[Book Review] I Walked with A Zombie
Tomes on horror movies glut the current book market, with far too many of them rehashes of earlier volumes on the subject. However, the awesome oeuvre of producer Val Lewton, the wildly creative prime mover of RKO Studios’ classic shockers of the 1940s, has been relatively ignored.
While most writers tackle Universal Studio’s Grimm Bros.-style monsters, Lewton’s beauty parade of spiritually-fractured females—including a heartbreaking Cat Woman, a renegade Devil Worshipper, and a drop-dead gorgeous blonde white zombie—has sashayed through the past 80 years, virtually unspoiled by film historians. There’s a good reason for it. Lewton’s brilliance as a filmmaker was largely and appropriately visual. Capturing in words what Lewton caught on film is a daunting challenge, and as such, a book doing him full justice has never really seen its way into print.
Until now.
Clive Dawson has done what seems to be the impossible, and amazingly, he’s done it by focusing on Lewton’s most visual film—I Walked with a Zombie. Dawson has tapped into the film’s stylistics, analyzing it for the reader as if we’re in Lewton’s cinema psyche, lovingly plotting each set-up, characterization, and seductively frightening shadow. It’s a fast-paced yet remarkably in-depth tour of the contributions of Lewton, the director (Jacques Tourneur), and the scenarist (Ardel Wray). Their happy collaboration on this decidedly morbid movie not only spawned one of the major “sleepers” in Hollywood history but did so with a deep and uniquely cinematic sense.
There’s more in the book than the expert analysis. Dawson, who resides in the UK, traveled to Hollywood to conduct an adventurous deep-dive research mission. There are details, for example, on the first draft I Walked with a Zombie script by Curt Siodmak, who’d provided the scenario for Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941). As such, it’s now possible to differentiate between the content of what Siodmak provided, and what Wray, his young female replacement, dynamically brought to the story. Dawson also covers the film’s censorship travails, not only with Hollywood’s Breen Office, but via previously untapped correspondence from the United States’ Office of War Information. In doing so, Dawson hits on a major vibrating thread in the film: its strikingly anti-racist content.
The book also covers I Walked with a Zombie’s “world premiere” in Cleveland, Ohio (Why Ohio? – Dawson explains) and the outrageous “showmanship” of the evening. There’s a fine selection of stills that capture the ambiance of the movie. All in all, the book covers the film, colorfully and comprehensively, from its World War II genesis, all the way up to the current reputation it enjoys following its 80th birthday.
I only wish Lewton (who died in 1951) could have read this book, and that his wife, daughter, and son (all of them gone now, too) could have read it as well. Bravos to Clive Dawson for this superb, highly recommended, five-star study that showcases one of the most creative and subversive talents of 1940s Hollywood—and what, for many, survives as the finest of Lewton’s masterpieces.
Article by Gregory Mank
Gregory William Mank is the author of such books as It’s Alive! The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein; Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration; and Of Mice and Men: Mental Enfeeblement, Racism, and Mercy-Killing in 1939 Hollywood. Find more information about Mank and his other publications on his website.
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