In this Devil’s Advocates edition, author Clive Dawson examines I Walked with a Zombie, Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s classic film, described by critic Robin Wood as ‘perhaps the most delicate poetic fantasy in the American Cinema.’
In this blog post, Clive Dawson delves into the research process of writing this book and offers some background to the film’s production.
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This year marks the 80th anniversary of the release of this extraordinary film. Made by writer-producer Val Lewton’s RKO B-movie unit in 1943, saddled with a trashy, studio-imposed title and marketed aggressively as a horror film, I Walked with a Zombie is nevertheless a subtle and nuanced female gothic thriller loosely modelled on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It also advanced a bold condemnation of slavery and colonialism at a time when such themes were being actively suppressed by wartime government censors and simultaneously broke new ground on the representation of black people on screen. The film – about a nurse who takes a job in the Caribbean to care for a comatose woman who may or may not be the victim of voodoo – has since become something of a classic, admired for its subtlety and beauty by vintage horror film fans and repeatedly deconstructed by critics and academics searching for meaning in its text and subtexts. However, the surprising dearth of available information about its development and production, and the concerns and intentions of the filmmakers in the context of wartime Hollywood, inspired the research that ultimately led to this book.
Filling the hole in the historical record proved to be a mammoth undertaking, and the existing Lewton-related literature provided only a starting point. By far the most informative published source was Joel E. Siegel’s seminal biography, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, yet even this work shed only limited little on the making of I Walked with a Zombie. Accurate information about the genesis of the project, and the specific contributions made by the credited writers, was almost non-existent. Journalist Inez Wallace’s 1942 American Weekly newspaper piece about zombies was the original inspiration for the film, yet the piece has frequently been incorrectly cited, and the fact that Wallace had also contributed a story treatment was missing from the record entirely. Of the two credited screenwriters, Curt Siodmak received the lion’s share of the acclaim, with co-writer Ardel Wray often cast as a second-string player. Occasionally, she was airbrushed from the record completely. However, during the research process, it soon became abundantly clear that Wray was the main contributor to the screenplay since Lewton had rejected Siodmak’s draft as unsatisfactory. Similarly, the difficulties Lewton encountered from industry and government censors throughout the process have only recently emerged. Finally, an in-depth analysis of the shooting script, the production reports, and the completed film revealed for the first time the full extent of the changes Lewton made to the film in post-production. Various other misconceptions have also, hopefully, been dispelled along the way.
Whilst undertaking the extensive primary research it was necessary to access every extant record and archive relating to Lewton’s work for RKO, and profound thanks must be extended to my wonderful researchers, named below. Without their kind help, the book would not have been possible. The scripts and production files for the film, housed in the UCLA Library Special Collections, were obtained by Karina Wilson. Letters and other material from The Val Lewton Papers, held by the Library of Congress in Washington DC, were accessed by Brook Darnell. Innumerable newspaper and industry journal references, amongst other things, were located by Andre Solnikkar. Various other institutions supplied the remainder of the research material, including: The Margaret Herrick Library in LA; The National Archive in Maryland; The Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio; The Cleveland Public Library; The Cambridge University Library; The BFI Library and Special Collections; and The British Library.
My aim, when I first pitched the idea for the book to Auteur editor John Atkinson in March 2020, was to create the definitive guide to the production, consisting of the first complete production history and scene-by-scene analysis of the film. Hopefully, the finished book has gone some way towards achieving that goal.
I Walked with a Zombie is available to purchase now from our website.
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