I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim: Produced by Val Lewton - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

No one likes a know-it-all, and chances are if you’re checking out this review, you’re already familiar with Val Lewton’s work as a producer. So, allow me to be blunt: He produced a series of B-movies, primarily horror, for RKO Pictures. These flicks were extremely low budget, had lean, mean running times (usually just over an hour) and prioritized mounting tension and building a sense of dread over the outright thrills of monsters popping up and yelling “Boo!”

No, Lewton’s films were different. He wanted to create a lingering fear that lasted with the viewer long after the movie had finished. During his brief tenure he made a lot of classics, like Cat People that introduced filmic language into the social lexicon and new tools were available to a generation of filmmakers that hadn’t existed before. His legacy looms large and I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim are two of his best.

I Walked with a Zombie tells a story of voodoo, magic, religion, forbidden love and feuding brothers on an island in the Caribbean. Betsy, a nurse, is given an assignment to take care of a man’s ailing wife and leaps at the opportunity to go from snowy Canada to an ostensible paradise in the sun. When she gets there, it’s anything but that.

Jessica, her patient, is seemingly brain dead. She can walk. She can eat. She has “life” but nothing behind her eyes. Why, it’s almost like she’s dead while alive… or, the living dead. A zombie! Look, this also sounds mightily corny, and it very well may have been if the film under the excellent, taut direction of Jacques Tourneur (who also directed the equally excellent Cat People for Lewton) hadn’t been so adept at creating a sense of dread, and a sense of the inevitable, lurking in every shadow, in every corner.

The zombies of this picture pre-date George Romero’s reinvented the genre, so the living dead here aren’t flesh-devouring ghouls. They’re a sadder figure. They’re ghosts, but alive, a mere shadow of the person they once were. Worse yet, they’re slaves. In a surprisingly progressive line for a film from the 1940s, a coachman who gives Betsy a ride inland tells her of the island’s tragic history and how it’s colored even today by the generational trauma of slavery. The ghost of that history haunts the very present.

The Seventh Victim is no less excellent, and is my personal favorite of the Val Lewton RKO features of this era. Unlike I Walked with a Zombie, which unfolds in this organic, character-driven way, The Seventh Victim is a labyrinthine mystery that takes sharp twists and turns through the plot, each reveal more insidious than the last.

While the structure in stories differ, the direction from Mark Robson (who went on to direct Valley of the Dolls) is no less excellent. The use of shadows and exaggerated German Expressionist set design make this feel like a noirish tale, told in an aggrandized world of betrayal. This film concerns Mary, who is looking for his missing sister, who may be the victim of a dangerous cult. And each scene brings Mary (and us) deeper into the rabbit hole.

Both stories favor suspense over payoff, which feel reminiscent of some of H.P. Lovecraft’s early short stories—where the focus isn’t on the supernatural itself, but the idea that the supernatural may exist at all. And that such knowledge hints at a world that exists in between worlds, that we never knew of before. Everything we held to be true is thrown out the window in a violent defenestration. Our comfort in knowing certain knowable, objective truths no longer exists.

My wife is the big Old Hollywood buff of our duo and she introduced me to Val Lewton years ago by having me listen to the “You Must Remember This” podcast by Karina Longworth. After that, I mainlined all of those movies and if I have one complaint from this offering by Criterion, it’s that I wish it had been a comprehensive box set containing everything from Cat People to Bedlam, but I’ll take these two, happily and without (too much) complaint, over my greed in wanting more.

For folks who love cozying up with a creepy black and white people in October, this is a great offering.

I Walked with a Zombie: 4/5
The Seventh Victim: 4.5/5

Vital Disc Stats: The Ultra HD Blu-ray
The films I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim arrive in a two-disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray release from Criterion. Both films are contained on the same 4K & Blu-ray disc respectively, with certain special features available, such as The Secret History of Hollywood alternate audio tracks available on both films and feature-length audio commentaries from film historians and authors. The 4K is a BD-100 with a BD-50 serving the 1080p editions. Other special features like interviews and documentaries about Val Lewton’s legacy are found on the second Blu-ray disc, housed in the same case. I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim come in a standard case with original cover artwork commissioned by Criterion for this release by Katherine Lam and, inside, is a 22-page booklet containing essays about each film and notes about the transfer. The booklet is reversible—one side is for I Walked with a Zombie and flip it over halfway through for The Seventh Victim.

A lot of work went into the restoration process for both of these films, which are presented in both 4K and 1080p, as both a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc and standard Blu-ray disc are provided. The original nitrate negative for The Seventh Victim had mold damage and, according to the book included with the discs, there is still some residual mold residue present in the picture - which, honestly, I did not notice.

I’ve seen both of these films a number of times throughout the years thanks to Turner Classic Movies and in my memory of the films, I see them as speckled with dirt and real rough and gnarly looking. Seeing them in this presentation was a big shift for me, and a welcomed one because it allowed me to soak in all the fine details in a way I never had before. The set design is exquisite. The costuming contains so much character. And the cinematography is deeper in a way I never realized, so sophisticated is its technique in taking the ordinary and making is darkly extraordinary.

The 4K discs do not contain any sort of HDR grading, so depending on the size of your TV, there won’t be a tremendous difference between versions. I have a 65” OLED and if I had two of the exact same TV going at the same time I could probably notice some sharper detail on one versus the other, but watching key scenes individually presented no real difference. However, both versions looked gorgeous, and I applaud the amount of work that went into these restorations.

Both I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim are given an uncompressed monorail sound mix, so this is going to be a front-only presentation on the soundstage. That said, I had zero complains with the mix on either film. They were strong in surprising ways, layered in complexity with ambient sounds like blowing wind whistling through trees, footsteps clomping off screen and an eerie musical score just beneath everything, punctuating events for added emphasis.

In my favorite sequence of the two films, the sound design on I Walked with a Zombie builds and builds with such masterful intent to a climactic crescendo. The scene begins quietly and eerily, with only the barely audible sound of a gentle breeze and crickets chirping. Off in the distance is the sound of drums from a voodoo ritual. As we get closer and closer, the sound raises and raises. By the end of it, the music is blaring, chants are wavering in various frequencies and my subwoofer was thumping along in participation. Through it all, on both films, dialogue is clearly audible and crisp. And for talky pictures that rely on spoken exposition, this is an absolute must.

The special features on these discs are very robust and will provide enough for both know-it-all fans of Val Lewton and newbies to his filmography alike to keep buyers of this set entertained for a good, long while, with plenty of new pieces of information and trivia. There aren’t a lot of features, but the ones that exist are long, dense and filled with information about these films, their lasting legacy and the era in which they were released.

• Audio Commentary on I Walked with a Zombie featuring authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

• Audio Commentary on The Seventh Victim featuring film historian Steve Haberman

• Audio Essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood featuring stories about the casts, crews, and productions of both films (Jean Brooks’ segment 53:14 and Tom Conway’s segment 1:03:53)

• Interview With Film Historian Imogen Sara Smith (HD 47:00)

• Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (SD 53:24) A documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; actor Sara Karloff; and others.

• Excerpts From “The Origins of the Zombie, from Haiti to the U.S.”  (HD 12:42) An episode of the PBS series Monstrum, hosted by scholar Emily Zarka 

• 22-Page Booklet containing essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante

Val Lewton was an undeniably influential force in the world of horror. Not for the horrors he threw up on the screen, but because of what he didn’t show. That restraint, which forced our mind’s eye to envision terrors beyond comprehension, brought an almost novelistic approach to filmmaking and revolutionized the way filmmakers can terrify audiences, from Jaws to The Blair Witch Project and beyond. Criterion’s double-bill of I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim is an excellent set, with beautiful video transfers, rich sound mixes, and a mountain of features to make your way through. This release comes Highly Recommended for most film nerds in general, but if you’re already a Val Lewton fan, I’d say this is an absolute must-own.