Narration and Incarnation:

/ Walked with a Zombie

J.P. Telotte

Despite never achieving the big-time status of the major

Hollywood studios, RKO Pictures managed to sustain a reputation for
artistic innovation. Because of a constant press for production money
and a lack of dominant stars for whom vehicles had to be specially
created, the studio "put a premium on ingenuity," as James Naremore
explains, often allowing its filmmakers, within budgetary limits, a
freer hand than normal and seeking to cultivate new talent. As a
result, an inexperienced Orson Welles not only had the opportunity to
make films, but-in the case of Citizen Kane, at least-to do so in a way
that would blaze a new trail for cinematic narrative. While working
with far smaller budgets and thus even less front office interference,
the RKO B-units achieved a no less noteworthy standard of produc-
tion. The horror unit particularly, employing alumni from Welles'
projects such as Robert Wise and Mark Robson and headed by a truly
creative, guiding spirit, Val Lewton, who heartily disliked the typical
Hollywood approach to genre narrative, produced a series of films
which proved equally unconventionEil in narrative style and which,
almost in spite of their subjects, managed to explore fundamentally
important human issues.
Given the extreme financial and material limitations of the
B-film formula, the Lewton unit was practically forced into uncon-
ventional means of enhancing familiar fantasy subject matter and thus
more subtly evoking audience response. Joel Siegel's description of
the "fragmented, mosaic-like structure" of the films, especially the
"series of tiny, precise vignettes which do not so much tell the story
as sketch in its borders and possibilities," suggests the sort of ap-
proach that was hit upon for these genre pieces. And another hint of
the difference between works like The Cat People, I Walked with a
Zombie, or /.y/e of the Dead and the far less subdued and narratively

18
conventional competition coming from Universal Studios can be
found in Robin Wood's comment on the often illogical "poetic
structure" of Lewton's best films. When we examine Lewton's early
films, we find a narrative style which recalls Sartre's prescription for
fantasy storytelling: "in order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither
neccessary nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. The stran-
gest event will enter into the order of the universe if it is alone in a
world governed by laws...You cannot impose limits on the fantastic;
either jt does not exist at all, or else it extends throughout the uni-
verse." What the Levifton films do is not simply strip the world of its
ordinary "laws," as most conventional horror films did, but manipu-
late the context within which audiences would perceive even the
most commonplace actions. By means of such narrative manipula-
tion, by gradually drawing viewers into a world that is deceptively
quotidian, Lewton found that he could suggest a more unsettling
misgovernance in what we typically perceive as the ordinary.
In the film that most critics consider the masterpiece of the
series, / Walked with a Zombie (1943), this effect is in great part
achieved with the voice-over, a familiar narrative device, but here
employed in a most unconventional way. While partially evoking the
first-person narration of the film's ostensible source, Jane Eyre, the
device in its atypical development more strongly suggests the influ-
ence of that landmark of cinematic storytelling, Citizen Kane. Just as
Welles used various nsmrative voices, speaking consecutively and often
contradictorily, to fashion his enigmatic portrait of Charles Foster
Kane, so Lewton constructs a film which relies on multiple voices and
hence different perspectives to limn its world. His focus, however, is
less the multiplicity of viewpoints available than the stance those
narrative voices imply. As Bruce Kawin notes, in the fictional film
voice-over narration represents an "interpretive response" to events.
In that capacity it not only introduces and frames what we see,
but also appends a sense of detachment as that voice proceeds to
"narrate" or comment upon actions, to stand psychologically outside
of them, even if physically involved in all that occurs. And with that
distance there comes as well a suggestion of control, as the speaker's
words direct our access to this world and exercise certain rights over
it, even the prerogative of dishonesty in narrating, of lying about what
we see, as occurs in Hitchcock's Stage Fright. As the body of his films
testify, Lewton was consistently concerned with our common tenden-
cy to distance the self from anything discomfiting, especially what we
might term the fantastic, and in reaction, to assert steadfastly the
controlling power of our rational faculties. For / Walked with a
Zombie he fashioned a narrative structure which speaks clearly to
these concerns by focusing attention on the manner in which we
perceive and make judgments about the mysterious and threatening
world in which the horror film conventionally places us.
Given a sensationalistic title which leads viewers to expect
little from the film, Lewton's unit could justifiably have employed a
conventional horror formula in Zombie, as Universal had done so
successfully. Simply plunging viewers into a natural world threatened

19
by monsters and eventually released from that grip by a vanquishing
of the threat would not only have been consistent with the familiar
horror formula, but it would have offered audiences a comforting and
not yet trite analogue for the world struggle in which they were
involved. The narrative mechanism of Zombie, however, pointedly
works against such a sense of security. The film opens with a voice-
over which effectively suggests our normal desire to know and explain
away whatever we find disturbing. Betsy (Francis Dee), a Canadian
nurse who has come to the island of Saint Sebastian to attend the
invalid wife of a sugar planter, introduces the film by laughing at its
very premise: "I walked with a zombie . . . . Heh,heh. It does seem
an odd thing to say. If anyone said that to me a year ago, I'm not at
all sure I would have known what a zombie was." Her calm, detached
voice seems to promise an amusing anecdote, an explanation of that
initial intriguing statement to dispel any anxiety latent in the term
"zombie." The narrative which ensues, combining Betsy's voice with
various scenes of her new home, does little to fulfill this promise,
though; instead, and ironically, it simply demonstrates her inherent
naivete. Consequently, another voice must intrude to provide a
different, previously withheld view of things: a glimpse of the dark
and complex human motivations operating beneath the idyllic surface
which Betsy initially sees. Though hardly a traditional voice-over, the
song of a calypso singer (Sir Lancelot) functions similarly hexe to
afford this new perspective. From off-screen at first, he sings of the
half-brothers Paul Holland and Wesley Rand, and of their love for the
same woman-Paul's wife Jessica. The singer's narration complements
the initial voice-over by granting us insight into the tensions and
suspicions surrounding the household in which Betsy lives and works,
and by imparting a quite different tone to all that follows these
disclosures. When that ominous atmosphere breeds disaster, as Wesley
kills Jessica and himself drowns, still another voice-over intrudes to
bracket the entire narrative and offer a possible coda for the film:

O Lord God most holy. Deliver them from the bitter

pain of eternjil death. The woman was a wicked
woman, and she was dead in her own life. Yea, Lord,
dead in the selfishness of her spirit. And the man
followed her. Her steps led him down to evil. Her
feet took hold on death. Forgive him, O Lord, who
knowest the secret of all hearts. Yea, Lord, pity
them who are dead and give peace and happiness to
the living.

This final solemn "say" comes from a mysterious and never identified
speaker, though it seems clearly a native voice, one far removed from
that almost cheerful, civilized commentary with which the film began.
The very distance between those two voices suggests just how far we
have been brought into this world, while it also reaffirms how little of
it can ever be satisfyingly explained; it leaves us simply with a recog-

20
nition of the terrible paths human nature frequently takes.
Obviously, this bracketing of the story with multiple voices
violated the normal method of voice-over narration which, drawing on
literature and oral traditions of storytelling, relies on a single narrator
to present or comment upon the events depicted. By violating audi-
ence expectations in this way, though, Lewton added an element of
complexity seldom met with either in such genre programmers or in
more traditional film narratives. Kawin reminds us that "the question
of voice becomes, finally, the question of mind, and both are insepa-
rable from the question of meaning." The many consciousnesses
here, consequently, like those numerous voices which paint the
ambiguous portrait of "Citizen" Kane, inevitably reflect upon our
capacity to sift meaning from events, to stand apart from and judge
our world. And similarly. Zombie's various voices grant us less
satisfaction than frustration, leading us from a promise of explanation
to an admission of human limitation. In that very movement, though,
the film manages to work its effective variation on the familiar mat-
ters of its genre.
What / Walked with a Zombie's unconventional narration
suggests is the unfolding of a pattern that has been doubled and
redoubled, folded so neatly and compactly that its true shape and
significance have effectively been hidden from sight. That "folding,"
however, denotes the work of a civilized mind, attempting to order
and arrange this world and these events according to its particular
perceptions, to enclose any ambiguities or troubling uncertainties
within a securely bound volume of knowledge. The truly varied
understandings of the world embodied in those shifting voices,
though, reveal how vain the attempt is, as each reads a slightly differ-
ent story in that text, unfolds its leaves to display another, more
complex pattern therein. As J. Hillis Miller notes, this result is actual-
ly characteristic of discourse, for "the coherence of the monological
has all along been undermined by the presence within it, inextricably
intertwined in any of its expressions, of that other non-system, the
'instance' of fragmentation and the absence of unifying authority."
By simply underscoring that "instance of fragmentation," then,
Lewton could raise a narrative ghost of sorts-the absence of "author-
ity "-to haunt his tale and to carry out more effectively the basic
function of all fantastic discourse, which, as Eric Rabkin argues,
"represents a basic mode of knowing," perhaps even the only truly
reliable one we have. The message which Zombie's voices whisper,
then, is appropriately a distinctly discomfiting one, as they speak of
how unformulable-and unnarratable-our most involving experiences
always tend to be.
The untroubled voice which introduces the film-Betsy describ-
ing the events leading to her employment at Fort Hudson-stills the
apprehensions we almost automatically bring to the horror genre. It
suggests a frame and closure for the ensuing events, within which they
can all be explained, rendered rational rather than threatening. The
only ominous note Betsy relates from her job interview, the query
about whether she believes in witchcraft, is quickly dispelled by the

21
 promise that she will spend much of her time in the Caribbean "sitting
under a palm tree, swimming, taking sunbaths." Those words color
her subsequent thoughts, for on the boat to Saint Sebastian her
voice-over becomes a present-tense revery on the idyllic beauty of the
tropical sunset. The thoughts we hear, though, are interrupted by
someone speaking from off-screen, another narrative voice of sorts,
challenging her unspoken interpretation of this world. That sobering
voice is then made incarnate when Paul Holland (Tom Conway),
Betsy's employer, enters the frame and continues his explanation,
noting that "everything seems beautiful because you don't under-
stand. Those fiying fish-they're not leaping for joy; they're jumping
in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water-it takes
its gleam from millions of dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence.
There's no beauty here, only death and putrescence. Everything good
dies here, even the stare." Paul's commentary quickly establishes a
pattern of disillusionment to complement the impulse for explana-
tion, while it also suggests the possibility of other narrative voices to
challenge the authority of Betsy's introductory narration. Her limited
perspective on this world, we have quickly seen, might prove incapa-
ble of providing a coherent understanding of it, in part because of the
romantic notions Betsy brings to and attempts to impose on her new
environment, but also because of the narrative distance implied by her
voice-over and underscored by Paul's incarnation from off-screen.
Zombie's opening thus establishes a possibility of various
different perspectives on this world, as well as the need for a gradual
initiation or immersion into that complexity. The initial shipboard
shots of Paul and Betsy confirm the disparity in perspectve suggested
by their narrating voices. We first see Paul in long shot, framed
against the open sea of the background, while a group of native sailors
chant an eerie and indistinguishable song in the foreground. In
contrast to this composition in depth, Betsy appears in an almost
claustrophbic medium shot, completely framed by the rope ladder on
whose rung she leans. These compositions hint at the initial disparity
in the knowledge which each bears. Betsy, although trained in obser-
vation as she proudly points out, too quickly seizes upon appearance-
such as the dosages and disease symptoms which her scientific training
has brought her to respect-but she is hard put to go beyond that
percieved reality. When she arrives at Saint Sebastian, a native cab
driver recounts the island's slave heritage and describes Ti Misery, the
ship's figurhead which symbolizes the slaves' sorrowful introduction
to the island. After this narration, Betsy simply gazes at the fiowers
and greenery around them and offers the judgement that at least the
slavers "brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?" The rhetor-
ical nature of her comment, implying the "truth" she expects to hear
confirmed, suggests that she will not even notice the irony in the
driver's response to her cultural myopia-"If you say, miss, if you
say "-much less the implication that there are indeed other possible
interpretations. As Betsy's voice-over then relates her first impres-
sions of Fort Hudson, that impression of limitation recurs in her
description of the "strangely dream-like" world she saw through the
gates of the plantation. The accompanying subjective shot through

22
 the bars of the gate reinforces a sense of her alienation from this
world and establishes a recurring visual pattern of barriers, suggesting
just how "barred off" Betsy is from all she surveys. This motif is
replicated by the bar shadows which suffuse her room and the lattices
on her window, through which she first glimpses her patient, Jessica
Holland (Christine Gordon) wandering like a sleepwalker through the
garden outside. This visual pattern then issues in a particularly telling
encounter, as the nurse emerges from her room to follow her patient,
only to find that Jessica has a frightening, deathly look about her, and
she approaches Betsy in a menacing manner that prompts the nurse to
scream for help. Distanced from that unsettling encounter by a
night's sleep, Betsy can laugh at her reaction -as in the film's open-
ing-but only by first bracketing it within a familiar context, by
creating a narrative in which her patient is nothing more than a
"mental case." Paul's overly eager agreement with her diagnosis,
though, hints at his own weakness, undercuts Betsy's assurance, and
evokes a doubt which lingers throughout the narrative.
From this encounter a series of explanations by various
characters follows, functioning essentially as embedded authorial or
narrative voices, when several people attempt to furnish Betsy with an
overview on this world or to explicate its mysteries for her. Paul
initiates this pattern by explaining why Betsy heard a mysterious
crying in the night. Because "for generations they found life a bur-
den," the servants "still weep when a child is born and make merry at
a burial"; so that crying, he suggests, was simply their mysterious way
of marking a recent birth. Dr. Maxwell (James Bell), in charge of
Betsy's patient, next recounts Jessica's medical history to explain how
she became "a sleepwalker who can never be awakened-feeling
nothing, knowing nothing." Her condition results, he believes, from a
tropical fever which "burned out" portions of the spinal cord. Half-
jokingly, though, he also suggests another possibility, noting that
Jessica "makes a beautiful zombie." Since that term only leaves Betsy
puzzled, he must then define it for her: a zombie is "a ghost, the
living dead. It's also a drink." His double definition, like his diver-
gent diagnosis, bespeaks both the native intelligence, which employs
its voodoo system to explain the mysteries of this world, and that
detached, scientific perspective of the medical field, which even Paul
ultimately prefers to believe in. This epistemological duality hints at
the complexity of the situation facing the characters, a complexity
thinly disguised by Dr. Maxwell's musing that when faced with such
problems "sometimes it's better for a doctor to laugh than to pull a
long face." Despite the explanations of her husband, doctor, and
maid ("She was very sick and then she went mindless."), then, Jessi-
ca's condition and the circumstances precipitating it remain cloaked in
mystery; and if Betsy, "the nurse who's afraid of the dark" as Paul
describes her, seems little troubled by these ambiguities, it is because
she steadfastly perceives the world as essentially knowable and narra-
table.
In light of this attitude, the next source of narrative informa-
tion might justifiably be described as an equivalent voice-over. While

23
Betsy spends her off-day at an outdoor cafe with Wesley (James
Ellison), the song of a calypso singer is heard . from off-screen,
describing for the first time the vicious love triangle which led to
Jessica's current condition. Defensively, Wesley tries to counter the
song's narration by raising his voice to recount a humorous story
of the plantation. This attempt to drown out one narrative voice by
overlaying it with another, much as the larger story of Zombie does, is
frustrated by Betsy's curiosity, which mirrors our own preconcern
with this new narrative information. With these revelations the light
ton*' o,' the original conversation gives way to a dark and menacing
atmosphere, as night comes on and Wesley, his tongue freed by rum,
joins in the pattern of explanation by offering the disconcerting view
that Paul IE not what he seems: "He's playing the noble husband for
you. Even after he drinks himself into a stupor, silences his own
voicp. the discomfiting revelations continue, as the singer reappears,
noi only to conclude his story of the tragic conflict between the two
brothers but also to implicate Betsy, who still sees herself as an
outsider to these events. With the song's conclusion that "the broth-
ers are lonely and the nurse is young," Betsy is transformed from the
distanced narrator to the topic of narration, even a substitute for
Jessica in a reenactment of the original romantic wrangle. The threat-
ening implications of this unexpected involvement are underscored in
the shift from a bright and cheery daylight, full of holiday promise, to
the discomfiting darkness in which the calypso singer holds forth,
approaching Betsy in the same ambiguously menacing manner Jessica
had earliej Moreover, his appearance repeats the pattern already
established by Paul and Betsy whereby an off-screen voice becomes
incarnated as an on-screen figure-a narrative pattern which subtly
underscores the motif of increasing involvement by promising to
prove every commentator, every detached voice, actually a participant
in the unfolding action. This second narrative voice, then, marks an
ongoing process of revelation, one plunging Betsy deeper into the
mysteries of this world, into depths her initially distanced narration
seems ever less likely to be able to illuminate. At the same time, the
singer's intrusion points up the audience's similarly increasing immer-
sion in the film's fantasy context, for we have been dislodged from
our initial perspective and cast into a world where nothing is quite as
we had originally expected.
When Betsy's voice briefly resumes the narration, it is appro-
priately to speak of her involvement in these affairs, of this new level
of knowledge she has gained. Against a dark background of waves
crashing on jagged rocks, suggesting the inner turmoil she feels and
recalling the similar background from which the calypso singer e-
merged. Betsy vows to try to set things right, to do whatever she can
to restore Jessica's sanity, though primarily because despite Wesley's
comments she finds herself in love with Paul. Just how incommen-
surate with this world her perspective remains, however, is dramatized
by tht two radically different solutions she seizes upon. Betsy first
convinces Dr. Maxwell to try one of the latest, and still dangerously
experimental, medical practices on their patient-insulin shock thera-

24
 py. When it fails and she must face the inadequacy of the scientific
approach, Betsy turns to the native voodoo culture. The long set
piece which follows, wherein she takes Jessica on a midnight walk
through the sugar cane fields to the voodoo houmfort, encountering
along the way various emblems of death and decay as well as the giant
guardian of the crossroads Carre Four (Darby Jones), is easily the
film's eeriest scene; it is not, however, as Joel Siegel suggests, one
which exists solely "for the sake of its own grace of movement,"'^
solely for effect. Marking the mid-point in the film, this scene meta-
phorically summarizes our own and Betsy's slow and deliberate
journey ever deeper into this dark and menacing world, seeking to
narrate its complexities, to find at its center some explanation for the
mysteries it holds. At the houmfort Betsy again listens to an off-
screen voice, that of the houngan or witch doctor who is supposed to
"speak to Laba and Dumbala," the native gods, about Jessica's condi-
tion. When this voice is incarnated, though, it proves to be that of
Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), who had earlier cautioned Betsy to disre-
gard the natives' voodoo "nonsense." It is a discomfiting revelation,
yielding no answers, only other mysteries and the unsatisfying expla-
nation that these sinister ceremonies simply mask a kind of primitive
yet quite practical psychology. This encounter, following Betsy's trek
into the "heart of darkness," underscores the Chinese-box nature of
this world and repeats that pattern of explanations-increasingly
unsatisfactory ones-which has begun to dominate the film. By this
point, though, one of the directing forces behind that explanatory
impulse, Betsy's narrating voice, has disappeared, or as Sylvie Pierre
suggests, has "exploded" into a myriad of possible voices. With the
loss of that monological coherence which her narration initially
promised, we are left with no key to these mysteries, only the inexpli-
cable phenomena themselves, mocking our desire for explanation and
for intellectual distance by their substantial yet ambiguous presence.
Through her growing involvement in these events, Betsy
reveals the simple principle informing the film's narrative style: that
nothing here is as it initially seems. Like the brioche which the maid
brings Betsy for breakfast, a puff pastry which looks like "too much"
until one pokes it with a fork and deflates it, or the sea as Paul des-
cribes it early in the film, all appearances are deceptive. And this
principle governs our perspective on events as well as Betsy's, for in
scene after scene the low-key lighting and strategically placed shadows
work upon our generic expectations to suggest some impending threat
which never materializes. Our participation is therby invited, our
anxieties stirred, but never to be fully allayed. In retrospect, even
that highly atmospheric walk through the cane fields seems an exer-
cise in deception, since we are led to believe by Betsy's loss of the
"voodoo badge" needed to pass by Carre Four, by the recurring
images of death and decay, and by the eerie sound effects, that this
journey is indeed hazard filled. Yet nothing happens. In the very
middle of this forbidding realm we find only an old woman who
claims to be trying to help these primitive people. If Mrs. Rand's
explanation of her presence is unsatisfying-even Betsy comments.

25
"this still doesn't explain why you're here"-it is because the narrative
has at every level fostered skepticism even as we seem to approach
some determination. The repeated undercutting of expectation makes
those many attempts at explanation seem far less adequate, as if they
too were simply facades which a civilized society, with its great store
of rationalizations, might impose on whatever it finds disconcerting or
inconsistent with its normal perspective.
The film's conclusion effectively dramatizes the collision of
these varied and equally unsatisfactory explanations, analogues for
those conflicting narrative powers which direct our perspective. The
local police commissioner has decided to conduct "a legal investiga-
tion" of the circumstances surrounding Jessica's condition-a task
obviously doomed to frustration and intended merely to quell curiosi-
ty. Appropriately, this inquiry only discloses contradictory versions
of the events leading to Jessica's illness: one, recounted by Mrs. Rand,
who now claims deliberately to have turned her daughter-in-law into a
zombie in revenge for tearing her family apart; the other by Dr.
Maxwell, who holds that his patient is only the victim of "a fever with
a long Latin name and a reputation for its after effects." Reason
predictably holds sway here, as both Paul and the doctor note that
even if it were possible to turn someone into a zombie, that person
would first have to be dead, which was not the case with Jessica. Just
as predictably though, the film cuts this explanation as well, for in.the
subsequent scene Paul and Wesley reveal another bit of privileged
information, that Jessica had lapsed into a coma resembling death, a
fact which suggests to Wesley that she could indeed have been trans-
formed into a zombie. Their subsequent argument only demonstrates
the strength of the rationalizing impulse which drives the narrative, as
Paul talks his brother down by asserting that he had "heard nothing
that would convince a sober man." In their opposing viewpoints, the
two brothers evoke those rational and emotional forces which con-
tend so near the surface in this film and whose antagonism Lewton's
work was to explore continually. In this instance, neither is able to
account adequately for the present situation-even to determine
whether or not Jessica is a zombie-and their disharmony suggests the
sort of partial vision we inevitably have of our world. It is a frag-
mented perspective which, J. HiUis Miller would hold, lies implicit in
every act of narration, every attempt to explain away the mysteries of
the human situation.
/ Walked with a Zombie, of course, is concerned not simply
with that inability to narrate or explain reality but with the conse-
quences of that inability, especially our failure to understand and bear
with these limitations. This incapacity is essentially the source of the
"horror" with which Lewton's fantasy formulations were always
concerned, and it provides the impetus for the dread events with
which this film culminates. Afraid of what "experiments" the natives
might' try to perform on her if she were allowed to roam free, Paul
keeps Jessica locked within the confines of Fort Hudson, whose high
walls and iron gate speak not only of his desire to protect his wife but
also of his unspoken fear of those unbounded, unpredictable forces

26
which operate just outside this fragile enclave. Fort Hudson becomes,
in effect a fortress of the rational, imprisoning its inhabitants within
that "sober" perspective to which Paul now clings. In effect, we might
view it as another image of the film's basic narrative impulse-mute
testimony to the result of all such attempts to explicate this world.
Faced with its own limitations, that rational perspective tums within
itself, becomes a conservative force which shuts out, as a way of
denying existence to, everything that remains mysterious.
Paul's final explanation, that the native voodoo is simply
"nonsense" which works by making one think "just as they want you
to think," finds neither substantiation nor refutation in the film's
final scenes. / Walked with a Zombie culminates in a wordless se-
quence of events about which we are left to draw our own conclu-
sions. Apparently moved by the voodoo drums and his conviction
that Jessica is in fact already dead, Wesley frees her from Fort Hudson
and follows with a shaft pulled from Ti Misery, that arrow^studded
emblem of suffering which serves as a fountain centerpiece in the
estate's garden. A traditional cross-cut montage then parallels a
voodoo ceremony wherein a doll is stabbed with a pin to a beach
scene which finds Wesley standing over Jessica's body holding the
arrow with which he has apparently dispatched her. Whether he was
impelled by enchantment or was simply the victim of his own imagin-
ings upon abandoning the rational world, we never leam, for he too
dies after walking into the surf with Jessica in his arms. We are only
left with more unanswered questions, albeit ones rendered practically
irrelevant by the stark facts of tragedy and death which dominate our
attention.
A final narrative voice takes over at this point, but it is not
Betsy's, and it does little to resolve those lingering, disconcerting
questions.J' It is a native voice speaking from a mediated perspective
on these events and conveying a familiarity with human tragedy. In
its commentary we find a combination of both pagan and Christian
attitudes, drawn together here to acknowledge and lament man's
limitations. "The secret of all hearts," we are told, remains beyond
man's purview, beyond too the capacity of this narration. Yet this
last voice does more than simply unsettle our expectations or frustrate
our desire for narrative consistency. It speaks of itself, of the limita-
tions on any single perspective on man's actions, and thus reminds us,
with its final supplication for the Lord's "pity," of why man continu-
ally seeks, even demands some form of belief.
Although this last voice remains off-screen, disembodied, it
pointedly recalls the previous voices by the water imagery from
which, in effect, it emerges. Like Betsy's introductory narration as
she walks along the seashore, the calypso singer's as he emerges from a
dark and turbulent seascape background to sing of the Holland-Rand
family, and Betsy's voice as she muses on her feelings for Paul while
perched above the foaming and crashing waves of the coast, this last
bracketing narration comes from the sea, beginning as native fisher-
men wade through the shallow coastal waters and discover the bodies
of Wesley and Jessica, and ending as the camera tracks in to a final
close-up on the fountain in the Holland garden-Ti Misery. Both sea

27
and fountain are complex images with which to end, since they
archetypally suggest birth, life, and eternity, yet at the same time, as
we recall, the omnipresence of "death and putrescence" here. They
remind us of the islanders' original "fall," their introduction from
across the sea to this death-surrounded land via the slave ship bearing
Ti Misery as a figurehead, and also of that most fundamental human
mystery-a life which leads inexorably to death. As the water plays
upon the head and chest of the fountain centerpiece, it suggests tears,
as if unspoken comment upon the sorrows of all these people. It is
fitting, then, that the various narrative voices eventually merge with
the single recurring image of the film, the "silent" narrator Ti Misery,
as its enigmatic presence evokes those very mysteries fully as well and
quietly underscores how little of the human situation can be verbally
narrated or spoken.
Certainly this emblem of death and suffering-of Saint Sebas-
tian's martyrdom-in the middle of a beautiful tropical garden stirs
mythic resonances, and it provides the pattern for similar subtexts
exploring the myth of man's fall in subsequent Lewton films. At the
same time, its mysterious presence reminds us how frustrating myth
can be. Modern man, it seems, ever seeks to raise mystery to the
conscious level, there to deal with it in a most rational manner and
thus exorcize its troubling messages. The self-consciousness of the
various narrative voices here comments upon that very capacity for
explicating and understanding the world we inhabit. As Kawin notes,
we should associate such narration "not with the inability to function
in the given world, but with the attempt to know the world and self
more deeply and thus to function in a way that would otherwise be
impossible." Judging solely from the opening voice-over, we see /
Walked with a Zombie essentially as a fiashback story, a reminiscence
of Betsy's traumatic initiation into a world where nothing is as it
seems, and where the forces of life and death, love and murder are
arrayed in contention just beneath an idyllic surface. Then ensuing
voices haunt that recollection, revisit the consciousness with a remind-
er of how irreconcilable those forces and how inexplicable that world
will always be. The disturbance of our own narrative expectations
approximates the radical upset which Betsy did and, in fact, still does
experience. It is, however, the sort of upset we may need to experi-
ence, the "walk" we must take "to function" properly in this com-
plex and often frightening world.
A fantasy narrative like / Walked with a Zombie, Tzvetan
Todorov suggests, "implies an integration of the reader into the world
of the characters," a world "defined by the reader's own ambiguous
perception of the events narrated." In the horror film this engage-
ment is usually achieved visually, through an atmospheric setting or
abnormal figures. Zombie in great part follows this tradition, especial-
ly in its effective compositions in depth and layering of shadows to
locate barriers or mysterious dark areas between the audience and the
actions depicted. Such effects, Paul Willemen feels, "constitute a
dramatisation of the structure of phantasy itself," since they point to
the absence of clarity or full knowledge which we are permitted on

28
this world. Like the film's narrative form, then, these stylistic
components serve to ensure our engagement in the fantasy context, to
subtly draw us into what Michel Foucault would term a "geneology of
knowledge" as we explore the disjunctions between the various
possible interpretations of events. What results from this marriage of
generic convention to the narrative model of a film like Citizen Kane
is a complex fantasy context, one which subtly subverts the mono-
logical but only to reveal for us a better vision of our place in this
world.

When Paul learns that Betsy has turned to voodoo for help, he
worriedly notes, "there's no telling what you may have started with
this insanity." His reaction well demonstrates the sort of fear sparked
I by any challenge to the normal, but especially to that mental order
which always obstinately clings to its narrow interpretations of the
surrounding world. It is not just a fear of other explanations but a
dread of the very potential of multiplicity, which brings with it the
possibility that there might exist many, perhaps an infinite number of
voices, speaking versions of reality whose full range we can never
grasp. That way, it may well seem, lies madness-or at least the world
of the fantastic; that way, in any case, leads to a profound confronta-
tion with the self and its limitations. All that we can be certain of at
the end of / Walked with a Zombie is how very fragile our normal
environment is and how incommensurate to experience our rationedi-
zations remain. While the film may lack in monsters and more tradi-
tional frights, it draws from that very absence its own type of horror-
one born from knowledge, but a knowledge which arises, paradoxical-
ly, from an experience of unknowing. We learn here, through Betsy,
of our incarnation or humanness, which implies as well our inability
to stand outside of and delineate that complex world we inhabit, that
which colors all that we think and feel. Such a knowledge depends on
our experience of limits and in this instance arises from that indeter-
minate style of narrative which flourished, contrary to most expecta-
tions, at RKO Studios. With his own development of that style, Val
Lewton produced a singularly discomfiting horror formula, one which
effectively addresses an audience which too often prefers its truths
at a remove, distanced from ordinary experience, narrated rather than
made incarnate.

Notes

Magic World of Orson Welles (New York: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1978), p. 26. For a further discussion of RKO's status and
method of operation see Tim Onosko's essay, "RKO Radio: An
Overview," Velvet Light Trap, 10 (Fall 1973), 2-5.
2
Lewton had a particular aversion to the typical Hollywood
horror film which he saw as characterized by "masklike faces hardly
human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end." See Joseph

29
McBride's "Val Lewton, Director's Producer," >lcnoH, 11 (Jan.-Feb.
1976), 12.
^Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking Press,
1973), p. 108.
^"The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur," fi/w Comment,
8, No, 2(1972), 70.
^" ..'Aminadab' or The Fantastic Considered as a Language," in
Jean-Paul Sartre: Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette
Michelson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 57.

^Mindscreen (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), p. 6.

'Mindscreen, p. 22.
^"Ariachne's Broken Woof," Georgia Review, 31 (Spring
1977), 55.
The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1976), p. 205. Fantasy has the revelatory power, Rabkin argues,
because it "exists only against a background to which it offers a direct
reversal" (p. 197); it is, in other words, reality's way of revealing its
own nature, of placing itself in the proper context which Sartre talks
about.
"^^ Val Lewton, p. 109.
^^"The Beauty of the Sea," in Jacques Tourneur, eds. Claire
Johnston and Paul Willemen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival,
1975), 46.
^ ^According to Siegel, this last voice simply intones "the
Christian funeral service" (Val Lewton, p. 114), His explanation,
though, not only literally misreads these last lines of the film, but
suggests that he has missed the essential thrust of the narrative, which
is to establish a mystery which cannot be explained away or excused.
At the very least the narrative points toward a combination of the
Christian and voodoo perspectives, such as we have earlier seen in a
child whom Mrs. Rand tends, who has "one foot in the church and
the other in the voodoo houmfort."

^Mindscreen, p. 50,
^'^The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans, Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p.
31.

30
 "Notes Towards the Construction of Readings of Tour-
neur," in Jacques Tourneur, p. 26.
1 fi
See Foucault's PowerIKnowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 83, wherein he dicusses the neces-
sity to attempt to join the "erudite knowledge" of learning and
civilization to "a popular knowledge" or "local memory" of funda-
mental truths which we have largely forgotten or ignored.

31