Film group note: I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur

I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur


A Dutiful Son

Jacques Tourneur was the son of a famous film maker, Maurice Tourneur.  Maurice Tourneur was born in Paris in 1876.  He appeared as an actor in the Paris Theater and, then, made some short films.  Some of these movies caught the attention of the Hollywood studios and Tourneur was recruited to work in the American film industry.  Beginning around 1914, he directed a number of silent films, almost all of them lost.  His style was said to be poetic, relying heavily on careful lighting and tinting effects.  His best received film was The Last of the Mohicans (1920), an artistic and box-office success although much of the film seems to have been actually directed by Clarence Brown – Tourneur suffered from ptomaine poisoning on location that side-lined him for much of the shoot.  (Maurice Tourneur also received critical accolades for his direction of an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlincks’ symbolic drama The Blue Bird).  Tourneur clashed with the studio bosses in 1926, walked off the set, and moved to France.  He directed a dozen or so films for various French studios, many of them highly regarded at the time but forgotten today.  His son, Jacques, whom his father called “Jack”, worked on some of his father’s French films as a cameraman and second unit director.  In 1934, Tourneur returned to Hollywood, where he had been raised, and immediately found work with the studios.  He directed a number of shorts and very low budget feature films, gradually achieving a reputation for no-nonsense dependability.

Maurice Tourneur was always considered eccentric.  In 1924, he wrote an essay in a film review magazine in which he declared that not only were films “not art”, they “would never be” – he justified this view based on the fact that films are made by committees of men who are beholding to a business that must compromise to sell the greatest number of tickets.  Notwithstanding this opinion, Tourneur later wrote a letter to Variety, praising his son “Jack’s” work for MGM and signing the correspondence “the Michelangelo of the movies” also known as “the Frank Sinatra of the Riviera.”  Maurice Tourneur was terribly injured in a car crash in 1948, the year that he made his last picture – a suitcase roped down atop his car came lose, fell onto the road, and, when Tourneur tried to retrieve it, another motorist ran over him.  His leg had to be amputated.

Maurice Tourneur lived until 1961, spending his last years translating American crime novels into French.  In 1951, Tourneur worked with an old actor who had been directed by his father in the 1919 film, The White Heather.  Tourneur told the old man that he would be “happy if he was half as great a director as his father.”

Digression: Albion, Nebraska – 1942

My mother detests cats.  She has been afraid of the creatures all of her life.  She attributes this phobia to a fright that she received in 1942.  She recalls that she went to a movie about a woman who turned into a cat and murdered people.  The movie appalled her and she left the theater shaken – she was, then, about six years old.  As she walked home, someone crept up behind her and threw a hissing and spitting cat at her.  That event marked her for life.

The movie that my mother attended was Cat People, Jacques Tourneur’s first horror film produced by Val Lewton for RKO.


Some doubts about the auteur theory

Who is the “author” of a film?  Movies are made by groups of people working under the supervision of directors, producers, studio bosses.  American film historians note that studios such as MGM or Paramount had “house-styles” – that is, a certain “look” with respect to camerawork, sets, and couture.  In most instances during the classic Hollywood era, the studio style was more obvious than the directorial flourishes and signature touches.  Of course, there were exceptions and film had director auteurs long before there was a fancy French word to name these artists: D. W. Griffith put his monogram on each intertitle, signing his films in that way, as did his competitor Thomas Ince.  Audiences were encouraged to enjoy the so-called “Lubitsch-touch” in the Viennese (and later Hollywood) director’s sophisticated sex comedies.  Preston Sturges and John Ford were bankable directors and their films were distributed under their names.  But, generally, the movies released by Hollywood were products, most often anonymously constructed as vehicles for the stars under contract to the studios.

In the late thirties, Tourneur worked for MGM under David O. Selznick.  He was assigned Second Unit work with Val Lewton, Selznick’s story editor, on A Tale of Two Cities.  It was a prestigious assignment: Tourneur was in charge of directing action sequences, some of them involving as many as 3000 extras.  With Lewton, he contrived spectacular scenes dramatizing the tumult of the French Revolution – in fact, the studio was so impressed that Tourneur and Lewton were given a special on-screen credit for “arranging...Revolutionary Sequences.”  Some historians think this credit was intended to give the film a greater cachet of authenticity because of Tourneur’s French name.  Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that the best things about the big and expensive Ronald Coleman historical epic are the second unit street-battles, the rioting and the storming of the Bastille.

Lewton was a Russian immigrant, born in Yalta and the son of a Jewish moneylender.  (His birth name was Vladimir Leventin.)  He came to the United States in 1909 and worked as a journalist.  He was an enthusiastic progenitor of “fake news” and, in 1920, was fired from a newspaper for inventing a story (something about the death of a truckload of kosher chickens) from the whole cloth.  Lewton formally studied journalism at Columbia and, then, worked writing pulp fiction.  His 1932 book, No Bed of Her Own was adapted into a risque pre-code film No Man of her Own.  Lewton had been working at MGM as a script doctor but quit the job when his novel became a best-seller.  He wrote three other novels without making much money and, then, returned to MGM where he was employed as story editor with Tourneur on A Tale of Two Cities and, later, Gone with the Wind.  (The famous scene in which Scarlett O’Hara walks from a train station into a field hospital where thousands of wounded men are lying on the ground – possibly the most famous crane-shot in film history – was invented by Lewton.)  Tourneur said that Lewton was “a dreamer.  He had the most fantastic ideas.  But I always had to talk him back to reality.”

In 1942, Lewton was lured away from MGM to work as a producer at RKO.  Lewton was paid $250 a week, told that he had to make horror films for less than $150,000 a picture, and advised that the titles for the films, selected to make the pictures as marketable as possible, were under the control of the studio.  No film was to be longer than 75 minutes – the pictures were devised as the B movie for double features.  Working within these constraints, Lewton produced nine horror films that are now regarded as among the greatest pictures ever made in that genre.  The first three pictures were directed by Jacques Tourneur: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943).  Also in 1943, RKO released under Lewton’s supervision, The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson) and The Ghost Ship, also directed by Robson.  In 1944, Lewton produced The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel to the extremely successful 1942 film that inaugarated the RKO horror cycle; The Curse of the Cat People was directed by Gunter von Frisch with the assistance of Robert Wise.  Between 1945 and 1946, Lewton produced three films with Boris Karloff, among that actor’s very best performances – Karloff said that Lewston had “restored his soul.”  The Karloff films are The Body Snatcher (directed by Robert Wise), The Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson) and Bedlam (Mark Robson).

Although these films are all ostensibly written by various hacks employed by RKO, no doubt exists that Lewton was responsible for the final script and supervised the direction of these movies so closely that they all bear the unmistakable traces of his style and sensibility.  (Several of the Karloff pictures are actually credited to Lewton – however, the credits are fanciful: Bedlam’s credits claim it was written by William Hogarth, the 18th century engraver of The Rake’s Progress – one of the prints in that series shows the notorious insane asylum.  Isle of the Dead is based on a painting by Arnold Boecklin.)  These films are all excellent, a quality product that is literate, suspenseful, and remarkably atmospheric given the poverty-row budgets within which Lewton worked.  And these films raise serious questions about “authorship” – it’s generally thought that the auteur with regard to the nine RKO horror pictures is Lewton.  This idea seems corroborated by the fact that several of the directors credited on the films were workmanlike but dull in their other work – Mark Robson and Robert Wise never did anything as good as their films made for Val Lewton.  Working in other conditions, their movies are efficiently directed but generally conventional and tediously inert.

Jacques Tourneur is a different case – he was a first-rate director in his own right.  After The Leopard Man, RKO split up Tourneur and Lewton, allowing Tourneur to work alone on several films.  Tourneur noted that the studio motivation was mercenary – “we were making so much money for RKO that they thought they would double their income by having us work separately.”  At RKO, Tourneur made Experiment Perilous (1944), a suspense film starring Hedy Lamar that is one of his best pictures.  In 1946, he directed Canyon Passage, a superb Western set in the Pacific Northwest.  Working with independent producers, Tourneur then made Out of the Past (1947), a quintessential film noir with Robert Mitchum.  Stars in my Crown, Wichita, and Great Day in the Morning are all excellent low-budget Westerns.  Anne of the Indies was made in 1951 for 20th Century Fox as was The Way of the Gaucho (1952) made in Argentina, both films highly regarded today.  Finally, in 1957, Tourneur directed The Night of the Demon in England, an extraordinary horror film based upon a story Montague R. James.  All of these films, and a half-dozen not listed, show that Tourneur was an extremely reliable and often brilliant director.  He is a film maker’s film maker – Martin Scorsese in particular reveres him.  Tourneur began drinking heavily at the end of his career and his last several pictures made in the early sixties are pedestrian.  Working in TV, he did, however, create one impressive episode for The Twilight Zone, “The Night Call” in 1963.

Tourneur died in 1977.  (Lewton had died from series of heart attacks in 1948.)  Looking back on his career, Tourneur said: “I’m a very average director.  I did my work the best I could; we’re all limited in one way or another.”  Asked what he thought his role would be in cinema history, he said: “Nothing, none.  There is nothing more evanescent that an image on celluloid.”

The leading exponent of auteur theory in American criticism is Andrew Sarris.  Sarris ranked Lewton as a third-rate director under the rubric “expressive esoterica.”  American auteur critics were unimpressed by Tourneur – he “lacks thematic coherence” and the only unifying principle in his work is “strict adherence to the text” (of the script).  In the late seventies, critics like Manny Farber expressed the idea of “termite” art – that is, low-cost, competent, popular film making that eschews grand ideas and grand statements of principle.  Tourneur, who worked successfully in all genres, was proclaimed as one of the best of the “termite” directors.  This remains his reputation today. 


I Walked with a Zombie – production notes

Lewton and Tourneur shot the film two months after completing Cat People.  (The movie was premiered in April 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio the home of the author who ostensibly inspired the film, Inez Wallace.)  The movie was shot before Cat People was released.  Production took place between October 26, 1942 and November 19, 1942 – the budget was described as “shoestring.”

The studio insisted on the lurid title, derived from a magazine article about voodoo in Haiti written by Inez Wallace for American Weekly Magazine.  Other than the title, the magazine article has nothing to do with the film.  Wallace’s story involves the assertion that plantation managers in Haiti made use of zombie-labor – that is, persons who had been drugged and hypnotized to the point that they had no volition of their own.  Lewton insisted on detailed research and spent several weeks studying voodoo while the script was being written.

The script, very loosely based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is credited to Ardel Wray and Curt Siodmak.  Lewton undoubtedly contributed to the final version of the script as actually filmed.

Ardel Wray was a woman script-writer who worked with Lewton on I walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam.  A former model, she first worked in the film industry as a script writer and story editor beginning in 1933.  She followed Lewton to RKO immediately after his arrival at that studio.  She wrote her last script for Lewton in 1945 when she was pregnant.  In 1948, she returned to the movie business and wrote a very highly regarded script for a film about Lucrezia Borgia – the movie was not produced. (She also wrote a film about the pirate Blackbeard, similarly never produced.)  In the early 1950's, she was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC during the McCarthy hearings on communism in Hollywood.  She refused to name names and was “grey-listed” – her name was taken off a film with Alan Ladd and, for twelve years, she was denied any screen credits.  Her appearance before HUAC was probably the result of her brief liaison with Dalton Trumbo and her   work with him on his notorious anti-war novel Johnny Got his Gun (1938).  In the sixties, she worked as a story editor and screenwriter for a number of television shows produced by Warner Brothers including 77 Sunset Strip.  She died 75 years old in 1983.

Curt Siodmak, the other screenwriter, was a German Jewish emigre to the United States.  He came from a mercantile Leipzig family and studied mathematics at the University of Berlin.  After graduation, he published several novels but with interested in producing films.  He invested in film royalties in a movie written by Billy Wilder and directed by his brother Robert Siodmak and Edward G. Ulmer, both later well-known for their work as directors in Hollywood.   The resulting film, made in 1929, Menschen am Sonntag (“People on Sunday”) is one of the best of the movies made during the waning days of the Weimar period.  (The film is a slice-of-life, ultra-realist portrait of the activities of four young people in Berlin in the day-off-work, Sunday.)  Siodmak wrote many novels and produced scripts for several science fiction films made in Weimar Germany prior to 1933.  In that year, he heard an anti-Semitic rant by Dr. Joseph Goebbels and decided it was prudent to leave Germany.  He moved to Hollywood and secured employment with Carl Laemmle, the producer of horror films at Universal heavily influenced by German expressionist cinema.  Siodmak wrote the script for The Wolf Man in 1941.  He later wrote scripts for The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) about the hand of a murderer grafted onto a pianist with dire results and several other iconic films, including The Earth v. Flying Saucers (1956), the progenitor of the UFO genre.  Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (1942) tells the story of man’s brain preserved after his body is destroyed; the brain, extracted from a vicious megalomaniac financier, gradually seizes control of those around it, hypnotizing them into doing criminal acts.  The story, ridiculous on most levels, has had an immense appeal – Orson Welles dramatized the tale in a radio broadcast in 1943 and the novel has been filmed, at least, three times.  Siodmak died at age 98 in Three Rivers, California.  I Walked with a Zombie is surprisingly restrained for a script by Siodmak and, it seems, that Ardel Wray’s influence is probably predominant in the finished product.

Sir Lancelot was a calypso artist from Trinidad.  He was hired to devise a sort of choral commentary on the action in I Walked with a Zombie.  A number of scenes were shot in which Sir Lancelot’s music and lyrics comment on the action.  That footage was largely scrapped – all that remains is his indelible performance where he sings “Fort Holland”(actually a tune called “Shame and Scandal”, a big hit from 1940)) song in the outdoor café.  (Tourneur recalled that he was like a “Greek choir” strolling about an commenting on the action in “eight or nine scenes” – only one such scene remains in the finished 65 minute cut.)    Lewton recognized that Sir Lancelot had a tremendous screen presence – he appears in The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People.  In both of these films, his contribution is mostly acting – in the second Cat People film he doesn’t sing at all.  Sir Lancelot was classically trained, lived in New York, and was initially known for his performances of opera arias and German lieder.  He was politically active, a Leftist and involved in the promotion of Civil Rights.  Sir Lancelot continued performing and working as songwriter through the mid-sixties when he retired – he was tapped to perform the title song for Gilligan’s Island, a jaunty sea-shanty written very much in his musical style.  (Unfortunately, someone else recorded the tune for the iconic TV show.)  Sir Lancelot Pinard (his real name) was a faithful Roman Catholic – his last record was called Pinardhymns in which he is identified as a “Knight of the Holy Trinity”, the first and only experiment in the genre of “religious calypso”.  The singer is credited with being the first musician to popularize calypso music in the United States – in the forties, he was a fixture of Greenwich Village music venues, including The Village Vanguard. 

Zombies and Vodoun

Tourneur experimented with make-up to create zombie effects in the film.  The results were unconvincing – some still photographs show characters in rags and exaggerated minstrel-influenced Black face with staring eyes.  Lewton wasn’t satisfied with the appearance of these monsters and, so, he agreed to purchase the services of several actual zombies.  An RKO purchasing agent traveled to New Orleans, met with some Voudon priests (Houngan) in that city, and, ultimately, issued a shipping order for two zombies, cash on delivery from Port au-Prince subject to a letter of credit from a bank in Santa Domingo guarantying payment.  (Relevant documents are on file from the RKO production records for I walked with a Zombie.)

The zombies were received in two wooden shipping boxes filled with excelsior.  When Tourneur pried the boxes open, he discovered that one of the zombies was badly damaged in shipping, was missing limbs, and could not be revived to act in the film.  The other zombie was intact, but, also couldn’t be resuscitated from its dormant state.  Accordingly, Tourneur and Lewton had to retain the services of specialists to revive the zombie sufficiently for its appearance in the film.

To understand these problems, it’s important to draw some distinctions.  Haitian zombies differ radically from the lumbering undead featured in films like Night of the Living Dead.  A Haitian zombie is ordinarily an agricultural laborer who has offended some powerful person on the sugar plantation where he is employed to work.  Persons who have offended the plantation manager are kidnaped and, then, treated with so-called “zombie powder”.  This powder is a gritty and abrasive substance made from dried and ground up puffer fish, mummified human remains (also macerated and, then, ground to powder), hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, and pulverized glass.  The powder is rubbed into the victim’s elbow, the glass particles breaking down the skin, and allowing the psychoactive agents in the substance to enter the victim’s blood stream.  Puffer fish contains a powerful paralytic neurotoxin called tetrododoxin.  This substance paralyzes the victim, slows respiration, and, then, causes coma – in this comatose state, the putative zombie seems to be dead.  However, the victim is conscious, fully sensate, but simply unable to speak or move or show that he is still alive.  A specialized Houngan, called a Bokor, applies the compound to the victim, abrading the skin to poison the person.  The seemingly dead person is, then, afforded Catholic rites of burial and interred alive in a simple wooden casket.  (Usually, a large tarantula is put in the casket with the zombie to “keep him company.”) The night of the burial the living corpse is exhumed, taken from the casket, and, then, another compound, this called a deliriant (delirium-producing agent), is blown into the zombies nostrils using a reed-straw.  The deliriant is made from Hyla tree frogs, a powerful mania-inducing hallucinogen.  This substance, once inhaled by the zombie, counteracts the paralytic qualities of the tetrododoxin and revives the person, although only to a limited extent.  The zombie remains in a state of chemically induced psychosis, delirious and profoundly disoriented.  In this state, the zombie can be forced to work along side others similarly situated, comprising a kind of nightmarish midnight shift of agricultural laborers at the sugar plantation.  At dawn, the zombies are treated again with paralytic, stored in vaults underground, and, then, revived with the inhaled deliriant at sundown to continue their work.

The difficulty confronting Lewton and Tourneur was that the one undamaged zombie was paralyzed and the shipping bokor had failed to send the vivifying Hyla (tree fog) inhalant with the creature.  The risk was that the zombie would gradually resume consciousness and, then, run amuck in the absence of a substance to eliminate its volition.  Tourneur did some research and summoned to the studio the most knowledgeable authority then existing as Haitian Voudon.  This was Katherine Dunham, the celebrated African-American anthropologist and folk dancer from the University of Chicago.  Dunham was corresponding that time Eleonora Derenskowka (later known as Maya Deren).  Maya Deren was then living with her husband, a cinematographer, in Los Angeles.   She accompanied Katherine Dunham to the RKO studio to observe the work on the zombie.  Dunham and Deren found the zombie comatose, exhibiting classical signs of locked-in syndrome – that is, completely paralysis of the skeletal muscles.  The mode of injection was clear: a scabbed-over patch at the antecubital joint caused by powdered glass abrasion.  Surmising that the paralysis was similar to that induced by so-called “pot curare” (Amazonian curare packed in terra cotta pots), Dunham suggested an intravenous injection of an anti-paralytic, neostigmatine delivered in a nicotine solution.   (These drugs had been in use beginning the 1930's as an antivenom agent for snake-bite.)  The snakebite anti-venom was injected with the result that the zombie began to blink its eyes, twitch violently, and, then, sustain seizures with concomitant loss of bowel continence.  Although the zombie had suffered some muscle atrophy from prolonged paralysis, the creature ultimately was able to walk, albeit with assistance.  A physical therapist from Los Angeles County Hospital, on a secret retainer to the major studios, was summoned to the RKO set to provide exercise treatment designed to improve the creature’s gait and enhance muscle tone.  This therapy, provided over the course of four days, was largely successful.

Unfortunately, other problems immediately ensued.  The zombie was incoherent at first, but later began protesting his plight in Haitian creole.  No one knew the lingo and, so, Katherine Dunham, who had done field work in Haiti, was recalled to the studio.  She was able to assure the zombie that all was well and that he would be sent back to Port au-Prince when the shoot was concluded and, in fact, paid for his labors by being provided a 1941 Pontiac Streamliner shipped by steamer to the island.  Needless to say, the zombie was very hungry after a month of poison-induced paralysis and dined, more or less, continuously at the RKO cafeteria.  Agnes Moorehead, then at the studio as an actress in Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons writes in her memoir – ‘You saw all sorts of exotic folk in the studio cafeteria.  I particularly remember a very tall and haggard zombie working on one of Val Lewton’s horror films.  At first, I was immensely impressed by the exquisite make-up work done to render this animate corpse as a realistic, flesh and blood apparition.  But, then, when I spoke to the fellow (he answered in something that sounded like barbarous French), I realized that the specimen was not made-up, but was, rather, some kind of living and grotesque human anomaly.  Despite his oddity, the zombie was very popular with the girls and seemed to be possessed of an enormous, inordinately exuberant appetite.  It was majestic and awful to see the creature tucking into a plate of spaghetti and meatballs or devouring trays of stuffed cabbage with jello dessert.”  As one might expect, the zombie (now nicknamed “Doudou”), gained weight.  Studio photographs show the cadaverous monster with a pot belly and a double chin.  This was quite unacceptable and Lewton ordered that another dose of paralytic be administered to Doudou to render him more tractable to direction.

Formulating this additional dose of paralytic proved to be difficult.  Puffer fish was occasionally available at Asian markets but only expert chefs knew how to extract the poison from the animal’s flesh and swim bladders.  (Puffer fish is a delicacy in Japan).  The leading Japanese specialist in preparing these fish was inaccessible – incarcerated with other Nisei at an internment camp in the Owens Valley near Lone Pine.  Tourneur himself made the drive through the Mojave Desert and up the valley to the place where the internment camp was located, a dozen miles below the icy and serrated Sierra ridge at Mount Whitney.  The famous chef was depressed and angry and refused to cooperate.  Tourneur went back to Los Angeles and decided to dose Doudou with curare.  To everyone’s surprise, the improvised curare potion (made from wood ivy and largely used in vivisection experiments) was effective.  Doudou’s appetite reduced radically and he became much more amenable to Tourneur’s direction.  (Tourneur remarked that it was not really much different from the studios administering enemas and Corpu-leans or Redusol diet tablets containing 2,4 dinitrophenol to their starlets to keep them trim.)

Tourneur and Lewton slimmed down the zombie and planned to shoot Doudou’s scenes (he was to play Carre-Four in the film) at the end of the production schedule.  But, then, another completely unexpected problem ensued.  The Screen Actors Guild (S.A.G./AFTRA) intervened, claiming that the use of zombie actors by RKO violated the applicable collective bargaining agreement between the actors and the studios.  (S.A.G. was founded in March 1933 and was always closely observant of the horror film genre due to the presence of Boris Karloff on its Board of Trustees from the very inception of the Union – he was motivated by Hollywood’s use of actual monsters in early Universal films, particularly Tod Browning’s Dracula and thought the practice abusive.)  Remarkably enough the S.A. G. steward who inspected the RKO set in late 1942 and discovered Doudou’s employment was Ronald Reagan, then, an outspoken Screen Actors Guild activist.  Reagan and S.A.G. threatened an NLRB complaint alleging unfair labor practices.  Under pressure from the Union, Lewton agreed not to use Doudou in the film and, instead, hired Darby Jones to play the part of Carre-Four in the film.  Accordingly, the entire difficult and expensive attempt to use an actual zombie in I Walked with a Zombie turned out to be futile. Nonetheless, Tourneur's ill-fated attempt at documentary realism had a number of interesting consequences.  Maya Deren was confirmed in her lifelong interest in Voudon worship. After making several very famous avant-garde and experimental pictures in the forties, most notably The Meshes of the Afternoon, she traveled to Haiti to make The Divine Horseman, an important documentary about Voudoun religious practices. Ronald Reagan acquired prestige with S.A.G. as a result of his intervention in the labor dispute with RKO -- he later said that his union work, particularly the episode with RKO, encouraged him to enter politics.

Doudou never returned to Port au-Prince.  Lewton kept him mildly sedated and he served the producer as a butler and personal valet at his Laurel Canyon mansion.  (Lewton used the studio physician for sedatives who was much later implicated in the death of Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Hyman Engelberg.)  Doudou was a hit at parties and was said to be quite a ladies-man – he is supposed to have fathered no less than ten children during his six years serving Lewton.)  He grew enormously fat, favored Havana cigars, and was found mysteriously drowned in Lewton’s swimming pool in 1949.


Carre-Four

In the film, the zombie Carre-Four represents the petro loa (angry divinity) le Maitre Carrefours.  Le Maitre Carrefours is a wrathful version of Papa Legba.  He favors drinking rum laced with gunpowder.  Carrefour is thought to be a version of the West African lunar deity, Kalfur.

A Houmfort is a Voudon temple.

Darby Jones who plays Carre-Four was born in Los Angeles in 1909 – he was a child actor and performed in Hollywood from the time he was nine until the mid-fifties.  Jones reprised his role as Carre-Four in the comedy Zombies on Broadway (1949).  He played Pullman porters, waiters and bellman, and African tribesman – generally the only roles available for Black actors during most of his lifetime.  He died in1986.  Before his death, he was interviewed and remembered his work for the studios fondly – although he realized that the roles that he played were demeaning, he says he didn’t mind because the pay was good and he got to prowl around the studios watching films being made.