Up a Backlit Staircase, Casting a Long
Shadow: Jacques Torneur’s I Walked with a
Zombie, Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre, and the
Problems and Rewards of Visible Obstacles
And I can’t decide which one I love the most / The flesh and
blood or the pale, smiling ghost
---------Robyn Hitchcock, “My Wife and My Dead Wife”
Val Lewton produced I Walked With a Zombie (directed by Jacques
Tomeur) shortly after his success with Cat People, though he only grew excited
about the former by incorporating elements of his favorite novel into its script.
Lewton’s favorite novel was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a screenplay
adaptation of which was—in 1943, the year of Zombie's production—being
finalized.
The two films could not have come from more different worlds. 1943’s /
Walked With a Zombie was a low-budget horror quickie—it would end up
costing less than $150,000—for RKO Studios (Viera), where 1944’s Jane Eyre,
budgeted at over $830,000, would be billed as a prestige picture for 20th Century
Fox (Sconce). The poster for Zombie promised cheap thrills: a foreshadowed
hand reached for the viewer from the darkness. The poster for Jane promised a
faithful adaptation of a literary classic: underneath the names of the two top
billed actors, Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, were the names of their
characters, Rochester and Jane, and underneath the movie’s title was this
reassuring imprimatur: “By Charlotte Bronte.” Their markets may have been
different, but the two films shared far more than their source material or even
the cinematic grammar of their time. In choosing to isolate their protagonists in
manic, highly expressionist set pieces, the two films share a preoccupation with
the extemalization of internal mood and thought that, in turn, allowed their
heroines to exert the same sort of agency—the same amount of control—
permitted to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
I Walked