I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
A nurse in the Caribbean turns to voodoo in hopes of curing her patient, a mindless woman whose husband she's fallen in love with.
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What critics compared I Walked with a Zombie to
There was also at that time Jacques Tourneur's remarkable horror film I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a transposition of Jane Eyre to the modern Caribbean where the Rochester character's mad wife becomes a victim of voodoo.
If you don't count I Walked With a Zombie, this is the 27th screen adaptation of Brontë's classic, the mother of all Gothic romances.
In this moment Get Out adds a new, unsettling image to the annals of the horror film—an image of black subjugation capable of recalling the sightless “undead” of Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton’s 1943 I Walked with a Zombie , while seeming to belong entirely to this movie and this moment.
It does, I have to admit, tend to bog down in the seemingly infinite twists and bits of business leading up to the climax, and movie-overfed-critic types are likely to fondly recall the better movies, including " I Walked With a Zombie " and " The Princess Bride ," that this draws inspiration from.
Zombie movies have been around for some time now, the greatest being the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur horror classic I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a reworking of Jane Eyre on a Caribbean island.
Zombies -- those disheveled, shuffling, flesh-eating masses -- are suddenly en vogue, from the planned record-setting zombie assembly at this year's Voodoo Experience in City Park, to last summer's movie " Pontypool " to the potential Hollywood South remake "I Walked With a Zombie."
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Del Toro, however, operates more in tune with B-movie producer Val Lewton, who used “Jane Eyre” to develop a darkly ambiguous take on the relationship between emotional duress and supernatural events in “I Walked With a Zombie,” a title forced on him by studio executives ahead of the 1943 production.
Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) hinge on their heroines' dread of being vulnerable to sexual predators.
The cycle of films he oversaw from 1942 to 1946, most notably The Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1942), showed that simple shadows are more ominous than even the most skillful shock effect.
He goes the old-school trail blazed in the 1940s by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man), barely showing the aliens at all, instead focusing on sounds, lights and shadows.
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Instead, filmmakers behind films like The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, The Others, Session 9, The Devil's Backbone and the new Wendigo have taken a cue from Val Lewton's great horror films from the 1940s, like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie.
"Unbreakable" begins with Willis in full "I Walked With a Zombie" mode as David Dunn, a phlegmatic security guard returning by train to his home in Philadelphia.