Jacques Tourneurs I Walked with a Zombie (1943) transforms Jane Eyre into a haunting Caribbean fable. A nurse caring for a comatose woman on a remote island becomes entangled in voodoo rituals, colonial guilt, and forbidden love. Dreamlike, poetic, and unsettling, it remains one of the cornerstones of RKOs atmospheric horror tradition.

Val Lewtons The Seventh Victim (1943) is a shadow-filled psychological horror about a young woman searching for her missing sister in New York, only to uncover a secret Satanic cult. Mixing dread, existential melancholy, and noir-like atmosphere, it remains one of the most haunting and adult horror films of the 1940s.

Criterion Collection

Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread. As head of RKOs B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.

Films In This Set

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated the horror film to new heights of poetic abstraction with this entrancing journey into the realm between life and death. When she takes a job caring for a comatose woman on a Caribbean island, a young nurse (Frances Dee) finds herself plunged into a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and Vodou priests have the