It stars James Ellison, Frances Dee, and Tom Conway, and follows a Canadian nurse who travels to care for the ailing wife of a sugar plantation owner in the Caribbean, where she witnesses Vodou rituals and possibly encounters the walking dead.

The screenplay, written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, is based on an article of the same title by Inez Wallace, and also partly reinterprets the narrative of the 1847 novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

On a snowy Ottawa day, young nurse Betsy Connell is interviewed to care for the wife of Paul Holland, a sugar plantation owner on Saint Sebastian, a Caribbean island.

She encounters Jessica, her patient, wandering the grounds that night, and is initially frightened by the nonverbal, affectless woman, who, as Dr. Maxwell later informs Betsy, was left without the willpower to speak or act by herself after a tropical fever irreparably damaged her spinal cord.

Paul and Betsy stop her the first time, but Wesley helps her the second, following with an arrow removed from a garden statue depicting Saint Sebastian, "Ti-Misery", that was once the figurehead of a Holland-family slave ship.

[7] Whereas the article detailed Wallace's experience meeting "zombies", by which she meant, not the literal living dead, but rather people she encountered working on a plantation in Haiti whose vocal cords and cognitive abilities had been impaired by drug use, rendering them obedient servants who understood and followed simple orders,[8] Lewton asked screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray to research the practices of Haitian Vodou and use Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a model for the narrative structure,[9] purportedly proclaiming that he wanted to make a "West Indian version of Jane Eyre.

"[10] Siodmak's initial draft, which was revised significantly by Wray and Lewton, revolved around the wife of a plantation owner who is made into a zombie to prevent her from leaving him and moving to Paris.

[19][20] The film was released on DVD by Warner Home Video in 2005 as part of "The Val Lewton Horror Collection", a 9-film box set, on the same disc as The Body Snatcher (1945).

[21] In 2024, The Criterion Collection announced a 4K/Blu-ray release of the film as part of the double feature set, I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim: Produced by Val Lewton.

[24] Whereas The Boston Globe felt the film "gets nowhere in the telling and finishes its overdone melodramatics with a most unconvincing climax",[25] a reviewer in Albany, New York, said it "rigs up a great atmosphere for the haunt and holler audience and, compared with Cat People, the movie with which it is mentioned most often in publicity, it is a success.

[30] Alan Jones of Radio Times gave the film four out of five stars, writing: "Jacques Tourneur's direction creates palpable fear and tension in a typically low-key nightmare from the Lewton fright factory.

Alone, dead, beautifully and self-consciously staged, facing the audience directly and meant for its inspection alone in a story explicitly about a people's long memories of slavery, he is disquietingly insisted upon."

Historian and author Alexander Nemerov asserted that I Walked with a Zombie uses stillness as a metaphor for slavery "in ways that center on Carre-Four",[35] who, like Ti-Misery, "the slave ship's figurehead, is a static and insentient figure".

[39] Both Nemerov and Mandelo discussed the references in the film to the residents of Saint Sebastian, due to the island's history of slavery, still crying at the births of children and laughing at funerals.

[40] He wrote that I Walked with a Zombie "not only depict[s] them with surprising accuracy and dignity, but consider[s] how those beliefs could be co-opted by the white man as one more element of control over the lives of the island inhabitants.

[5] Additionally, he wrote that when Alma instructs Betsy on how to reach the houmfort, "her description of Carre-Four as a 'god' sounds almost like 'guard,' and the two words combine not only to define his voodoo role, guardian of the crossroads, but also to assert the importance of his triviality: like the doorman at an actual club, he is a guard who holds godlike power.