Saw I Walked with a Zombie, a sort of quaint film about a nurse who comes to work at a small island in Haiti or somewhere where they follow voodoo. The nurse is supposed to care for the wife of one of the guys who runs the sugar cane plantation on the island. This wife was once normal but is now shambling and vacant, almost (dare I say) zombie-like. I didn't realize it, but the film is basically Wuthering Heights. One of the characters even calls the Heathcliff character Byronic.
Anyway, the setting of the film gives it strong racial/colonial overtones. I was convinced half-way through that the wife was meant to stand in for the decaying western values transplanted and enforced by the colonial settlers. Like the wife, a once vivacious force is reduced to sleepwalking along, vacant and useless but venerated by the local rulers. There's a late-film revelation that implies a more murky interplay with the locals.
Alas, the film doesn't really go in that direction, at least not explicitly. Instead it's a somewhat more conventional horror film, with stalking black men menacing the main characters. It's fairly lurid and is pretty entertaining, but also somewhat racist in what I feel is a strident and indifferent way. In one early exchange a black man is driving the nurse to the manor house. He speaks of his family being brought to this island in slave galleys. "Well it's certainly a beautiful place they were brought to!" the nurse smilingly says. "As you say ma'am." the driver responds. "As you say." because what else can you really say to that?
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