I Walked With a Zombie and The Seventh Victim (1943)

"Two Classic Lewtons get the 4K Treatment"

Bravo to Criterion, who are releasing two of the best films producer Val Lewton made for RKO in the 1940s on 4K UHD and Blu-ray.

Jacques Tourneur's (heavily Jane Eyre inspired) I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is the story of a nurse, Betsy (Frances Dee) who takes a position on a Caribbean island looking after Jessica (Christine Gordon) the near-catatonic wife of Paul (Tom Conway). Apparently Jessica got that way after contracting a severe illness that affected her spinal cord, but the song Sir Lancelot (a mainstay of 1940s and 1950s movies) sings suggests more is going on. 

Falling in love with Paul and determined to help him at any cost, Betsy determines to cure Jessica with voodoo, and the result is one of the film's highlights - a midnight trek through the cane fields, including a confrontation with the zombiefied Carrefour (the iconic Darby Jones). 

Whereas many horror films of this period build to an often fiery climax, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE's strength lies more in the subtleties along the way, the character interplay and the dialogue, rather than in its ending, which is measured and sombre rather than a confrontation between 'good' and 'evil'. Tourneur's careful direction and the screenplay from Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray are all of a much higher quality than was probably required or expected by RKO, and the result is a classic you can show your non-horror loving friends to show how thoughtful and carefully put together classic genre cinema can be.

In THE SEVENTH VICTIM, Mary (a young Kim Hunter) learns that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has disappeared. Her attempts to find her lead to the discovery of the Palladists, a group of Satan worshippers, whom Jacqueline has betrayed and whom they now want dead. However the group has forsaken violence and so their intended victim (Jacqueline will be the seventh) has to kill themselves.

Some superbly atmospheric sequences help to paper over a screenplay that does feel a bit cobbled together, complete with an ending that must have left 1940s audiences open mouthed, and not in a good way. Lewton's films were always the antithesis of Universal's mid 1940s lumbering monster rallies, and while THE SEVENTH VICTIM is indeed haunting and ultimately desperately sad, it leaves too many important questions unanswered to be entirely satisfactory. That said, there's much to enjoy here, from the subway scene (did it influence de Palma?) to the numerology - there are plenty of instances of the number seven, or multiples thereof, and look at how many times the names of the places Mary visits consist of seven letters (an influence on Peter Greenaway's DROWNING BY NUMBERS, perhaps?). And of course there's that climactic scene where Brooks is pursued, perhaps by nothing more than her own anxiety and paranoia. Some think THE SEVENTH VICTIM is Lewton's best, but that's up to you to decide. 

Criterion's 4K transfers are, unsurprisingly, a huge improvement over the old DVDs. Comparing with the 1080p presentation on the Blu-ray there's extra crispness and detail that you would expect from the format, with a good level of grain in the image but the image noticeably clearer on the UHD.

Extras include an archival Stephen Jones & Kim Newman commentary for I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE while Steve Haberman performs similar duties for THE SEVENTH VICTIM (it's also an archival commentary - from the 2005 DVD release). Another alternate audio track on both films gives us excerpts from Adam Roche's eleven-part series about Val Lewton from his classic movie podcast The Secret History of Hollywood. 

Both the two films and the extras above can be found on Criterion's UHD disc. A Blu-ray is included with the UHD disc or it can be purchased separately. It includes all the above, but also: an erudite and well-illustrated talking head piece from film historian Imogen Sara Smith about the two films; the 2005 documentary Shadows in the Dark: the Val Lewton Legacy, which is excellent and it's good to see it resurrected on this set; 12 minutes of excerpts from the PBS series Monstrum about Haiti and zombies; more audio material from Adam Roche about Jean Brooks (53 minutes) and Tom Conway (69 minutes). There are also trailers for both films.

Finally, the set also comes with essays by Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante.

Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE SEVENTH VICTIM are being released on a single disc by Criterion as either Blu-ray only or a UHD / Blu-ray dual format package on Monday 14th October 2024