lives in an eerie somnambulistic state. It was brought on by a fever, but some black workers insist that she has become a zombie. Betsy doesn’t know what to believe after she discovers that Jessica’s sickness coincided with an attempt to run away with Paul’s alcoholic brother Wesley (James Ellison). The Holland matriarch Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) works as a doctor for the locals. She admits that she summoned voodoo spells against Jessica to keep the family from being destroyed. Drawn to Paul but determined to do her best for his wife, Betsy decides to take Jessica on a midnight walk to the Voodoo Houmfort in search of a cure.

I Walked with a Zombie is Val Lewton’s most critically acclaimed film. Replete with creepy incidents and jolting surprises, it quickly advances its ‘Jane Eyre in the West Indies’ storyline while giving an impression of a leisurely pace. We are immediately taken by Frances Dee’s spirited, motivated outsider Betsy. Slightly less compelling is Tom Conway’s substitute Rochester, a sour-faced planter who masks his insecurity with negative comments about his island and nature in general.

San Sebastian’s emancipated blacks still work for white landowners. Lewton makes this population central to the story, adding cultural details that create the impression of a sad island of displaced souls. Births are for mourning and funerals for gaiety. An old buggy driver is politely deferential to Betsy’s comment that the slaves must have been happy to be brought to such a beautiful place: “If you say so, miss, if you say so.”  Maid Alma (Theresa Harris) proudly claims the superiority of voodoo medicine. In the film’s most inspired scene, folk singer Sir Lancelot uses an insolent Calypso ballad to indict the Hammond brothers. The lyrics spell out the ugly family story that Betsy can hear nowhere else. We can’t name another Hollywood movie that gives black characters this kind of political voice — the powerless weaponize art and music against injustice.

The voodoo dance and ritual on view are said to be authentic. The film’s political use of voodoo takes the place of a supernatural curse. The Hammonds are haunted by their past history as slavers, an issue never acknowledged in dialogue. Paul Hammond seems obsessed with the subject — in the courtyard of his house is a statue of the martyred Saint Sebastian, complete with arrows in its chest.

Almost all of this breezy, open-air movie was filmed on interior RKO sound stages. J. Roy Hunt’s cinematography is an object lesson in how to create a tropical ambience with stage lighting. The sunlight is filtered through trees, blinds and gratings; audio atmospherics express the tropical winds. Tourneur’s most evocative scene is Betsy and Jessica’s silent walk to attend a voodoo ritual. The impressive sequence consists of tracking shots through some cane fields that in actuality must be a very small stage set.

Lewton’s reputation was made when the press recognized his ‘keep it in the dark’ approach to horror: the theory that viewers will imagine scarier things on their own. Universal’s 1940s monsters could be weird, but Lewton’s scares made viewers jump. Lewton was really the founder of modern psychological horror, by making good use of narrative ambiguity. Hollywood’s norm was to spell everything out. Zombie hits on the truth that real family secrets are the ones that nobody wants to discuss. Just as in real life, the truth of relationships is never completely knowable.

All we have are conflicting opinions as to Jessica’s pre-zombie personality and deeds. The catatonic Jessica cannot speak for herself. The brothers don’t agree about what happened, and their guilt-stricken mother — a learned doctor — has become convinced that voodoo magic was involved. And now comes Betsy, who wants to do the right thing   but worries that she may be acting on her own unspoken personal agenda. Things would be simpler for everyone if Jessica were out of the way… but the faithful at the voodoo houmfort maintain their own claim on the entranced Jessica.

The ambiguity applies to the supernatural content as well — through the mute Carre-Four (Darby Jones). In any other horror film the spindly giant with the bulging eyes would be a racist bogeyman. His shuffling walk is unnerving, but he comes off as a lumbering, pathetic creature, doing the bidding of his voodoo masters. Events confirm the psychological power of Voodoo, but the supernatural aspect remains unexplained. True to zombie lore, Carre-Four stands as a sentinel at a crossroads. In full close-up, Tourneur lets his face go completely out of focus. The poetic imagery in the beach finale makes him seem an unacknowledged force of nature.

Wesley Hammond’s final actions are equally ambiguous. Is he the captive of a voodoo spell, or acting to bring an end to the intolerable state of affairs at the Hammond house?  Val Lewton seemed to be a man with a deep understanding of isolation and depression. Only a couple of his films acknowledge the supernatural as a straight-up reality, and even then, only indirectly. For Lewton, all ‘evil’ comes from tragic human relationships.

The acting is unusually good for a Lewton picture. Frances Dee and Edith Barrett are excellent. Tom Conway is not bad, it’s just that his anti-nature speeches remind us of the hilariously pessimistic harangues of  Werner Herzog. The weak link is James Ellison, a lightweight who tries but doesn’t convey much depth as a surly alcoholic. Christine Gordon is appropriately chilling as the beautiful ‘white zombie.’

The black actors playing interesting non-stereotyped roles are Sir Lancelot and Jeni LeGon as the voodoo swordsman. Tourneur used the expressive Theresa Harris again opposite Robert Mitchum in  Out of the Past. Darby Jones’ Carre-Four is unforgettable. Those four black actors received screen credit, which must be some kind of record for 1940s Hollywood.

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The Seventh Victim
71 min.
Starring: Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter, Evelyn Brent, Erford Gage, Ben Bard, Hugh Beaumont, Elizabeth Russell, Lou Lubin, Chef Milani, Marguerita Sylva, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Richard Davies, Tiny Jones, Milton Kibbee, Barbara Hale, Eve March, Mary Newton.
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller
Film Editor: John Lockert
Gowns: Renié
Original Music: Roy Webb
Written by DeWitt Bodeen, Charles O’Neal
Produced by Val Lewton
Directed by Mark Robson

I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday. 

Critic Joel E. Siegel named The Seventh Victim the movie that most closely expresses Val Lewton’s outlook on life. Yet it’s also the first to be rejected by non-fans. It’s a strange little story about the search for a woman . . . who is trying to obliterate herself. None of the film’s New Yorkers seem to have a handle on life’s problems. The picture’s final events are so darkly negative, it’s difficult to believe it could have been made in a Hollywood studio. The perfect way to encounter The Seventh Victim is as I first saw it … by setting one’s alarm clock to get up at 3 a.m. … alone. At the Hour of the Wolf, Jean Brooks stares balefully at the camera and recites a nihilistic speech about the pointlessness of life … and, well, it has an effect.

Val Lewton’s ‘horror’ efforts tried everything to avoid monsters, addressing  sexual insecurity,  child psychology and  murderous psychosis. To sidestep yet another ‘cat monster’ title, he singlehandedly invented a  serial killer format adopted by later Italian Giallo thrillers. The Seventh Victim is about a devil cult operating in Greenwich Village … but not really. Meeting like a book club that serves tea and cake, the secret society of Palladists remains somewhat vague. They may hail Satan, but they hold no supernatural secrets, like  Julian Karswell or  Minnie Castevet.

Lewton instead pegs his fringe cult Satanists as depressives that have sought out the occult as a diversion from disappointment and bitterness. As with any good cult, they’ve convinced themselves with the fantasy that they’re rebels against an unenlightened society.

Informed that her tuition at Lowood boarding school is in arrears, the teenaged orphan Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first film) is given permission to go alone to New York’s Greenwich Village to find her missing older sister/guardian Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). Mary learns that Jacqueline has disappeared. She no longer owns ‘La Sagesse,’ a company that manufactures beauty products. The new owner Esther Redi (Mary Newton) and beautician Frances Fallon (Isabel Jewell) can provide little information about Jacqueline’s whereabouts. Mary is offered help by Jacqueline’s one-time boyfriend, lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), and from an idealistic poet, Jason Hoag (Erford Gage). They suspect that the hedonistic psychiatrist Louis Judd (Tom Conway) is hiding something. Jacqueline is described as an ‘adventuress’ who may have run afoul of the affairs of a secret cult called The Palladists. Desperate, Mary hires diminutive detective Irving August (Lou Lubin) to help her break into Redi’s cosmetics factory, to find out if Jacqueline is imprisoned inside.

The average viewer may not be impressed with The Seventh Victim. It is the first feature directed by Mark Robson, who edited I Walked with a Zombie. It has a strong noir look but is visually less distinguished than Val Lewton’s Tourneur pictures. Its characters speak in soft voices; dialogues skirt important subjects instead of addressing them directly. They all must make a living in the city, and some of them talk about personal failures and disappointment. The main plotline is a detective search that loses heart as the story unspools. The movie’s villains are as misguided and ineffectual as the heroes.

Yet The Seventh Victim is the strongest display of Lewton’s dark themes, carrying an almost overwhelming feeling of morbid despair. It mostly eluded contemporary reviewers primed for a standard horror thriller. They called it a moody and atmospheric film that made little sense. Chances are that the ending was such a surprise, it just didn’t register. Lewton’s brand of subtle suggestion wasn’t common in Hollywood movies. Viewers not paying close attention might well miss the devastating import of the final scene.

Who would have thought that a Hollywood film made in the middle of WW2 could be this nihilistic?  The positive characters are realistically imperfect and their flaws are of the banal, everyday variety. Our young heroine has a good heart but soon bogs down in doubt and conflicting interests. By the end she has to be talked into continuing with her search. She’s aided by a trio of unusual men. Writer Jason Hoag has lost his touch and is given to embarrassingly florid statements. He hides behind ornate pleasantries but is too cowardly to put his words into print. The cynical Dr. Judd likes to manipulate and hurt people in petty ways. He may be exploiting Jacqueline for both sex and money. The attorney Gregory Ward seems more in love with the idea of Jacqueline than the woman herself. He hides important personal information from the trusting Mary.

Not a good movie choice for anyone in a state of depression.

The Seventh Victim’s many peripheral characters seem equally fallible. At the girls’ school the headmistress Mrs. Lowood (Ottola Nesmith) harshly dominates the passive Mildred Gilchrist (Eve March). Gilchrist nervously tells Mary to get free of the school and never come back. Lou Lubin’s little detective Irving August is a do-gooder who decides to help Mary. He ends up letting her bully him into taking dangerous action. The passive Frances Fallon knew Jacqueline well. She does Mary’s nails while sighing, “Oh, I guess most people are unhappy, Mary.”

Redi and Fallon are members of the Palladists. Several colleagues have overt reasons for choosing the worship of Evil over Good — Natalie Cortez (silent star Evelyn Brent) is a dancer missing an arm. We get the idea that Esther Redi might be a lesbian, here equated with a downbeat kind of evil. She may have invited Jacqueline into the Palladists in order to appropriate her cosmetics company, La Sagesse.

As in I Walked with a Zombie the key to the present is the back story of a mystery woman. Mary soon learns that she knew little about her older sister. Jacqueline is described as a sensationalist, forever looking for dangerous thrills. Could the younger, livelier Jacqueline have been something like the reckless club woman seen in Busby Berkeley’s nightmarish musical number Lullabye of Broadway?  That worldly, haunted ‘Broadway Baby’ filled her empty life with music and lovers. Somewhere along the way Jacqueline turned to the Palladists, and broke their unforgiving code of conduct. In isolation she’s become emotionally unhinged.

The little we know about the Palladists doesn’t add up. If secrecy is so important, why does Esther Redi use the cult’s symbol as the logo for her La Sagesse Company?  The Palladists are avowed pacifists yet demand the death of anyone who reveals their existence. When they finally get their hands on Jacqueline, the cultists try to bully her into killing herself. Why do they persist in harassing her, after several outsiders have learned their secret?  Despite their knife-wielding enforcers, the Palladists don’t seem all that threatening. In a scene assumed to be mandated by the Production Code, they let themselves be cowed by a simple quote from the Bible.

Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd is apparently the same psychologist from Cat People.  Is this a prequel?

We’re intrigued by the richness of The Seventh Victim and its odd set of characters. Gregory Ward talks about being madly in love with Jacqueline, yet demonstrates no such feelings when she’s finally located. Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd behaves inconsistently — he’s intent on keeping Jacqueline hidden yet joins the group trying to find her. I can see Tom Conway asking Mark Robson what he’s supposed to be thinking in a scene, and the director being at a loss for more of an answer than, “Just fake it and we’ll figure it out later.”

One can’t attribute this to Robson’s lack of experience, as the final film follows the shooting script quite closely. True, some of the line deliveries are weak, and Robson never attained Jacques Tourneur’s assured sense of style and precision. Were some subtleties lost in the shooting?  The movie is a subtextual iceberg — much of the ‘content’ is between the lines of the script.

The Seventh Victim abounds with memorable scenes and indelible images. Irving August’s walk down the dark La Sagesse corridor is unforgettable, as is the eerie moment when Mary first sets eyes on Jacqueline — and promptly loses her again. Audiences jump when Mrs. Redi walks into Mary’s apartment, to threaten the girl while she’s taking a shower.  Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t the kind to praise other directors, but the shower scene’s similarity to that of Psycho can’t be ignored.

Hitchcock must have been as interested by the film as was the English director Michael Powell. In his autobiography Powell relates an anecdote from the middle of WW2. He saw a studio screening of The Seventh Victim, and was so impressed that he bicycled the print across a bombed-out London, to show his friend Carol Reed.

This is the great Kim Hunter’s first film; three years later Michael Powell imported her to England to star in his Technicolor  A Matter of Life and Death. Hunter is at all times authentically sweet and gentle … even when reciting a gruesome children’s rhyme to some tots in her care. The male leads aren’t as well-judged. Top-billed Tom Conway recites his lines as if he has just read them a minute before; his Dr. Judd is a generic suave operator, The Falcon without a sense of humor. Hugh Beaumont’s Gregory Ward shows concern and little else, as if given no direction whatsoever. When he reveals his affection for the much younger Mary, we don’t know how to react.

Leave it to Val Lewton to have Mary be helped by Jason Hoag, an emotional, ineffectual poet. Actor  Erford Gage had stage experience; we wonder if he obtained his RKO roles because so many actors were in the service. Gage mostly conveys a sense of awkwardness. This may be his biggest role outside of his Nazi thug in Edward Dmytryk’s  Hitler’s Children. Knowing his story gives us a pang of sympathy whenever we see him on TCM. A few months later Gage was called up for active service. He was decorated in combat, but in March of 1945 was killed in action in the Philippines.

←  Jean Brooks was seldom given good material at RKO, but her Jacqueline Gibson makes a lasting impression with very little screen time. Her ‘Cleopatra’ hairstyle became part of a puzzle much later when it was ‘quoted’ in movies by  Bertrand Tavernier and  Wim Wenders. Brooks’ key moment is a soliloquy in which Jacqueline remembers a killing, as if it were a nightmare she can’t shake. Her own voice seems to put her in a trance; the camera slowly trucks in until two enormous, sad eyes fill the frame. Director Jonathan Demme recreated the moment with his choker close-ups of Jodie Foster describing a childhood memory in his powerful horror film  The Silence of the Lambs.

Lewton begins his movie with a literary conceit, quoting John Donne’s  Holy Sonnet VII in a stained glass window in Lowood Academy. Another classic allusion shows up in a little Italian restaurant when the poet Jason Hoag makes awkward comments to Mary about a painting of Dante and Beatrice. The absolutely stunning ending involves Lewton’s best use of the actress Elizabeth Russell. . . who does not receive screen credit. Russell plays a sickly woman named Mimi, and when she coughs we know she’s yet another reference, this time to the opera La Bohème. This finale plays out under a flickering light in a dim hallway; Mimi’s stylized lines are genuinely haunting. Just remember that before Mimi interrupted her, Jacqueline Gibson was on her way to Mary’s room, not room #7.

The Seventh Victim is not the kind of movie to see while multitasking. It’s a delicate animal that needs to be watched free of distractions. Preferably at 3AM when one’s psychic defenses are at their lowest.