Universal may have released the most popular of the horror films of the 40s, but the RKO studio showed that, despite their meager budgets, their films remain far more enduring. Rather than attempting to wile the audience with astounding creature effects, these films relied on atmosphere to achieve their sense of foreboding. Certainly, I cannot claim that they completely evade that dated corniness pervading throughout much of the classic horror films of this era, but I must concede that these two recent entries into my horror film marathon turned out to be pleasant surprises and profoundly entertainment.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

Despite the goofy name, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie demonstrates the deep and under appreciated genius of its director. Tourneur employs some impressive camera work atypical of the conventional standards for the genre at the time, including some gloriously eerie tracking shots following two women through a dark, wooded landscape where they confront an appalling apparition. Some of the night sequences shot in these environments in what at times resembled a sort of half real dreamscape already anticipated the beautiful look of Night of the Hunter

But perhaps most stunning of all is the tone with which the story unfolds. Films such as this too often resort to mechanic exposition, but Tourneur opts to keep the story implicit, preferring a far more poetic approach to what could have been steeped in melodrama. The “zombie” of the film’s title turns out to be far different from the modern conception of these creatures. Following Night of the Living Dead, zombies would evolve into the flesh eating monsters we now know them as, but at this time the idea of the walking dead still belonged more to the traditional voodoo incarnation of them.

The story involves a nurse sent to the West Indies to care for a woman who has fallen into a mysterious coma. She continues to walk, sometimes prowling around during the night, but does not speak nor register any other human presence. A number of possible explanations for her condition are brought up during the course of the narrative – the result of an evil she committed, a medical condition, and a voodoo curse – but, although many of them seem compelling enough, we never discover the true culprit. The ending leaves us with an ambiguous understanding of the situation uncommon for these films. Along with his other famous work, Cat People, this film belongs in the category of overlooked classic.

The Body Snatcher (1945)

Not to be confused with Invasion of the Body Snatchers this stunning little gem was based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson and directed by Robert Wise – most famous for his work as editor on Citizen Kane and director of West Side Story. The Body Snatcher is notable for, among other things, featuring both the talents of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. In fact, the most startling characteristic of the film is the consistently strong acting, especially for a 1940s B-movie. Karloff in particular conveys a depth that was all too lacking in his role as Frankenstein’s Monster. Lugosi, by comparison, does a phenomenal job despite the bit part he plays here, decidedly utilizing far more restraint than he was allowed as Count Dracula.

The story is thoroughly compelling, telling the tale of a doctor of medicine who requires cadavers to assist in instructing his students. Since cadavers apparently are hard to come by, he resorts to paying a mysterious cabman (Karloff) – an unpleasant and vulgar man who appears to possess a dark secret concerning the doctor’s sordid past – to dig them up from the graves of the recently deceased. When security tightens in the graveyards, the cabman must resort to other means for collecting his goods.

The story contains one of those predictable morals, something to the extent of ‘is it moral the take a life to save a life’ but it deals with this moral in a startlingly subtle manner. The story collects fragments of both Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness to construct the character of the doctor, whose decent into madness in the name of scientific progress paints a convincingly desperate and tragic image. Even when the means no longer justify the end, he refuses to abandon the evil that infects his soul. A terrific little film that I urge you to check out.