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Awix (3310 KP) rated I Walked with a Zombie (1943) in Movies

Jan 8, 2020 (Updated Jan 8, 2020)

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

1943 | Horror, Romance

9.0

(2 Ratings)

Movie Rating

One of the granddaddies of the modern zombie movie is almost unrecognisable as such: no blood to speak of and the plot is derived from a novel by Charlotte Bronte. Nice young nurse goes off to morbid, doomy Caribbean island to care for the creepy wife of her employer (can't speak, has no will of her own following strange 'fever'); finds herself falling for her boss (though God knows why, he's so disagreeable). Perhaps the local voodoo spirits can help cure the afflicted woman?

A zombie movie in the traditional sense, and all the creepier for it. The plot is rather melodramatic, and the gentility of the film is quite amusing to the modern eye (male worshippers at a voodoo ritual all turn up in suits and ties), but it scores hugely for atmosphere, though, and there are some genuinely eerie sequences. Usual studied ambiguity and lack of overt 'horror' you often get in Lewton movies, but this just adds to the sense that this is a classy piece of work.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Break of Dark in Books

Aug 2, 2019

Break of Dark

Robert Westall | 1982 | Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy

9.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

I must have been 12 or 13 when I first read this, and back then part of the fun came from the sense that these actually felt like adult stories, for all the book is advertised as being basically YA fiction: quite apart from the substantial quantities of profanity and sex, many the characters aren't typical YA identification figures: middle-aged seaside policemen, earnest young vicars, suburban couples, and so on. These are still hugely readable and satisfying stories even now many decades later.

But what are they about? Well, there are two stories of ghosts (a haunted Wellington bomber during the second world war, and a rather stranger tale of an unwitting medium), two of very atypical alien visitations (a cautionary tale of a young hitch-hiker, and a blackly comic one concerning a spate of peculiar crimes in a small resort town), and one of an inner-city vicar who stumbles onto something very creepy in the crypt of his church. All of them are engagingly and skilfully written, and immaculately paced. Good reads for all ages.