I Walked with a Zombie

Lewton was handed another lurid title and again refused to make the film it implied. What Jacques Tourneur delivered is a slow, humid gothic with the structure of a Brontë novel: a nurse arrives at a remote house to care for the master's catatonic wife.

The famous sequence is a night walk through the cane fields to a voodoo ceremony, several minutes long, almost silent, with wind in the cane and a tall figure standing in the path. It is one of the great passages of atmosphere in American cinema.

The film is unusually serious about the plantation and its history for 1943. A calypso singer narrates the family's shame in a bar, and a figurehead of a slave ship stands in the garden, and neither is decoration.

Nobody is bitten and nobody eats anybody. It is the last major zombie film before Romero changed what the word meant.