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Analysis Of ' I Walked With A Zombie '

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Produced by Val Lewton, I Walked with a Zombie is a film directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1943. I Walked with a Zombie, is a tale told in a suspenseful style which incorporates the usage of light and shadow instead of many special effects to portray a scary, compelling, and engaging story. Val Lewton described the film “a West Indian version of Jan Eyre,” with its abnormal first wife, its noble suffering husband, and its selfless nurse who becomes wife number two. The film is similar to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, in which a young Canadian nurse named Betsy Connell heads to the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to look after the unconscious wife (Jessica Holland) of a major sugar plantation owner named Paul Holland. Betsy’s …show more content…

At the same time, the outbreak of the Second World War threatened to devastate Hollywood’s vital overseas trade. The studios’ exports to the Axis nations (Germany, Italy, and Japan) declined to almost nothing in 1937-38, but still Hollywood borrowed roughly one-third of its total revenues from overseas markets. The primary oversees client was Europe, which supplied about 75 percent if the studio 's foreign income in 1939. However, the European markets were severely disrupted by the outbreak of war in September 1939 and continued to decline as fighting continued in Europe. The war in Europe resulted in the US government to initiate a massive military and defense buildup, which had tremendous effects on the movie industry. Hollywood played it safe by producing a few war-related features in 1940, however, focused mostly on newsreels and documentary shorts of the war. Hollywood, in order to increase demand on top featured films, turned to independent producers in the early 1940s. The most aggressive studio to adopt major independent productions was RKO. RKO had over a dozen independent unit productions under way in 1940.
Val Lewton’s Influence on Horror Films during the 1940s
During the 1940s it was Val Lewton’s unit at RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures which carried the horror

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