'I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim' Directors: Jacques Tourneur / Mark Robson (1943) Criterion Collection Blu-ray | Produced by Val Lewton | 4K restorations

Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread.

As head of RKO’s B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. 

Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.

Special features include:
- Audio commentary on I Walked with a Zombie featuring authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
- Audio commentary on The Seventh Victim featuring film historian Steve Haberman
- Interview with film historian Imogen Sara Smith
- Audio essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood featuring stories about the casts, crews, and productions of both films
- Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; actor Sara Karloff; and others
- Excerpts from “The Origins of the Zombie, from Haiti to the U.S.,” an episode of the PBS series Monstrum, hosted by scholar Emily Zarka
- Essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante