I Walked with a Zombie

A Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell, takes a position caring for the wife of a plantation owner on a Caribbean island. The patient, Jessica Holland, is unresponsive and wanders at night like a sleepwalker, obedient but seemingly emptied of will. Betsy comes to believe the cause is a nervous disorder, though the island's residents practice voodoo, and she grows attracted to her employer, the woman's husband. That conflict between her professional duty and her feelings drives the story toward the local medicine man and the explanation the island holds for Jessica's condition.

Jacques Tourneur directed the film, released in 1943, the second entry in his filmography after Cat People the previous year. Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray wrote the screenplay, and Val Lewton produced it for RKO Radio Pictures. Frances Dee plays Betsy, Tom Conway plays Paul Holland, James Ellison plays his half-brother Wesley Rand, and Christine Gordon plays Jessica. The cast runs to twenty-two credited performers, and the film lasts sixty-nine minutes.

On IMDb the film holds a notably higher critics' rating than its audience score on TMDB, where it sits at 6.8 from several hundred votes. That gap suggests the film is valued more by reviewers than by general viewers, a pattern common to atmospheric, low-budget horror of its era. It mixes drama, fantasy, horror and mystery within a small-scale production.