#1236: TOURNEUR, Jacques: I Walked with a Zombie (1943) / ROBSON, Mark: The Seventh Victim (1943) / Produced by Val Lewton

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TOURNEUR, Jacques / ROBSON, Mark (United States)
I Walked with a Zombie [1943] / The Seventh Victim [1943]
Spine #1236
Blu-ray



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.

69 minutes
Monaural
Black and White
1:37:1
Criterion Release 2024


“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.

71 minutes
Monaural
Black and White
1:37:1
Criterion Release 2024

Jacques Tourneur was 39 when he directed I Walked with a Zombie. Mark Robson was 30 when he directed The Seventh Victim.

Other Tourneur films in the Collection:


Other Robson films in the Collection:


The Film

a

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Commentary

Video tribute

Documentary 1

Documentary 2

Documentary 3

Controversial altered ending

Theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

By Spine #

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