Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch every zombie movie ever produced. Yes, all of them. How many is that? The current total is more than 600, and we will try to watch them in order of release date with a few flash forwards for fun. We look forward to watching zombie cinema evolve and become what it is today. I'm John, and I'm joined by my cohost Andy and our producer Brad. Join us for this journey to see which of us makes it to the end alive. Hello, Andy. Hello, Brad. How are we doing today?

Doing well. Good to see you, John.

In your commute to the podcast office, did you walk with a zombie to get here? Sorry, I couldn't resist. Today, we are talking about the movie we watched. I Walked with a Zombie from 1943. So that's today's movie. Yeah, I was very surprised by this movie. It wasn't anything I expected.

John, did we accidentally watch a good movie?

Did we watch a love story that was actually, I will argue, it's actually almost a classic tragedy in a way. It's very interesting. It is 100 percent a love story, and I have a lot of thoughts about that too.

This was an interesting one. Not at all what I expected. I'll say that.

So Andy, is there anything, we just said it's a love story, potentially a tragedy. Is there anything we missed that we want to warn people about in this one?

As far as content warnings, there's not a lot that I picked up with this movie. I think it lives within the general shadow of the sort of racist framing of White Zombie and earlier movies in that it basically follows the story of white plantation owners in the Caribbean. But that said, this movie doesn't really have anything in way of extreme gore or any other troublesome topics. And I even think that some of its content about slavery and racism has some nuance to it that I didn't expect.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that that content is up to modern standards, but it is certainly better than the standards of the era, I guess is what I would say. So we'll talk about that as we go through.

All right. Brad, can you warm us up here by telling us a little bit about the movie when it released, that sort of stuff?

I Walked with a Zombie was released on April 30th, 1943. Other big movies that year were This is the Army, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Casablanca, all war movies. The New York Times Review of I Walked with a Zombie reported that horror movies were also popular at this time. Though when you look at the list, there aren't a lot of them, but the big horror movies were Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Leopard Man, Phantom of the Opera and Son of Dracula, all released in 1943.

Interesting.

We haven't paid much attention to producers yet on this podcast, but Val Luton, producer of this film, is important. He worked for Arkeo Pictures, who released this film, and Cat People was his first film for Arkeo, released a year before. It was a major hit. It's low budget, but made a ton of money. So he followed it up with I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man and The Body Snatchers. All, again, made very little money and all did very well at the box office.

I'm curious. I think you mentioned that you, that this movie inspired you to watch Cat People, the original one, and you really enjoyed it.

Well, the director, Jaques Tourneur, he did a movie called Out of the Past, which is a film noir I'd seen years ago. And I remember really, really liking it. And he did Cat People, which was remade in the 80s.

I remember that one.

So I knew that he's very atmospheric. So after watching I Walked with a Zombie, I went and watched Cat People, which is also really good. If you like this one, it's very atmospheric. It's got the dark lighting. It's really, really good.

Yeah, that really stood out to me, actually, the light, the sort of, I actually put it a couple of times in my notes. This is kind of an artfully crafted and shot movie in a way that some of the others haven't been.

Yeah, I wondered, well, watching this, I had that thought too several times during this movie. I had the conscious thought of like, everybody involved in this movie is doing a competent job. Like, you know, I mean, it's-

Yes.

It's competently put together. It's clear. I don't know if just generally filmmakers are getting the hang of this medium by the early 40s here, or if we're dealing with a particularly talented director and cast or whatever, but it's put together in a, with the competence that is not present in, I would say, a lot of the movies we've watched up to this point in this podcast.

Hold on a second. So one other thing I'm noticing is, is there is a writer credit here that you've put as Charlotte Bronte. What is that about?

The movie is loosely based on Jane Eyre, which is why there's such a strong romance.

I gotcha. Okay. I guess I would have been less surprised by that if I knew the plot of Jane Eyre better. So that's on me, I guess.

I had forgotten the plot too.

So Jane Eyre is about a guy who has his insane wife sealed up in a tower or something, right?

Yes.

So I think that that certainly is.

Or is it? I don't know. I often say yes when I don't know anything, Andy. Sorry.

Maybe? That's a good way to get through life.

Well, Andy, you're talking about this felt competent. The director, Jaques Tourneur, two of his films were selected for the National Film Registry. That's Out of the Past and Cat People. And to get on that list, it has to be aesthetic, important or historical. And so you can see that he's a really good director.

Yeah. Yeah. So anything else before we go quickly to the cultural context?

No, the cast doesn't have any big names, so there's no one really to discuss there. Box office, again, there's not much out there for this time period, but interestingly, because of Cat People, this movie was made as a low budget B movie, but the success of Cat People allowed the studio to get a percentage of the box office. For low budget films, films would get a flat fee, and then whatever additional money was made, the theaters would keep.

I gotcha.

But this movie had enough leverage because of Cat People to get a percentage.

Interesting. Yeah, so cultural context, it's World War II, 1943. We're in the middle of it. Interestingly, a number of the movies that came out this year are war movies, right? This is The Army or Whom the Bell Tolls, which is not about World War II, but might as well be in this context. But the other one I didn't realize was this year was Casablanca, which is obviously a beloved historical movie. Something I never understood until I got old and started reading history was the importance of Monaco to sort of the Western powers in the first half of the 20th century, but that's John and Andy sneaking in a history podcast.

It is interesting how many more movies are in this year. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, but that's a lot of them.

This is a different podcast that we're not doing. I'm interested in Casablanca though, because I wouldn't say it's a good propaganda movie for war, unlike a guy named Joe or something like that. So it stands out to me as curious in that way.

Yeah. Stay tuned for our other podcast where we review all war movies.

All war movies all the time. All right. Do we want to talk about the poster for a second?

We do. We touched on this briefly in the last episode. I'll describe the poster briefly in a big yellow font. We have the words, I Walked with a Zombie. And in the background, we have some kind of interesting imagery that, some of which, the significance of it, you won't really realize until you actually watch the film. So we have a picture of what looks like a statue. And when we watch a statue of a woman, when we watch the movie, I think that is going to be the figurehead, the ship figurehead. What is that? A masthead?

What do you call that? I think you call it a figurehead. But I think it's actually Jessica. Jessica, the wife.

Okay. That makes sense.

But I think the allusion to a figurehead is not a mistake. I think this is kind of an artful poster, actually.

Yeah. So we've got a kind of a zoned out looking woman, who we're going to learn is Jessica Holland, who is, I guess, spoiler, the zombie in this movie. And then we have what feels like a little bit of a blast from the past, which is a steering mesmerist eye. It looks like kind of like the Bela Lugosi eyes that were featured in several of the movies. I don't actually remember any mesmerism eye closeups in this film, like we've seen in a couple of years. And then a screaming, someone who looks like they're screaming or shouting while a hand, a sinister hand, kind of reaches out to clutch them. I'm not sure this feels super relevant to the film. John, what do you think about this?

I don't think it feels super relevant. I think it's trying to in its own way sort of be salacious and provocative. But what I will say is it is a much cooler looking poster than any of our recent posters. Like if all the movies we've seen so far, if I had to have a movie poster on my wall, I might pick this one, actually.

Well, as we discussed, I think in a previous episode, a lot of the other posters look like people cut out photos of the different stars and pasted them together. This looks like an artist was commissioned to paint a coherent piece.

Yes, exactly. I'd also like to say, I think you do this movie a discredit, Andy, I know it's called I Walked with a Zombie, but it doesn't have a zombie, it actually has two whole zombies in it.

Okay. Well, all right, we'll have to discuss this, the state of the second being you refer to as a zombie. So for those of you listening at home, we will put a link to the poster of this in the show notes of this episode and of every episode where we discuss a poster. So have a look at yourself and see what you think.

Well, let's get started here. So another first for us in this movie, and I have no idea if this is common in movies at this time, but it starts actually with a voiceover from the protagonist.

I had this thought and not just a voiceover, but I think a narration through the film.

Yes, it happens. It's not nonstop, but it does occur as a regular thing in the movie, 100 percent. As if our protagonist who we find out is named Betsy McConnell, I believe. Though she's always just called Miss McConnell in the movie, so I didn't learn her name was Betsy until much later. But it starts with her doing a voiceover and where she says, well, I mean, that's our first clip because it was so striking to me. Let's hear it, Brynne.

Had anyone said that to me a year ago, I'm not at all sure I would have known what a zombie was. I might have had some notion that they were strange and frightening, even a little funny. It all began in such an ordinary way.

So this is a wistful voiceover about a zombie.

Yeah, it's interesting. It almost has that element of record scratch. You might be wondering how I found myself.

Exactly. But I will say for me, it immediately was like, okay, what do we got here? Yeah. So it struck me instantly that this was not like our other movies.

Yeah, it's too upbeat. This movie is not going to be a super depressing one, at least by the upbeat tone of this narration, or at least that's what it suggested to me.

Yes.

Well, it also lets you know that she survives right at the beginning.

It's our post-events narration. So I think that that is interesting. But then we cut to what we learned later as Canada, and we can tell it's Canada because it's snowing, and a job interview, which is, I don't know if this is common from the 1940s, but there's a greasy haired man sitting behind a desk interviewing a woman who is standing in front of the desk, which seems awfully rude.

Yes.

But he asks her, hey, we're going to send you to an island called St. Sebastian. It's in the West Indies. By the way, do you know anything about witchcraft?

You ever been asked this in a job interview?

You know, not yet, but hope springs eternal, I guess.

You're just waiting for that moment, aren't you?

That's right. So the plot is very quickly laid out. There's a man named Mr. Paul Holland. He lives on the island of St. Sebastian. They'd use the term West Indies. Again, we would call that the Caribbean or the Caribbean today.

I think this is a made up island, although feel free to email in angrily if I'm incorrect. But I googled around and I couldn't find St. Sebastian, unless his name has changed.

And so, Mr. Paul Holland, his wife, who we later learned is named Jessica, is ill and they need a nurse. And she seems excited about it. We also get the impression, if her character here reminds me of the lead in The Ghost Breakers. She sort of has that easy confidence and smart, she's clever, I think she cracks a joke about moving to the West Indies on her own. So she has that same kind of independent woman, confident vibe that we got from Ghost Breakers.

And she meets Mr. Holland on the boat.

Yeah, then we cut to them setting sail. And actually, you know, we talked a little bit about this being an artful movie. I think in a lot of our movies, a lot of the aspects of voodoo or Haitian culture were immediately, I don't know what I'm saying, they're immediately thrown into shock or seem shocking. The next question I had was, is this set earlier because she takes a sailing boat?

Yeah, I noticed that too. I don't know when this is supposed to have been set, but it's hard to imagine this wasn't in the 1940s or late 30s, just by the way everyone's dressed and behaves.

And I think it could be a sort of artful suggestion that she is moving backwards through time. I think that could be a metaphor. Or it could just be, it's a small island. We don't know, but what we do know is, in a future scene that we talk about a figurehead of a ship just like this, so that may be all there is to it. They want to set up the sailing vibe. But what we get to first is, the workers on the boat are singing. And the reason I brought up that sort of inserting the voodoo stuff to shock is they're singing a song. But I don't think it's intended to be horrific or scary at all. In fact, it entrances Betsy. So our protagonist, Betsy, is very charmed by the entire experience. And I think the singing is part of it. But she runs into her new boss on the boat. And he is a little less cheery. And he sort of states his world view very frankly to her. We're only three minutes into the movie, and this is what we got going on for her.

It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its glean from millions of tiny dead bodies, a glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay.

That's a pretty blunt statement of this movie's theme, I think.

And yet somehow, Betsy realizes she might be in love with Paul Holland.

Well, we'll get to that, yeah.

So next time, we're all married, but if we... Fans out there, try that as an opening line, see if it works. Put it in your dating app, see if that helps.

Yeah, he has a good line in here. He says something like, everything good dies here, even the stars. So we have a real glass is half empty sort of employer here.

Yes, exactly. And then they disembark. And this is another hint to me that it was in the past because Betsy takes a carriage to her place of employment, which we find out is called Fort Holland. But it looks like the back of a Model T attached to two horses. It's like this weird old carriage. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on here. And then we got an exposition from her driver, who is black, about how the Hollans brought slaves to the island. And they also brought somebody named T. Misery here. Now, this is sort of an honorific among black people on this island. They say T, like TI. So I would say T. Andy to you in this example. So we quickly learned that that isn't like Mr. It's like Mr. essentially.

Well, you might have quickly learned it. It took me quite a while to put the pieces together watching this film.

I didn't quickly learn either. I'm lying.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but this is part of one of my challenges with the film was sorting out everybody, all the cast and what their relationship was to each other. Because it's going to get complicated in just a second. It started with this conversation about T. Misery.

But what we find out is the cab driver's name, we'll just call him Exposition. He comes in and he says, the Hollands brought the slaves to this island, but they also brought T. Misery, who we find is the figurehead of a ship. It's a black man, presumably a slave, and he has a bunch of arrows sticking out of him, and he now resides in the Hollands garden in Fort Holland. We don't know that yet, but that's what we're told by this cab driver.

Yeah. Then we roll up to the fort.

She gets to the fort. We get another montage that is sort of a voiceover of when I first saw the fort kind of thing, and that comes past. But then we start to meet some of the other characters. And I think the first person we meet is Wesley Rand, who is Paul's brother, half brother.

Yes. It's important, but also complicated.

So we're pretty quickly in here, and there's a lot of names and stuff. It all does become important. I'm in one of those places where do we want to confound everybody with all of the relationships right out of the gate.

Well, let's just list the key figures that we need to know to understand the rest of this movie, right? So we have Paul Holland, the owner who hired Betsy.

His half brother, Wesley Rand.

His half brother, Wesley. Their mother is also here.

Mrs. Rand.

And we learned that for-

And Jessica is here.

Jessica. That's Mr. Holland's wife. And is this, do we know why Betsy has been hired yet?

We don't. We just know it's been to look after Jessica, but Betsy doesn't even know what that means yet. You know what I mean?

I marked down on my notes that I was very confused by all these characters at this point.

Yes.

It does become a little bit more understandable as we go along. But we basically have two half brothers and their mother and the wife of Mr. Holland, and we're going to learn there's quite a bit of backstory to all these characters.

What we learn, and I don't think we ever get to the whole bottom of the truth, but the summary of what has occurred here is that something happened to Jessica. She either caught a fever or was terrified with an inch of her life or went mad. We don't really know. There's different versions throughout the movie. But what we do know is that she was married to Paul when this happened. Wesley blames Paul, his brother, and Wesley also I think was in love with Jessica. This is the first part that I think is very tragedy-esque. This is a high-quality movie and I don't want to oversell it. But if I think of it, just to bring in the ultimate tragedy, let's pull in Hamlet, for example, right? We're talking about a story of a man who sees the ghost of his father, and there's always this uncertainty about how did his father died? Was it poison? Was it not poison? This has that same vibe of, there's a tragedy in the background here that we don't fully understand, or that something that happened in the past, that is influencing current events, and so that's why I call it a tragedy. Am I reaching for that?

No, not at all, and not everyone involved even understands the full impact and the details of what happened.

Yeah, and again, to take another classic example, in Oedipus, the king doesn't realize that the person he killed was his father until much later, right? So it's a trauma from the past coming forward into the present, and I think that's sort of what this movie is about.

Yeah, so, I mean, is it safe to say this movie is going to be about Betsy's relationship with these different people, her relationship with her employer, Paul Holland, the gloomy guy on the boat, her relationship to Paul's wife, who we're going to learn.

We're going to meet in just a second.

Basically, catatonic, and Betsy is taking care of, and then Wesley Rand, the half-brother, who's got a big chip on his shoulder, and we'll learn more about that as we go along.

There is a brief moment where they talk about, well, there's two lines I wanted to pull out of here. One is, there's drums, of course.

Yes, I noted that, too. So, I first noted that with a sneering mentality, but then it was explained that these, so I thought, okay, here we are, the use of the drums to signal, ooh, scary, spooky.

Where's our, yeah, where's our croaking frog to go with our scary drums? Yeah.

Exactly. But then they reveal that the drums we're hearing, this one, are actually, it's a signal for the mill workers in the way that in a factory, you might have a whistle to signify times or whatever. So, as they kind of demystified what has been in most of the movies we've watched to date, a lazy way to say, be scared by the native population.

Right, and the other thing, Wesley makes a crack about his brother being a Byronic character as in Lord Byron, which I thought was also funny and a little above the grade of the movies we've been watching so far.

Yes.

So, that all happens, they get through dinner, and now we head to the evening. Betsy's getting ready for bed, and she looks out her window, and she sees someone in a white gown walking in the garden, and she hears crying. And there's a lot of things that go on here, and I think they're all interesting. But just to sort of set up, she follows this figure into a tower.

Can I just say that these movies sure love, like, willowy women in white dresses, white gowns.

Yes. She has white, blonde hair. She is pasty white. Not Betsy. Betsy is sort of dark haired, but Jessica, who we learned this is. So, Betsy gets up to investigate, follows this figure into the tower, and they hear this crying. And we sort of figure out what the crying was. And we'll get to that in just a second. But she gets up to investigate, and has an alarming encounter with Jessica. You know, I thought this is, again, I'm like, this is really cool looking, the way they shot the shadows and made this scary.

This is a great scene. And it just reminds you that you can ring tension out of just very simple, very simple scene. The tension here is she encounters Jessica, she follows Jessica into this tower, and Jessica is walking around, but she's not responsive, and she looks genuinely creepy, and she sort of follows and then looms up towards Betsy in a threatening manner, but it's all very creepy.

Yes, she doesn't snarl, she doesn't have a weapon, and she's just scary looking, and I think it really works here. So Paul comes running, this causes Betsy to scream, Paul comes running, so does one of the maids, and we discover the crying was not Jessica, because it couldn't have been according to Paul. It is one of the, and this is where we sort of get into a little bit of that nuance about slavery I wanted to talk about. This woman who works on the plantation had been crying, because I think she had a nephew who was born, they say my sister was brought a birthing, but the point that Paul explains to Betsy in this is that the way that the women that work here, the former slaves, when they have children, that's so ingrained in their culture that when it happens, the first thing they do is cry, which I thought was interesting.

And they laugh at death, right? It's sort of an inversion of the emotions that you would expect, because life is suffering, or life was suffering for, at least for their ancestors.

Yes, and the other thing we went into is we see the figurehead at this point in The Garden, which is clearly a slave, sort of hit with arrows, that was the figurehead of this ship. And it just seems to me, again, like this is not certainly enlightened thinking, but Paul and the other characters here seem to have a sensitivity around the history of these slaves that our other movies have not, to this point.

Yeah, totally agreed, yes. The maid who tells us this also kind of gives us the rundown on Mrs. Holland's condition, right? Her name is, the maid is Alma, and she occurs throughout the movie.

Yeah, and we sort of get the skinny.

She tells Betsy that Jessica, Mrs. Holland, was very sick, and then she went mindless.

I want to ask the question at this point, because there's all this stuff going on. Does this movie feel like a horror movie to you?

It does not, no.

No, it doesn't. It's got some, then we'll get to one soon, some truly effective bits. And this past one was one of them, but it does, the overall vibe is not one of tension and horror.

No, I think there's elements of it that evoke that sort of a gothic story, you know, with your kind of isolated castle and your kind of guilt and secret laden cast of characters. But it's a pretty, it's not a gloomy or menacing aesthetic.

No, and like, for example, Betsy isn't trapped there, right? On her day off, she goes into town and it's sunny and she has a drink in a cafe. Like, it doesn't feel like a gothic in the sense that she can't escape or is trapped there by some horrible curse. And we get, and in the morning, Paul, her employer, is really irritated with her and just basically says, you are just a frightened girl and I need somebody who's more mature than you are.

And specifically, he's mad because she freaked out when she was confronted by the catatonic Jessica.

Yeah, but Betsy defends herself in the following way.

Frankly, it was something of a shock to see my patient that way for the first time. Nobody had told me Mrs. Holland was a mental case.

A mental case?

I'm sorry.

Why should you be? My wife is a mental case. Please remember that, Miss Connell, particularly when some of the foolish people on the island start regaling you with local legends.

Shortly after that, we went into Dr. Maxwell, who is Jessica's doctor. He doesn't live at Fort Holland. He comes and visits. That's why they need a nurse. But they start bantering a little bit. They get to know each other as co-workers. And then Betsy, Miss Connell, asked this question of him.

But I don't know about zombies, doctor. Just what is a zombie?

A ghost, a living dead. It's also a drink.

Yes, I tried one once, but there wasn't anything dead about it.

But we have a more serious problem to deal with, Miss Connell. You want to know about your patient, don't you?

Please.

I'll try to put it simply. Mrs. Holland had a tropical fever, very severe. We might say that portions of the spinal cord were burned out by this fever. The result is what you see. A woman without any willpower, unable to speak or even act by herself, though she will obey simple commands.

Does she suffer?

I don't know. I'd rather think of her as a sleepwalker who can never be awakened.

So we get this tension, and I think we had a little bit of this tension in some of our early movies. Certainly, a wanga, I remember, is there's this voice of reason that says, that's a bunch of silly nonsense. There's a scientific explanation for this. But there's a tension that, is there? Is she a zombie? Like, did you get that, you know, a sort of divided mind like a lot of these movies have?

Absolutely. And we'll get into it later when we get closer to the conclusion. But this movie, I think, is very much talking about just the two different perspectives from which you can look at the same situation. You know, from this sort of Western scientific perspective, Mrs. Holland's condition can be explained, you know, with these clinical terms. The people that live on the island, their perspective is, you know, may be more magical, and they're all, they're describing the same thing, but they're using different vocabulary for it. And this movie is going to say something, I think, about the way that you communicate from one of those camps to the other.

Yes, I agree.

So is it worth pausing for a minute, John? So at this point, Jessica has been, I mean, she has been described as a zombie. The doctor started all this, that conversation we heard by saying she makes a beautiful zombie, doesn't she? So do we want to pause here and talk about as zombie fans, if this is our zombie, what are we looking at?

My thought was we're looking at somebody who is mesmerized to become a zombie, but we don't know who the mesmerist is, right? There's some other force acting on her. But I don't think of her as in King of the Zombies, as in Bowery at Midnight, as that sort of more closer to what we know as a zombie cannibalistic creature who died.

Yeah. She's not hungry and aggressive and a shambling around. This is, I think, a call back to White Zombie in some of those earlier films, where a zombie is simply someone whose will has been removed from their body. They have no agency over themselves.

Yes. And I think we get the same vibe as White Zombie, where the woman had a white gown and blonde hair and sort of wafts through the scenes, these darkened landscapes. So I think, yeah, that vibe too.

Yeah. There is a reveal towards the end about the nature of Jessica's condition that will answer the question of, is this type of zombie a dead person brought back to life or a living person simply stripped of their will? And I guess I'll try to bring a little tension out of that question as we work our way there, John, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So things are tense. Paul does not like Betsy very much.

Yeah. What do you think of Paul and Mr. Holland at this point? Because I thought at this point in the movie, I thought he was a pretty huge jerk.

I think he's a pretty huge jerk, and I think we're going to get the feeling that Jessica's state is his fault, right? He was the sort of person who cruelly drove his wife to madness. I think that's the impression that it's a good segue to our next scene. We run into Wesley. Betsy gets a day off. She runs into Wesley, and they get a drink together, and we start to hear the lore of what happened from the locals' perspective.

This is such a neat way to get some exposition in, some backstory exposition. How does Betsy learn what the backstory is, John?

Her and Wesley decide to have a drink, and Wesley, I believe, Betsy has a tea, and Wesley starts knocking them back. He's clearly drinking a lot.

It's definitely suggested. I think later she says that he is not an alcoholic yet, but I don't know. I think I'm not sure what criteria he hasn't met.

Exactly. But I will say, first of all, in the daylight, Wesley looks a lot like Will Arnett. I just want to point that out, like I got this. I was like, he has that vibe of that sort of smug, handsome, like, yeah, sure, whatever you think. I got that vibe from Wesley, like the false confidence.

I want to credit this movie for the characterization of Wesley here. When you first encounter him, he seems like he's like the friendly counter to his half-brother, Mr. Holland. Whereas Mr. Holland is stuffy and vaguely rude and really negative, Wesley is, he's friendly, but he's a good hang. Yeah, he's the one who's fun to hang out with. But starting in this scene, we are going to learn that maybe it's not such a positive character, I think, as we have been led to believe. One thing I want to note, just to skip back for a second, people throughout this film repeatedly refer to how beautiful Mrs. Holland used to be. It's such a strange way to say it. I mean, someone is beautiful or they're not, and when you get sick, you don't lose whatever quality you had that made you beautiful. But it's just a funny way to say it. All right. Anyway, back to the marketplace where Wesley and Betsy are sharing a drink.

Yeah. It's interesting. There's a local band, and they're just singing songs, and they start to sing a song. It's not like the blues, it's like there's a genre of music and I don't know what it is, but it's sort of a repetitive song, a cyclic song where they're telling a narrative as they sing it. And we realize without using names, they're telling the narrative of the Holland's coming to this island, bringing slaves, Holland's wife going mad, Wesley being in love with Jessica, the whole thing. And when the waiter sees Wesley, he says, I'll go tell them to stop and sing a different song. I thought this was incredibly clever.

I thought this was just a really clever way. It did make me laugh. I mean, they're singing it like it's like a folk tale, except the subject they're singing about are lit people that are alive right there on the island. And it just made me think, you know, I guess every folk song had to start by singing about contemporary events, right? Right.

Exactly.

There is some reference to Greek mythology here that went over my head a little bit.

It went over mine as well.

Yeah. So either the movie is the movie is being smarter than us or or maybe not. But Wesley gets really mad when the song starts getting into more detail about Wesley's falling in love with Mrs. Holland and the singer comes up and apologizes.

But we get the sense that he maybe doesn't really mean it because as Wesley gets drunker, there's a this. So here's the end of the scene, which is, I think, amazing. Wesley is passed out drunk face down on the table. It's now the evening. The singer comes out of the darkness singing the song again, and he sort of predicts that Betsy will come to the same harm as Jessica, if she remains in Fort Holland with Paul.

He finishes out the verses and kind of completes the story that got interrupted earlier. And according to the song, Wesley fell in love with Mrs. Holland and tried to leave. But Mrs. Holland fell from the tower and then fever took her. That's what the song says. And yes, it's very clearly implied that Betsy might be next if she gets caught up in this sort of sick little situation.

Yes, and then at the end of this scene sequence, we meet our final sort of main character, Mrs. Rand, Wesley's mother, also mother to Paul, but by different fathers. And she helps pack up Wesley to go back home. And we find out that Mrs. Rand is a doctor, and she serves the local population a lot, and that will become important later.

I'd like to add real quick that the singer in real life is named Sir Lancelot.

I saw that in the credits. There's somebody's credit named Sir Lancelot. I'm like, who is that?

He's a real Calypso singer, important in bringing Calypso to North America.

That's the genre I couldn't name.

And an inspiration for Harry Belafonte.

Okay. Yes, it's a Calypso song. I'm sorry for being bad at music. They did it 100%. And if you compare it to the Banana song or something, it's got the same sort of rhythmic vibe.

That explains why it was a fun song, right?

That explains why we enjoyed it, yeah, exactly.

So yeah, Mrs. Rand is going to be important to Mother, although it's not clear yet what her role is going to be. But she occupies, she, as a missionary's wife, it reminds me of the missionary from, I don't know, maybe it was White Zombie? I don't know. There's a certain character type, it's suggested in these movies, I think.

Right.

A missionary that these, they're kind of coded as people, they come from a American Western scientific background, but they sort of acknowledge that there is depth to the local traditions and religion that goes beyond what Western science, the vocabulary of Western science is really prepared to do. And I think her character is kind of interesting because she's going to straddle the line between, as a Westerner, but one who has come into very close contact with local religious tradition.

Yes. So there's a couple of things here, and I'm going to sort of lump these things together, because it's a lot of family drama. And though I think it's effective, it doesn't have anything to do with zombies.

We can kind of speak through some of this, yes.

So there's another dinner. There's more talk of the drums. We do get a little exposition about a god of the voodoo religion and how the drums speak for that god, and there's sometimes a... Maybe you could tell this better than I could, Andy, but basically, it sets up that the people, the practitioners of this religion, will sometimes go to these meetings and receive the voice of their god to get advice on what they should do. And they basically try to summon that god through a person, right?

Is this the first of the movies we've watched? So, this is Voodoo Religion. Is this the first of the movies that has named deities?

Yes.

I think so.

100%.

Because Dambala is named as maybe the main god who's being worshiped in this area, and then later, we're gonna meet another named god.

I'm sorry, I didn't look up to see if those were real. I assumed it was made up, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, I actually don't know either.

I assumed they were just Hollywood makeup stuff to tell a good story. They needed a, they need, for plot purposes, they need a place where people go to speak, almost like confession, and this is how they set that up.

Well, without giving, I don't want to give this movie too much credit, but this feels like...

Real quick, Damballa is a West African, Haitian voodoo spirit god.

Okay, so let's give the movie credit for at least getting the name right, even if they don't get it.

I want to give the movie credit just generally for portraying voodoo here as a religion with coherent practices and ideas.

Yes.

Rather than...

It doesn't exist just to scare white people.

Yeah, it's not just a scary, vague thing that can explain whatever bad things are happening to the white people.

Right, right.

It seems to have a purpose for its local worshipers, a purpose and practices that are coherent.

So a couple things. There's a dinner. Paul and Wesley have another fight. Wesley sort of storms off. Paul, I think this is where Betsy falls in love with Paul. He's been sort of this harsh, cruel man, but then she spies him through a window playing the piano very soulfully. And Paul confesses to her like, like yes, there was an ugly scene where I threatened my wife and I feel horrible about it. And I feel responsible for what happened to her.

Yeah, specifically he threatened to use force to keep her from leaving and running off with his brother.

Then Ms. McConnell, Betsy goes for a walk on her own. And we get another voiceover where she basically is saying, I love Paul and because I love him, I'm going to help save his wife.

This was, this was when she said, I love Paul, I had to go back and rewatch their conversation because I was, when I first heard it, I was like, really? Really? You love that guy?

There's bad boys and then there's bad boys, Betsy.

I mean, I guess he does have that brooding man vibe about him, I suppose.

But we also, this is the first place where we see him soften a little bit.

Yes, for sure.

Yes.

And she's fallen in love with Holland, but it is an interesting kind of love here because it's this very pure love. She loves him so she wants the best for him. And in her mind, that means restoring his wife back to herself, which is an unusual thing to want for the person you're falling for, right?

I could see immediately a modern version of this movie popped into my mind, and it's Betsy plotting to restore the wife so she falls in love with Wesley and runs away so she can have Paul. There's a cynical version of this story, but that's not the version that we're watching here.

Yeah. Next morning, they're with a doctor discussing a treatment option for Jessica, right?

Correct. And it's insulin shock treatments. I don't know if that's a thing. But basically, it's a high-risk, high-reward thing. If we do this, she could be restored, but it could also kill her. And Paul has a moment of reflection here, which I think is really key to the story.

You're asking me to pass a sentence of life or death on my wife.

Insulin shock treatment is an extreme measure, Paul, as Miss Carmel pointed out when she suggested to me.

You admit that this is terribly dangerous, so why do you advise it?

I've worked with it. I've seen cures. It's at least a hope.

It's the very danger itself, Paul, that makes the cure possible. Insulin produces a state of coma. Then the patient is revived by a violent shock to the nerves. That shock can kill, but it can also cure.

So they try this.

Betsy says something interesting here because Betsy is among the group encouraging them to try the treatment, and she describes Jessica as living in a world that's empty of joy or meaning.

Yes, and I actually struggled with what clip to include here because the clip we shared has the stakes, but Betsy's comment is really framing the decision thoroughly. So they do the treatment. It doesn't work. But Paul thanks Betsy for giving him hope. Now, it's the next day again, and if there's anything you wanted to tap on, let me know. But the important part is we run into Alma again with her whole family, and the new baby is there.

My note I had for this scene was that Betsy is fawning over this adorable little baby, and she gives it a very swallowable pin that she attaches to its shirt. It's like, thanks a lot, lady.

Yeah, it's like her nurse's pin with the entwined snakes or whatever, but she's like, oh, you're so cute, and she gives it to the baby.

Well, I just wanted to know. I don't know if this is getting more common in this movie, but this interaction between Betsy and Alma and her extended family doesn't really have any of the racial tension, the racial overtones that have been in movies. They're just people talking to each other. It was...

Yes, about life.

It was weirdly refreshing to watch.

Now, that's interesting, because Alma suggests, well, sure, that doctor can't help you, but maybe there's another doctor that can. And I'm curious about this. I don't ascribe sinister intent to Alma here, because she's been nothing but a dedicated servant to this family. What do you make of this? She's clearly trying to get... Here's how I read this scene, and I don't have a clip for it, but she's clearly trying to convince Betsy that maybe Voodoo could help Miss Jessica.

Yes. Yeah, that's the big picture. And that's the idea she's planning in Betsy's mind, that where modern science isn't working, maybe Voodoo has an answer. I didn't read sinister intent from Alma, because...

I didn't either.

Alma makes the case that there was someone in her community that had a very similar problem to Jessica who was cured, right?

Mrs. Rose. Yeah.

So I think it's honest, good intentioned advice. I think so too. But I agree with you. I mean, things are about to take a more sinister tone, I think.

Yeah.

And it does... this isn't like a Faustian bargain, but there is a little bit of that DNA here, I think, in this exchange.

Yeah. And so, just real quick, before anything else happens, Betsy does drop in at the mission, see Mrs. Rand, and she asks about the voodoo cure, and Mrs. Rand is like, that's not... it's not real, right? Like, we trick them into... we use some of their voodoo terminology for our cures, but it's not... they're mistaken. Don't mess around with that stuff.

Yeah. She describes the voodoo practices that heal as practical psychology. It's an interesting exchange, especially given what we're going to learn in a little bit about Mrs. Rand.

But we see that Betsy is unconvinced. She wants to try it because she wants Jessica to be better for Paul, is what we're given. So she talks to Alma and gets directions, and Alma gives her complex directions and gives her these pins that will protect her from the guard that they're going to run into when they head toward the zombie camp.

This is kind of a movie thing, John, but I would not be able to follow the directions she gave, and it's really common in movies for people to give very vague directions. Like, give me a scale here. Turn left at the banyan tree. What is when? Yeah.

Which banyan tree? Is there only one banyan tree? And then you'll see a skull on a stick and like, what? Yeah. So we don't need to go to the detail except to say, this is another really artful scary scene. If there's a horror scene in this movie, it's this one, this whole sequence.

Yes.

Describe this to us.

Yeah. Betsy sneaks out at night leading Jessica along. And they have a, this is a neat sequence. It's a pretty extended sequence of them just traversing the countryside following the directions that Alma gave them.

Walking through the sugar cane, the high sugar cane that they can't see over.

Yeah. There's just some good shots, I think. It's pretty effectively creepy. They pass a lot of sort of creepy props, you know, like skulls and things like that.

The hanging animal is probably grosser in 1943 than it is in 2025 when that kind of thing would be so realistic and disgusting, it would haunt you for days.

But they've specifically been given passes that will, that when they meet the god of the crossroads, he will not harm them. He will let them go on their way. And I thought this is kind of interesting. Can you want to describe the god of the crossroads?

So it is the tallest person I've ever seen, practically. It is this incredibly tall, skinny black person, but they have prosthetics on, or I hope they're prosthetics, to give them sort of huge staring eyes. And I got the impression that this was a zombie. But you don't think so.

Well, I mean, I guess it depends on what we are saying a zombie is. I interpreted this as a human who had been possessed by the God of the Crossroads, who's named, and I don't know if I... Caraphor, yeah.

Okay.

I think he was a god, and maybe that is what a zombie is in this story, a human that's been possessed by supernatural forces. But I don't know. Did you think he was kind of just a zombie?

I thought he was just a zombie, but I can see your point that maybe there's something more to this. But he's certainly scary, and he certainly reminds one of a zombie, if nothing else.

He looks exactly like the zombies we've seen in other movies that we've watched.

Did you guys know that this is not the first time you've seen him in this film?

When did we see him before?

I believe he's the one walking with Betsy at the beginning when she says, I walked with a zombie.

You think so? Interesting.

Whoa. You know, they're in silhouette, so they're blackened with the sun behind them. But he's very tall. The figure she's walking next was very tall and skinny.

Interesting. I had thought that was just her and Paul walking down the beach or something upon reflection.

But she says, I walked with a zombie. So the first thing she says, there's two people on the beach.

Well, okay.

Interesting.

That kind of blew my mind. And it also, I was going to complain about the title of this movie, but now maybe I can't because the movie was smarter than that.

Maybe you can't. Yeah. The other note I put in at this time is the music in this film is just so head and shoulders above the other films from this era. It just struck me in this scene in particular.

The music was by Roy Webb, who is also a multi Academy Award nominee.

That makes sense. It's good. Anyway, I found this whole sequence effective. Betsy loses her past, which I thought was going to have a bigger consequence, but it doesn't seem to. And we could go into detail on this scene, but what we get is a voodoo scene, and there's a particular voodoo, unnamed voodoo practitioner who is sort of dancing with a sword. There seems to be a whole thing going on.

Yeah, sort of ecstatic dancing, I think.

Yes. And then we see all of the locals are going up to a particular door that's been painted, and they're sort of asking advice or praying to this door. And so Betsy and Jessica, who stand out like a sore thumb, just sort of hop in line and wait their turn. And when their turn comes, the door opens, and Betsy gets pulled in, and inside...

Jessica gets left outside.

And Jessica is left outside, yes. And Miss Rand is inside. So we get this sort of rotating sequence where Miss Rand is talking to Betsy about how, look, the voodoo isn't real. I'm tricking them into thinking it's real. And in the meantime, that voodoo practitioner who was dancing with a sword starts communicating with Jessica, and he actually sticks his sword through her arm. Right? And everybody marvels that there's no blood. So we're brought back to the question, okay, if there's no blood, did Jessica really have a fever? Yeah. So we have actually what I think is really well done. We have Mrs. Rand saying, no, this voodoo stuff isn't really true. And then we have actual proof that Jessica is a zombie, and these things are occurring simultaneously, which I thought was very clever.

It's a neat, almost dreamlike sequence, this whole segment. And it's so startling to see Mrs. Rand in there that it's just an effective sequence.

And so she confesses she's been impersonating one of the voodoo gods to influence the natives to use Western medicine, essentially. And then after this, they returned back through the sugar cane to the fort. Is there anything big I missed there?

No, I think, except to say that, I think from Betsy's perspective, this didn't really work either. It didn't cure Jessica. No, it didn't. It looks like whatever Betsy hoped would happen, did not happen.

However, because the voodoo practitioners recognized her as a zombie, they become suddenly interested in her, right? Yes. So they get back, Paul scolds her for taking Jessica, but they sort of have this moment where Betsy confesses, look, I did it for you, right? I want you to be happy. And in the morning, the following morning, the police, they call him the commissioner, basically the local police come to visit Paul, and there's a big to do, and it seems like maybe Paul is in trouble for whatever happened to Jessica way back when. Is that what you took from this scene?

Yes. And I wanted to add to that sequence where Betsy confesses to Holland what she did. This scene, he basically says, why are you assuming that I want her back?

Yes. That was another clip that didn't make the cut for me, but it was very, very sort of interesting, showing his mixed feelings about this story.

So at this point, your mind is going, well, you know, is she a bad person? Is Mr. Holland, did he try to kill her? You know, I don't know. I was not sure what was going on, but I liked it.

So we think there's going to be trouble for Paul, right? We think he's finally going to pay for his crime of whatever he did to Jessica.

Yeah. And the commissioner is here at least ostensibly because Betsy's little adventure the night before has basically riled up the local population, right? And the drums are going nonstop. And I don't know why this would really merit a police visit, but here we are.

Alma thinks that there is going to be trouble. And what we see is that voodoo practitioner has created a voodoo doll, and he is trying to summon Jessica to him.

Yeah.

But the first thing he does is teach that God to find Jessica using this voodoo doll and go fetch her back, right? And that happens in the first night, and here comes... And could you help me with the pronunciation of his name?

Carrefour?

Carrefour. He comes to the fort. So I think one night, and maybe I'm getting my sequencing correct, but he comes to the fort to fetch Jessica and is scared off by Mrs. Rand, who uses his name. And then another night, Wes, she tries to wander off through the gate on her own, and they shut the gate so she can't escape. But these are all efforts from the voodoo practitioner to summon her.

Yeah. Let's back up a quick second. So while the voodoo practitioner are trying to basically recall Jessica to them, we do have a big scene with Mr. Holland and Betsy and Wes and Mrs. Rand, where a lot of the truth comes out.

Okay. Was that here? I think I've made a mistake. Fill us in on what happened.

It's happening while the voodoo practitioner is starting to recall. So it's sort of intercut.

So Mrs. Rand makes a confession.

Yeah. So they're all in there with the police commissioner. And Mr. Holland suggests that he acknowledges that he has sort of this instinctive need to hurt people, to hurt the people he loves with his words.

Right.

And so he confesses his worry that maybe he deliberately drove Jessica mad. And he is saying this to Betsy specifically because he doesn't want her around anymore. He's ordering her to go back home because he doesn't want to hurt her the way he hurt his wife. But the commissioner is there. And it's suggested that the two brothers are going to have to be hauled into court to kind of get to the bottom of all of this, right?

Right.

Correct me if I'm missing anything.

No, I just think in my notes, I have this happening after the encounter with Karafora. But I think you're right. I think they're interwoven.

Yes. So right after Mrs. Rand orders Karafora. Yeah, the commissioner is there, and they're going to take Paul and Wesley into court to kind of figure out once and for all what happened. But then mother Rand steps up and says that she can resolve the situation. You want to take over, John?

She admits that this is her fault, that Jessica died, and she admits that Jessica is a zombie, and that she brought her back to life by becoming possessed, asking Dumballa to make Jessica a zombie.

And she did it at a spite. She was angry because this love triangle between Jessica and Paul and Wesley was forming, she was angry at Jessica for, in her mind, breaking up their family. And so she pretended to participate in a voodoo ceremony and asked the priest to make Jessica a zombie. She mentions that strange drugs were used, and it sounded like she, I don't know if she fully understood what she was doing. And I think she, I don't think she took it seriously, but then when she got back, Jessica has fallen extremely sick.

And I think this is super interesting because there's an aspect of zombieism here, or this guilt here, but, but yeah, we can talk more about that maybe when we sort of wrap.

Yeah, somebody here talks about how you can create a zombie by poison or by hocus pocus, kind of suggesting, you know, do you want to look at it from a scientific perspective? Well, then it's some sort of interaction with these drugs and chemicals. Or do you want to look at it from a more magical perspective, in which case, you know, it's a supernatural event. And someone says, you know, but to create a zombie, this answers the question of is Jessica alive or dead? In this world, to create a zombie, the person has to be dead. And so, I don't think she says it, but the camera settles on Mrs. Rand at that moment looking like, yeah, like, so the implication is that Rand actually murdered Jessica. Am I, did I get that right?

I think so, but it's not explicit.

And it's a little, I mean, there's a lot going on. So apologies if this is a little confusing.

So, but here we are. Let me just summarize where we are. So, so the drama is about to come to a head. The tragedy is about to come to a head. And the tragedy, the thing in question here is, we still don't really know, with 100% certainty, how Jessica got this way. Like, there have been a couple of theories. I think you're right about Mrs. Rand, but, but Wesley and Betsy have a discussion like, this is inhumane. We should put her out of her misery. This is Wesley's suggestion. And this is what, this is the conversation they have, which sort of sets up the very end of the movie.

She ought to be free.

You could free her, Betsy. You could do it. You're a nurse. You have the drugs.

It'll be so quick.

Her heart beats. She breathes. That's life, Wes. I once took an oath to God life.

So in a way, we sort of see, I would like to propose that we sort of see Betsy being set up in the same situation between the Dueling Brothers again, right? But not sort of falling into the same trap, if trap it was that Jessica fell into. Like she is not going to get involved in this mess in that way. But what happens is that night the drums come back and Jessica gets up and goes to the gate and Wes opens the gate for her so she can leave. Then he runs back to the figurehead, which is, remember, pierced with arrows. He pulls one of the arrows out and follows Jessica. Rather than let her go to the zombie cultists, he stabs her. You don't see it, but it's a really cool sequence where as the zombie practitioner, as they're cutting back and forth, stabs Jessica, the voodoo doll, with a pin. Wesley stabs her with the arrow, but we don't see Wesley do it, we just see the aftermath. And then Carrefour comes to get them both, and Wesley retreats into the ocean with Jessica's body, and they drown.

So this was a, I love this scene. This was really neat. I read it slightly differently.

Okay, tell me how you saw it.

I think yours maybe makes more sense. So the voodoo practitioner stabs Jessica with the pin.

The pin, for sure.

And I thought that he was controlling Wesley.

I think so, too.

Causing him to kill Jessica. Is that?

I think that's what happened. I didn't articulate it very well, but I thought that was actually really well done. That not only was the curse on Jessica, but like everybody involved was cursed. And Wesley thought he was engaging his own actions, but he was actually being controlled by the voodoo practitioner.

That's a great way to articulate it, yes.

And they get chased into the sea by this zombie slash god. And then we wrap up very quickly. We see some men spearfishing, they discover Jessica's body, and they discover Wesley, and they bring the bodies back to Fort Holland. There's this voice over at the end. I'm not sure if it's from anything or who is even saying it, but it sort of puts a bow on this whole tragedy.

O Lord God most holy, deliver them from the bitter pains of eternal 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.

So this was an interesting way to end. What did you make of this quote John? I don't know if it's a quote from somewhere, in which case again, this movie has gone, is being smarter.

Way over my head, yeah.

I mean, it gives us, if we take it literally, it gives us another, a new perspective on Jessica, that she was evil. So I don't know if we're supposed to take it that literally, but I appreciated that the central character, Jessica, in all of this, we never really know the truth of her character or her situation.

She never has a line, there's no flashback with her. We only know Jessica from the things that other people say about her. That's it.

We've heard that she was an innocent victim, we've heard that she was maybe fooling around with her husband's brother. Now here we learn that we hear from others that she was horribly, verbally abused and here it's suggested that she herself was sinister. So that's just an interesting series of incompatible takes.

Yeah. And one thing I was thinking was, is the narrator in a sense pointing out that her selfishness in clinging to life after she died some wicked selfishness? That was another interpretation I had.

That could be too. It would be interesting to think of Jessica semi-choosing to stick around to be a haunting presence in the lives of these men that behaved really badly.

Because all of the people in this family, the two brothers and the mother, throughout this film haven't been able to work out their feelings of guilt or relationship to Jessica or their situation. They're sort of stuck perpetually in this loop of acrimony until Betsy shows up and until Jessica gets killed.

Yep. So, hey, John, let's pull this back into our Zombie Strains closing questions. So, at the end of each movie, we ask a series of questions, some of which are going to be relevant and others not to this film. But anything before I jump into the questions?

I have a point I want to bring up, but I'll do it as you ask me the questions. I think I can work it in.

All right. Well, here are the questions we typically ask. Is there a party of heroes in this story, a party of survivors?

Not really. They're central characters. A party of survivors implies that there's some immediate physical threat to all of them, and I don't think that's the case.

How many survive? What are their fatalities? We have Jessica is a zombie before the story starts, and then we have Wesley is drowned at the end.

Wesley is drowned at the end.

That's it on fatalities.

That's it on fatalities. I'm curious about if we don't think Carrefour is a zombie, then though he drives Wesley into the sea so that Wesley drowns, does it count as a zombie kill? I think I'm going to say yes, because...

I think there's enough ambiguity there to say yes. I mean, if he's not a technical zombie, he is certainly...

He's playing the part of one.

He is certainly a zombie type of character. So is there a zombie horde? No. Just the one. Is the world threatened?

No, not in a broad sense.

No.

Yeah. This is similar to White Zombie and some other movies where this is a very small scale story, which works really well. And what type of zombie strain are we looking at in the zombies we see in this film?

Clearly at spiritual zombies, reanimated people through magic, basically.

I think so too. The Western characters in this movie do a lot of talk about how it's scientific. But I think the movie comes down pretty clearly on the side of like, this is real supernatural activity.

Yeah. Once she gets stabbed in the arm at the voodoo gathering, I feel like there's no question she's dead.

Yeah. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that. I like the sense this movie creates that having triggered this sort of supernatural chain of events, it's at least somewhat out of the hands of the human beings involved.

Right.

So I don't know. So we'll call it, this is our mindless zombie. There is no zombie master like there are in earlier films, but it is explicitly stated that the zombies will follow orders and are open to suggestion, right?

Correct.

Any new zombie strains that cropped up in this movie, John?

I don't feel like there are. I feel like this is where I want to make my point about the different zombie strains, but I'll answer the question first by saying no. I think this is one we're familiar with.

So normally, I'd ask you to go through your four pillars of the zombie movie. I think we've touched on all of them, but what is your point you want to make about the zombie strains?

Here's what I'm learning about. I still think those four pillars really are applying to zombie movies, and there is one of them here, right? Just to rattle them off quickly, there's Apocalypse, Contagion, neither of those things are true. There's Loved Ones Turning Against You, which I could give a tentative yes to because at times Jessica is intimidating or scary to people. But it is tough moral choices, which is maybe the one pillar that is strong here because the conversation that Wesley and Betsy have about whether or not they should kill her, is not exactly the same as we need to kill this zombie before it animates and kills us. But it is, we need to kill, that we have to make a tough moral choice about letting this person live because they are a zombie. I think that's clear here. But I wanted to make another point, which is I'm starting to see zombies as a trope that are used in other forms of storytelling to make a point. I'll make this point. Let's say Doctor Who is an example. The trope of Doctor Who is time travel. But what happens when Doctor Who does all this time travel, he encounters and gets to tell a bunch of different stories. When I'm starting to see these zombie movies, what we have here is a love story and a tragedy. The previous episode, we had a mobster story. This is a love story and a tragedy. Before that, we had different kinds of stories. We had a Gothic horror story in White Zombie. The zombie trope is the through line, but we're starting to get a bunch of different kinds of stories. They aren't all about zombies animating and taking over the earth, which is, I think, part of what you and I expected to see when we started.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I hadn't really thought about that, but I think you're right. And I think that's an important part of the evolution of zombies in film.

I think they sort of leaned back into the mystical zombie, not because they wanted to make a zombie movie. I think they did it because it was a good way to tell this tragedy. They wanted to tell it's like the director and writer snuck in a tragedy underneath this sort of faux horror movie, and they're using that trope to get butts in seats, as the kids say. But it's not a horror movie. It's not a zombie movie. It's a tragedy where the zombie plays the central role.

Yes.

I don't know. What were your thoughts sort of coming away from this?

No, honestly, I think you've covered most of the stuff I was going to say. I look forward to movies that can think of a way to frame stories, including zombies, that is not... that does not have this... I'm sorry, this is a little tricky to articulate. How many movies have we watched, John, where the encounter with zombies comes because we're following a bunch of rich, white plantation owners whose lives intersect in some way with the locals on the island where they live, and they get kind of entangled with local religious elements. I mean, that's interesting. It has fueled a number of movies. I hope that the sort of more clever use of the zombie trope in this movie is a sign that we will... people will start coming up with new ways to frame these stories that aren't just American... Westerners go into a third world nation and have a scary encounter with its local religion.

Yes. I will be glad when we're past that. But here's what little bit of hope I get from the way this movie came together. Is that, like, for example, one of the things I'm excited about about our future zombie movies is something like Warm Bodies, which is Romeo and Juliet but zombies. Or I think it's called Maggie, a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he has to protect his daughter who has become a zombie. So movies that are taking the trope of zombies and doing different things with them. And this movie feels like, yes, it's a zombie movie, but it's really this family tragedy that is the story we're trying to tell. So it would be nice if we got more breaks like this that weren't just, like you're saying, in the modern zombie sense, like the straight up zombie horde kind of thing, or in the sense that you're saying, just like a clash of cultures, isn't that other cultural scary kind of thing?

Yeah.

And it's doing something else.

And I realize this is an, that's a good point. I realize this is an artifact of the time, but the inability to treat the other non-white cultures as anything other than an other, it really limits, surely there's some great zombie stories to be told from the perspective of the people living in the cultures that sprouted this mythology. It's just kind of funny how many movies we've seen that can only engage with this through this very, I don't know, this kind of white person, western-centric approach.

But again, a couple of things in this movie is about something else. And I think it's the most sensitive, again, not far enough yet, but the most sensitive to the local culture that we've run into.

I wholeheartedly agree. So hey, John, I think that's a wrap on our discussion of I Walked with a Zombie.

One last thought, would you recommend this movie?

Oh, of course. So yes, I can unreservedly recommend this movie. Both because it is a good film. I think it is one of the better quality films we've covered in this podcast. And I also think it genuinely does some interesting things with the zombie trope that you articulated a few minutes ago, John. I can easily recommend this. And I would say this is up there with Wanga. I mean, you could, if you're just going to watch one movie about white plantation owners in the Caribbean who run into zombies, probably watch this one. If you want to watch a worse movie, but that has an amazing performance in it, watch Wanga.

Yeah, I agree.

If you do that, you could probably skip White Zombie and a number of the other ones we've watched.

And Bowery at Midnight. Yeah, I think what's a relief to me is that, I think I forget when you watch an old movie like Bowery at Midnight, for example, or Maniac. Maniac is much worse, but they're just movies that aren't very good in a way. You know what I mean? And you watch these old crap movies and you realize, well, why do people fall in love with these movies? And then you run across a movie like this and you're like, oh, this is why. This is actually a moving, engaging story and you sort of forget that those are out there. You think it's just like one island in the sea, Casablanca, 1943, that's the only good movie from the 40s. No, there's a lot of them. And now Brad has inspired me to want to watch Cat People too, but that's not what we're going to watch next. No.

So yeah, wow, what a setup. Brad, what are we watching next?

I am so sorry to do this to you guys. You sound so hopeful about the future of Zombie Strains. We are going to flash forward to 2002.

Oh dear.

And I'll explain why after you take a look at the poster.

Oh no.

Oh.

Oh no.

John, will you describe this?

Yeah, it says Tales from the Crypt Ritual. It says Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual. So in the upper left hand corner, we have the Crypt Keeper. And then we have in red highlighted is three people. I see Tim Curry. I do not immediately recognize the other two people though. And I see-

Craig Sheffer and Jennifer Gray.

Oh, Jennifer Gray. Okay. And then underneath it, it says Ritual in yellow. And there is a voodoo doll stuck with pins at the bottom of the poster. The Tales from the Crypt Presents, as if this is like a Tales from the Crypt branding exercise, does not inspire hope, Brad.

That voodoo- your eyesight is better than mine, John, because that looks to me like the Stapuff Marshmallow Man, not a voodoo doll.

Oh my gosh. So why are we flash forwarding to this movie?

And why is this theater- look at the contrast between that goofy looking Crypt Keeper in the corner and then what looks like the sort of thing that's aired at like 3 a.m. on Showtime in the like early 90s with this red-

This has the Skinimax vibe to it, Fred. Tell me what's going on.

Explain yourself, Fred.

This is a loose remake of I Walked with a Zombie.

What?

Okay. Well, we do have three characters there for our love triangle.

Well, I will say, I am pretty much up for Tim Curry chewing the scenery anytime. Whether it's Hunt for Red October or Clue or Legend, I will watch Tim Curry going over the top. So hopefully, we'll get some of that.

For sure. I think this movie would be a lot more enticing to me if you imagine that the Crypt Keeper in the corner is part of the lineup of stars and that it's going to be a good one.

All right. Join us next episode for The Ritual from 2002. See you next time. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.