MC
Marco Castellini
•Betsy is hired as a nurse in the home of a wealthy gentleman in Haiti to take care of his wife, who is afflicted with a strange disease. In reality, the woman is a slave to a voodoo ritual and there is nothing more to be done for her... The "magician" Tourneur crafts one of his best horror films, marking genre cinematography. Scripted by Curt Siodmak, this film, based on a novel by Inez Fallace, is a small horror cult, much appreciated by great masters like George Romero, Tobe Hooper, and Martin Scorsese. The figure of the "zombies" is linked to the pagan imagination of Haitian traditions (therefore, there is no trace of the "Romerian anthropophagy"), but Tourneur still manages to give a strongly horrific stamp to the figure of the "living dead." Of course, "I Walked with a Zombie" follows the clichés, the times, and the way of being of 1940s horror films, and for this reason, it may seem rather slow and uninvolving to the modern viewer, but if you watch it carefully and especially if you ask a film for "substance" more than "packaging," you cannot but appreciate it.
