I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943) #TSPDT #488

A nurse arrives on a colony to find her patient in a strange state of waking coma, possibly induced by something more than magic.

There are several very memorable moments in this movie - first of all, the scene in the field with the frightening "zombie-like" native leading the main character to the center of voodoo worship. The images are dream-like and extremely haunting.

The film really is a great study for subtle horror. All the really frightening stuff is in the various subtexts - this fantastic set-up makes an contention of the two brothers over the dinner table at least as chilling as the more "traditional" tricks of the trade to frighten the audience. Another masterpiece from Tourneur, whom I've obviously neglected to admire so far. His salient ability seems to be to swathe ordinary tension with hidden meaning, as far as I've noticed. Definitely worth seeing more of.

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Time of the Gypsies / Dom Za Vesanje (Emir Kusturica, 1988)

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Detour (Ulmer, 1945) #TSPDT #390

A hitchhiker is picked up by death and then picks up his personal tormenting devil. The plot looked fairly straightforward, but the magic of this gem is that the story strand convolutes until it tightens into a strangling gordic knot - which is pretty much exactly what happens towards the end. The flashback structure are very noir-ish, so was the plot - everything straight down, right from the beginning. I really rooted for the guy to get out of this situation, but every time he takes a decision it actually gets worse - so in the end I was just hoping he might die and get relieved. Most striking was the jaw-dropping performance of Ann Savage. She pops out about a mile and her character is rendered so immensely unlikeable that I wondered that she has not been called the godmother of a new type of acting school (maybe she was?) This is definitively a film worth studying again. Its shortness does nothing to diminish the impact and it is rich on details.

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