A Film Canon

 

 

This extraordinary film characterises the zombie as a mere silence, or stillness, around which it wraps a series of noises, and movements, that are so slight as to simply reiterate it - from the chants, drums and conches that drift across the Caribbean island upon which the narrative takes place, to the delicate breeze that invests every surface with its presence, and is so artfully evoked as to make atmospherics palpable; an ominous respite from humidity. It feels as if Tourneur's ultimate aim is to conflate sight and sound, and, in doing so, to suffuse the film with the preternatural, rather than supernatural, register appropriate to this more traditional conception of zombiedom, as well as to the profound ambiguity about whether the 'protagonist' (Christine Gordon), the wife of a plantation owner (Tom Conway), and ward of a Canadian nurse (Frances Dee), is a zombie at all. To this end, screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray emphasise the continuity between Western and 'native' beliefs, replacing the dichotomy between Westerners as subjects, and natives as objects, with a spectrum of uncannily enlivened objects, and uncannily disempowered subjects - from the figurehead that graces the protagonist's garden, to the representative from the voodoo camp, whose bulging, lifeless eyes culminate one of the most terrifying - and lyrical - instances of Lewton's trademark vision of treacherous passage; a night journey through a cane field, guided solely by the synecdoches of horror.