Nosferasta: First Bite + I Walked with a Zombie

The starry sky in Nosferasta: First Bite is much brighter than the sky over the Caribbean Sea in the opening images of I Walked with a Zombie. When I consider this exaggerated, artificial, hyperreal brightness in Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s film, as opposed to Jacques Tourneur’s shadows and visual restraint, it seems to me that this difference in their approach to reality makes explicit the fundamental difference in the narrative construction of these films. Far beyond the technological developments between the two works, the filmmakers approach the stories they want to tell from positions that encompass irreconcilable epistemological, aesthetic and political perspectives.

Complex men, fragile Ladies and submissive Black people with hidden powers

In Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, the characters seem to have been defined before filming began: the women are fragile, the men are complex and the black people, apparently submissive, possess hidden powers. This description deliberately separates the black population from the other characters, because I recognise that division in the work, although the film itself makes it less stable than it first appears.

Hired by Paul Holland (Tom Conway), Betsy (Frances Dee), a naïve Canadian nurse, arrives at a Caribbean plantation to care for Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), a white lady who can no longer speak or act of her own will, and who becomes the body upon which the desires and conflicts of others are inscribed. The cause of her illness is never explained, fuelling the mystery surrounding the family. Yet the conflicts between Paul and his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) occupy the centre of the story. The two men appear contradictory, tormented, difficult to understand. At first glance, they seem opposites: one restrained and sombre; the other given over to drink and rebellion, but both become difficult to read in their relationship with Jessica. Paul speaks of her with an opaque sense of guilt, caught between the pain of having lost her and the knowledge of having prevented her from leaving. Wesley denounces his brother’s domination, but his love for Jessica ends in a gesture that deprives her, one last time, of the possibility of choosing. Tourneur denies us the certainty of knowing what drives either of them.

The black population remains largely on the margins of the narrative, serving the Hollands’ story. Yet it is through these figures that we learn of the island’s past, understand what the family’s silences seek to conceal and can glimpse the source of the present psychosis: the violence of slavery and the history of the plantation. Motionless at the crossroads, Carrefour (Darby Jones) encapsulates
the colonial image of the black man as both submissive and threatening: his strength is visible, but his intentions remain inaccessible. The coachman (Clinton Rosemond) takes Betsy to the Hollands’ house and tells her how enslaved people were brought to the island. Ti-Misery, the figure taken from the prow of the family’s slave ship and placed in the garden, prevents the history of the house from being separated from that violence. When a singer (Sir Lancelot) sings a calypso and publicly exposes the Hollands’ secrets, Wesley orders him to be quiet; his emphatic apology shows how much it costs a black man to tell the truth in front of the family that dominates the island.

Betsy is presented as a young white woman exposed to danger. Through her fearful curiosity, the Hollands’ pain becomes an enigma and the island’s black presence takes on a threatening cast. But it is also Betsy who, on the advice of Alma (Theresa Harris), seeks in the voodoo temple an answer that medicine does not give her, only to discover that another woman in the family had already taken the same path. The distinction between those who hold knowledge and those who hold power then begins to falter.

Whose hidden powers are they, after all?

Nosferasta: First Bite (2021) positions itself on the other side of the history of visible and hidden powers. Oba, an African who escapes from a slave ship, encounters Christopher Columbus transformed into a vampire and ends up collaborating, under his domination, in the colonial conquest. Centuries later, it is Oba who tells the story and seeks to free himself from that subservience. Hidden power is no longer attributed to black people and their beliefs: the true monster is the coloniser, whose survival depends on the blood and labour of others. In Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s film, the black man associated with the supernatural no longer guards the crossroads in silence: Oba speaks and traverses five centuries, revealing his own involvement in the colonial conquest. Turned into a vampire by Columbus, he was both a victim of his power and a collaborator in his expansion, a position the film does not resolve by simply declaring him innocent. The satire also reveals the vampirism behind the respectable images of “discovery”: Columbus is the predator, and the monuments, the museum and the bureaucracy continue to administer his legacy.

Oba’s story is not confined to the past. The film jumps from re-enactments of the European invasion to a New York marked by the covid-19 pandemic. There, the vampire seeks to renew his residence permit, receives help learning to read and faces the procedures required to obtain American citizenship. The alternation between fiction and moments from Oba’s life makes the present more than an epilogue: after centuries of helping to
build the “New World”, he still has to ask for permission to live in it.

In that New York life, there is also room for Oba the cook. His corn soup, familiar in the places where he works and socialises, enters the film’s world. It is a detail that profoundly changes the character’s position by showing that Oba does not exist solely to represent five centuries of violence, nor to personify the monster. He has a practice, a history of his own, an everyday relationship with other people. When the film allows the artist, musician and cook from Trinidad to take part in writing the character he plays, the boundary between testimony, invention and performance becomes productive, and Oba can construct an image of himself that exceeds the role the colonial narrative would have assigned him.

It is also through satire that Nosferasta: First Bite attacks racial representations. Right at the beginning, Columbus paints his face black, as though he could put on the identity of those he intends to use to approach Indigenous peoples. The grotesque gesture makes visible a broader operation: appropriating the black body, using it as an intermediary in conquest and continuing to present himself as the author of history. The film places this operation alongside the reassuring images of the colonial encounter displayed in the museum, in which violence is rendered invisible beneath the appearance of an exchange between equals. The montage linking that staged past, the museum and pandemic New York prevent the conquest from being seen as a finished event.

Watching the two films together does not mean taking I Walked with a Zombie as a mere collection of stereotypes, or Nosferasta: First Bite as their unambiguous correction. Yet between Carrefour’s silence and Oba’s voice, the idea of hidden powers unfolds into that of concealed powers. Who was able to exploit, classify and represent the world, and how can that account now be interrupted? Who had the right to be a complex character, who was reduced to silence, and how can the violence that runs through both finally be narrated?