Jane Eyre meets the Zombie Apocalypse. Or not.

 When I announced the theme for this season of films at the Victoria Park Baptist Church, I promised off-beat and unlikely adaptations of "The Classics" and as you are about to see, I wasn't kidding.

In 2009, Ben Winters published the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which took Jane Austin's immortal classic and gave it the one ingredient that readers have always felt it lacked (or at any rate the one ingredient that Ben Winters had always felt it lacked).

What might surprise Ben Winters is that sixty-six years before he published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, film-makers Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton gave us the Zombie Jane Eyre.

(Full disclosure: I have never met Ben Winters. I have no earthly idea what surprises him.)


Before I go any further with this, I should clarify that the Zombies of modern popular culture have almost nothing to do with the Zombies of I Walked With a Zombie. The modern conception of Zombies can be traced back to a single film: Night of the Living Dead (1968) which invented many of the current traditions: the mindless shuffling, the extreme graphic violence, the eating of brains. 


The Zombies of I Walked With a Zombie are based on the traditions and folklore of Haitian Voodoo, and the film approaches these traditions with a great deal of respect and dignity. 





It also re-works the plot of Jane Eyre. Really.

The story follows Betsy Connell, a Canadian nurse who is hired to care for the wife of a sugar plantation owner on the (fictional) Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. Betsy finds herself falling in love with her employer (think Mr. Rochester, all you Jane Eyre fans) but he remains obligated to his wife, who has suffered a neurological disease that has left her physically healthy, but with no will or personality of her own. In effect, a Zombie.


Quite apart from the Jane Eyre parallels, I Walked With a Zombie has a great deal to say about Slavery, about Colonialism, and about Cultural Suppression. Made on a tiny budget, it is quite unlike any other film, and is all the more remarkable for having been made in 1943.


We'll be screening I Walked With a Zombie at the usual time of 7.30 on Thursday, the 20th of January at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. I hope to see you there!

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