I Walked With A Zombie / The Seventh Victim - Criterion Collection Blu-Ray

Horror lurks in the shadows in a pair of fascinating and atmospheric horror films born from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer and director who transformed our fear of the unseen and unknown into haunting excursions into existential horror. As head of RKO's B-horror film division in the 1940s, Lewton, in collaboration with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, a new level of sophistication to the genre by creating thrills not with conventional movie monsters but with brooding atmospheres, suggestion, and sensual unease. The poetically hypnotic I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are filled with rituals, mysticism, and the occult, and remain thrilling death dreams that dare to embrace darkness.

I Walked with a Zombie

1943

Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated horror films to new heights of poetic abstraction with this enchanting journey into the realm between life and death. When a young nurse (Frances Dee) is assigned to care for a woman in a coma on a Caribbean island she finds herself in a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and witch doctors have the power to summon the living dead. Sugar cane swaying in a moonlit field, the hypnotic beat of voodoo drums, the inexorable pull of death—the otherworldly atmosphere of this bold new version of Jane Eyre is as close to pure dream-state surrealism as studio Hollywood ever came.

The Seventh Victim

1943

”Death is good," is how producer Val Lewton summed up the message of his films, a credo that found its most explicit expression in this hauntingly nihilistic thriller, the first film directed by Lewton's regular editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York's bohemian Greenwich Village, where she discovers an ominous shadow world of devil worshippers and murder. And what about the mysterious room furnished only with a chair and a gallows? With its nuanced treatment of depression and queerness, The Seventh Victim has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, and its radical bleakness has not diminished with time.

New digital 4K restorations of both films, with uncompressed mono audio tracks

Audio commentary on I Walked with a Zombie with authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

Audio commentary on The Seventh Victim with film historian Steve Haberman

Interview with film critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith

Audio excerpts from Adam Roche's podcast The Secret History of Hollywood

Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), 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; author Neil Gaiman; actress Sara Karloff; and others

Trailers

English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: Essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante New illustrations by Katherine Lam