I Walked with a Zombie: Colonialism and Intertextuality

Abstract

This article is about some uses of intertextuality between cinema and literature. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is the second of nine films produced by Val Lewton that shaped the horror genre and had a lasting influence on the language of cinema. Reframing the classic Victorian novel Jane Eyre in a Caribbean setting, the film outlines the fault-lines of the European colonial enterprise long before the advent of postcolonial studies. Jean Rhys’s partly autobiographical novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) rewrites Jane Eyre in a feminist and postcolonial perspective. In Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, cinema and films, including I Walked with a Zombie, are the intertextual means to the creation of literary character and the figure of a love that has no name.