I Walked with a Zombie

Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur turn a lurid title handed to them by the studio into a hushed, beautiful piece of atmosphere, essentially Jane Eyre relocated to a Caribbean sugar plantation haunted by Vodou. A nurse arrives to care for a catatonic woman and is drawn into the island's older beliefs.

It is barely horror at all, all shadow, sugarcane and dread, and it treats its Haitian material with more seriousness than the era usually allowed. The walk through the cane fields to the houmfort is a masterpiece of mood.

Proof that a great filmmaker can do anything with any title.