Jane Walking wih Zombies

Last October 4 a collection of the nine B-pictures Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946, "The Val Lewton Horror Collection", was released for Zone 1 (USA and Canada).
The box set includes "Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People / I Walked with a Zombie / The Body Snatcher / Isle of the Dead / Bedlam / The Leopard Man / The Ghost Ship / The Seventh Victim / Shadows in the Dark".

We at BrontëBlog are interested in one of them: "I walked with a zombie" (1943) directed by Jacques Tourneur. Weird as it could seem, this film is a reworking of "Jane Eyre". Not exactly a version or a resettling of the story because the changes are too numerous. But the general trends of the story and some particular aspects of Charlotte's Jane still remain. Nowadays, it is considered a masterpiece of its genre as many of the other movies included in this box-set (By the way, in another film of the collection "The seventh victim" (1943), there is also a Jane Eyre-related item, because the girls' school that Mary, one of the characters, quits at the beginning of the film is named...Lowood)

"Many critics feel that the second Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur endeavor, I Walked With a Zombie (1943), is both men's finest work. The title is so lurid that the heroine-narrator (Frances Dee) must shrug it off with her very first words, yet the movie is an amazingly delicate and poetic piece of spellbinding--nothing less than a reworking of Jane Eyre on a voodoo island in the Caribbean. " (from Amazon).

On this web devoted to the film you can find the screenplay, pictures among many other things related to this movie. We can find even something more about the story of how the idea of the movie was originated: "Val Lewton was given the title "I Walked With A Zombie" by the RKO front office, who had drawn it from an American Weekly article of the same name by writer Inez Wallace. The result of that meeting was a depressed state for Lewton. Writer Carl Siodmak, who had written the screenplays for Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, Ghost of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Woman, the novel Donovan's Brain, among others, worked with writer Ardel Wray to flesh out a theme based upon Haitian voodoo. Mark Robson, Zombie's editor, recalled Lewton being depressed one day, then happily confidant the next, announcing to his crew that they were going to make a West Indies version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre."

Did Jean Rhys watch this film before writing Wild Sargasso Sea?

The film comes with a commentary by Film Historians Kim Newman and Steve Jones and the theatrical trailer.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë