Produced by Val Lewton: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE & THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)
Val Lewton, a master of horror, created two chilling films that explore the unseen and the unknown, turning our fears into haunting experiences.

Val Lewton, a master of horror, created two chilling films that explore the unseen and the unknown, turning our fears into haunting experiences.
With his reliance on mood and milieu, along with a staunch avoidance of cliché, Val Lewton added a new vocabulary to the audio-visual language of horror. Anyone with an interest in the genre’s foundations will place him in the same lineage as Tod Browning, Paul Leni, and James Whale. However, Lewton does not have any directorial credits to his name, instead earning the rare distinction of being known as an auteur-producer. His films are marked by a sense of macabre menace and creeping unease rather than alarming monsters and jump scares. His horror occurs in the psychological and emotional realms. Along with an impressive collection of bonus material, this new Blu-ray release from the Criterion Collection presents two of his early classics: I Walked with a Zombie, his moody voodoo masterpiece, and the lesser-known, somewhat nihilistic portrait of existential doom, The Seventh Victim.
Val Lewton had started as a struggling writer and landed a job at Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer studios writing adaptations of movies for novelistic serialisations in popular magazines. He also wrote pulp novels under pseudonyms in various genres and No Bed of Her Own, published in 1932, was written under the name of Val Lewton—a shortened and Americanised version of his Ukrainian birthname of Volodymyr Ivanovich Leventon. The risqué novel was optioned by Paramount Pictures and filmed as the rather pedestrian No Man of Her Own (1932) starring Carole Lombard and Clark Gable.
Shortly after, Lewton was hired as an assistant to producer David O. Selznick and worked as a story editor on some major productions including A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Reportedly, it was Lewton who convinced Selznick to purchase the rights to Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. However, Lewton was not happy in a role that he felt constrained his creativity, so when RKO studios were looking for a producer to helm a new horror unit, he leapt at the chance.
RKO were in financial difficulties and hoped to emulate the success of Universal’s classic monster movies. Lewton had to fit his productions within the stipulated formula of a budget of less than $150,000 and a runtime of less than 75 minutes. He was also expected to develop his scripts from attention-grabbing titles handed to him by studio executives who knew exactly what they wanted. Lewton gave them something else. Luckily for Lewton, his first production for RKO, Cat People (1942) was a huge hit, inspiring his superiors to grant him a little more creative freedom. It seems he found a kindred spirit in director Jacques Tourneur, and their collaboration continued the following year on I Walked with a Zombie…
A nurse in the Caribbean turns to voodoo in hopes of curing her patient, a mindless woman whose husband she’s fallen in love with.
Stories that open with a first-person voiceover, delivered in the past tense, follow a literary convention that lets us know the protagonist will live to tell the tale. Also, the tale is worth telling. Val Lewton completely reworked Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie using Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, also recounted in first-person, as a template. But instead of a governess, Betsy Connell (Francis Dee) is being interviewed for the position of a private nurse. Through the windows of the office, we see thick snow falling and understand why young Nurse Betsy finds the idea of being sent to a Caribbean island so alluring. The sugar importing company is providing support for one of their plantation managers whose wife has succumbed to a mysterious paralysis and requires constant care.
We meet the client, Paul Holland (Tom Conway) on the deck of the ship at night as he breaks in on Betsy’s thoughts while she admires the sea and stars, explaining that the luminescent shimmer in the waves is the result of putrescence and tells her there is no beauty, only death and decay. Thus, he’s established as a maudlin, Byronic figure giving the first clue that instead of a Gothic horror, we’re watching a dark Gothic romance.
One of the greatest flaws of I Walked with a Zombie may also be one of its strengths. The relationships between characters are sketchy and develop far too rapidly to be credible. Although the story relies heavily on this dynamic, Lewton is known to have deliberately excised scenes, even cutting a few that were shot, which would’ve made things clearer. Instead, he gave the audience credit for understanding the dreamlike storytelling structure where events have happened between the scenes we witness. For example, the brief conversation between Betsy and Paul on the deck of the ship is a matter of minutes, but a voyage from Canada to the Caribbean provides plenty of opportunity for further interactions. This allowed Jacques Tourneur more time to establish the sinister atmosphere, making the movie an exemplary mood piece in which ambiguity only enhances the increasingly uncanny atmosphere.
On arriving at the island of Saint Sebastian the conversation Betsy has with the coachman (Clinton Rosemond) underlines the narrative’s key subtext. When she asks about the plantation house, he mentions the statue of a saint pierced with several arrows explaining that it was the figurehead of the ship that brought the people to the island. He remarks that the white plantation owners were on the upper decks, but his forebears were chained to the bottom. Picking up on the conversation she had on the ship that delivered her to the same shores, Betsy remarks, with no sense of irony or sorrow, “They sure brought you to a beautiful place,” to which he politely responds “…if you say so.” Long before the recent wave of heated dialogues around colonialism and its legacy, white wealth built on the suffering of slaves is perhaps the only credible motivation for the malevolent voodoo spirits that act as proxies for this collective guilt. However, such explicit explanations will finally elude us.
Another prominent theme is emptiness and absence—both physically and emotionally—and we’re first shown the vacant rooms of the house. These sets are beautifully shot by cinematographer J. Roy Hunt making good use of the textures created by shadows and bands of light passing through slatted windows. Lewton became famous for his penchant for contrasting light and dark shadows and Tourneur would go on to direct several notable film noirs—a term that had not yet been coined. Which brings us to the notion of the auteur-producer…
Val Lewton is known to have written the final drafts and shooting scripts for all his films but in deference to the named writer, and possibly down to union rules, he was never credited for this. His shooting scripts were incredibly detailed suggesting camera movements, costume, blocking, and describing the mise-en-scène in exacting detail down to specific props, often including their positioning and precise measurements. He knew that cinema was primarily a visual medium and, while he was working within the compressed B-movie time limit, he wanted to maximise the storytelling potential of every minute.
Realising that effective pacing relied on paring back the dialogue, he found ways to place clues in the props and set-dressing that subtly build character and imply their presence, even before we meet them on screen. This attention to detail is one of the things that elevates his work above B-movie fare and into the arthouse arena.
Speaking of absences, Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon) is only there in body and exists in the persistent cataleptic state of a somnambulist. Until Betsy’s arrival, Alma (Theresa Harris) the maid had been responsible for attending to her and explained it was like dressing a big doll.
This was Christine Gordon’s debut in a short career, and she does what little is required of her very well. Theresa Harris already had 70 or so screen appearances to her name and had just worked with Lewton, Tourneur and Conway on Cat People. Among the many maid parts she was inevitably cast for, she also pushed the envelope in a few pre-code comedies and dramas, notably sharing the female lead with Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (1933) and a significant supporting role alongside Ginger Rogers in Professional Sweetheart (1933). She’d already dabbled with voodoo in the movie Drums o’ Voodoo (1934) which made much of its predominantly black cast. For I Walked with a Zombie, she may be playing another maid but as a fully realised character, without comic cliché, and her energy commands the viewer’s attention in each of her scenes.
I Walked with a Zombie is notable for its treatment of black characters and extras, replacing stereotypes with comparatively authentic contemporary portrayals, and none of the era’s eye-rolling caricatures of African Americans. For the scene involving the intimidating delivery of a calypso song (I may assure you) they cast the popular calypso star, ‘Sir Lancelot’ who wrote “Shame and Scandal in the Family”, especially for the part. The song tells of the family who run the plantation and it’s another clever, time-saving device to share some valuable backstory. Although the lyrics are specific to the plot, what sounded like a genuine standard folk song went on to become one. Following the success of the film, Sir Lancelot released his own version of the song which was then subsequently covered by Odetta Harris among others. In the 1960s it was a hit for Lord Melody who reworked the verses several times to address different themes. It went on to be adopted and adapted by scores of other artists, one of the later interpretations recorded in 2005 by British pop-ska band Madness.
Even in its treatment of Voodoo, the movie is sensitive and makes the point that, like all religions, there is the potential to manipulate its tenets for better or worse and tends toward the latter when culturally appropriated by Mrs Rand (Edith Barret), mother to Paul Holland and his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison). They reveal themselves to be part of an Edgar Allan Poe-style dysfunctional Gothic family with the brothers being played against each other by Jessica before she was struck down by the mysterious ‘living death’.
We know that Lewton, as well as structurally echoing Brontë’s Jane Eyre, admired du Maurier’s Rebecca and also borrowed from its plot. Instead of the ghost of an ex-wife, though, we have the ghostly ex-wife as a physical presence in addition to her lingering influence on the two rival brothers. This love triangle becomes a more complicated shape as Betsy falls for Paul despite being warned off by Wesley, who vies for her affections, rekindling that rivalry. It becomes clear that Betsy is enjoying her life on the tropical island and would like to stay with Paul but, rather than capitalise on Jessica’s illness, seeks a way to aid her recovery with the assistance of voodoo, not suspecting that voodoo may be the underlying cause.
In her time there, she befriended Alma who sets up a meeting with the voodoo congregation and this leads to the beautifully atmospheric night walk through dry cane fields, rustling and whispering in the warm wind, past warning signs including the hanging corpse of a goat, a human skull, and a singing gourd… to be confronted by what is certainly one of the most iconic zombies in cinema, Carrefour (Darby Jones). The whole image of a shuffling zombie walking with arms reaching forward comes from a later, somewhat unnerving moment in the narrative.
To discuss things beyond this point would risk spoiling things for those coming fresh to this important horror film that’s more of an accomplished mood piece. The reveal of the villain is more complex than one might expect, and it never quite becomes clear whether the evil stems from the agency of any single person, the ghosts of the dead, or the underlying realisation that their privileged lifestyle was built on the back of slavery, suffering, and death.
Lewton and Tourneur would make one more film together, The Leopard Man (1943) before parting ways. Yet the style they developed together took the adage of ‘show don’t tell’ to another level of ‘suggest don’t show’ and would remain evident in their subsequent movies, never more so than in Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece of supernatural suspense, Night of the Demon (1957). It seems the RKO executives shrewdly assumed that having them work on separate projects would up productivity and produce twice as many quality movies. This presented the opportunity for Mark Robson, editor of Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, to step up as director for The Seventh Victim.
USA | 1943 | 69 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH
A woman in search of her missing sister uncovers a Satanic cult in New York’s Greenwich Village, which may have something to do with her sibling’s disappearance.
Apart from again starring Tom Conway, The Seventh Victim shares many other similarities with I Walked with a Zombie, so they make ideal disc-mates here. For one thing, both narratives involve an absent wife and a love triangle involving siblings—this time, sisters. The night walk through cane fields is mirrored by a tense night pursuit through the deserted city streets. Empty rooms feature again right from the opening shots of empty halls and a grand staircase that can be recognised as the set left over from the earlier RKO production of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), directed by Orson Welles and edited by none other than Mark Robson. At the time, it had been an expensive flop and a factor in the studios employing Val Lewton to make marketable horror movies quickly and cheaply to help recoup their losses.
One of the stained glass windows has been replaced with a quote taken from John Dunne’s Holy Sonnet I: “I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday”; although the prop window credits it wrongly as Holy Sonnet VII, this is another example of Val Lewton’s love of literary inspirations and the full verse reads like an ‘elevator pitch’ for the movie (Google after viewing and you’ll see what I mean).
Suddenly, the empty halls are noisy and full of life as schoolgirls exit their classes and rush down the grand staircase; they appear young and carefree. Only one is going up, Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) whose carefree days are about to end. She’s been called to the principal’s office where Mrs Lowood (Ottola Nesmith) informs her that her older sister and only living relative, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has ceased paying her tuition fees. The name Lowood is another nod to Jane Eyre, being the school in the Brontë novel. The principal offers Mary the option of staying on and working as a classroom assistant instead of fees but she declines, explaining that she must go to New York and find out what’s happened to Jacqueline.
Her first port of call is La Sagesse, the successful cosmetics company that her sister owned but learns that before her disappearance she’d signed it over to her assistant. It seems no one has heard from her since but Frances (Isabel Jewell), an employee and close friend of Jacqueline’s, says that she frequented an Italian restaurant, and the owners may have seen her more recently or know her whereabouts. It turns out to be a solid but sinister lead as Jacqueline is renting one of the rooms above the restaurant but hasn’t moved in. Mary persuades the restaurant owners to open Jacqueline’s room in case there are any clues within but what they find is another empty room, furnished only with a single chair positioned beneath a noose that hangs from the ceiling. It’s a strong and disturbing image.
Again, the executives at RKO knew what they wanted from the title, but Lewton delivered something vastly different. The original treatment penned by the writer of Cat People, DeWitt Bodeen, involved a series of murders in the Texas oil fields and a race against time to solve the mystery before the murderer reached victim number seven. Lewton rejected this outright and set Bodeen to write the sequel to Cat People while bringing in newbie Charles O’Neal to develop The Seventh Victim according to some specific guidelines. Instead of a straightforward whodunnit, they decided to play with the tropes of the detective genre while tackling heavy themes such as mental illness, secret satanic sects, the futile search for meaning in life, and the respite of death. This time his audacity didn’t pay off and the film was considered a box office flop. This comes as no surprise when one considers the themes, overall tone of the piece, and what was going on in the wartime world.
The beautiful noir cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca and the inexorably darkening mood are seductive. The pseudo-sleuth narrative maintains a good level of intrigue, at least for the first act. The narrative climax is a fantastic set piece of Hitchcockian suspense as Mary is accompanied by private investigator Irving August (Lou Lubin) to break into the dark, empty offices of La Sagesse in search of clues. Speaking of Hitchcock, the later shower scene in which Mary is intimidated by the shadow of the insidiously sinister Esther Redi (Mary Newton) is thought to have directly inspired the iconic sequence in Psycho (1960).
There’s plenty of visual pleasure to be had on the way but ultimately, it’s a disappointment, let down by a flimsy plot and unrelenting bleakness. Perhaps the point is that it’s all pointless—just like a life filled with the futile search for meaning. When asked if there was a message, Val Lewton apparently answered, “Yes, the message is, death is good.”
Again, all the cast are perfectly competent, mainly down to restrained and measured performances that allow space for dialogue to breathe and sink in. The two female leads are excellent with Jean Brooks managing to allow just the merest glimpse of the vivacious sparkle that had made Jacqueline uncommonly attractive. For the most part, though, she’s as vacant as a somnambulist. In the lead, Kim Hunter carries the film and is excellently understated. She was just 21 and this was her screen debut; in fact, it was Lewton who suggested her stage name. Of course, she truly shines just a few years later in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) which tackles many of the same themes, but in a way that’s entertaining, memorable, and emotionally affecting. All things that The Seventh Victim never quite manages to be.
USA | 1943 | 71 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • ITALIAN • LATIN • FRENCH
directors: Jacques Tourneur (Zombie) • Mark Robson (Victim).
writers: Curt Siodmak & Ardel Wray (based on an article by Inez Wallace, reinterpreting ‘Jayne Eyre’ by Charlotte Brontë) (Zombie) • Charles O’Neal & DeWitt Bodeen (Victim).
starring: Tom Conway • James Ellison & Frances Dee (Zombie) • Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell & Kim Hunter (Victim).