I Walked with a Zombie (1943) & The Seventh Victim (1943) (b/w, Criterion Collection, Restored)

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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
New 4K digital restorations of both films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions
In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the films and one Blu-ray with the films and special features
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 critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith
Audio essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood
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; author Neil Gaiman; actor Sara Karloff; and others
Trailers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante

New illustration by Katherine Lam