Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr., Ernst Deutsch. Screenplay: Ardel Wray. Cinematography: Jack MacKenzie. Art direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Lyle Boyer. Music: Leigh Harline.

Two famous works of art haunt (I use the obvious word intentionally) the film Isle of the Dead. The obvious one is Arnold Böcklin’s painting of that name, five versions of which he painted from 1880 to 1901, the year of his death. The image is re-created early in the movie, when the Greek Gen. Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and an American reporter, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) row out to a Greek island to visit the grave of the general’s daughter. But the other, less obvious work that comes to my mind is Francisco Goya’s aquatint etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, one of the images he created for the series Los caprichos in the late 1790s. In it, a man slumped at his desk is surrounded by menacing bats and owls. Producer Val Lewton’s celebrated series of moody psychological horror movies in the 1940s typically depict conflicts between the scientific, rational mind and manifestations of superstition and myth. In the film, the island is swept by what a doctor (Ernst Deutsch) diagnoses as septicemic plague, but the superstitious resident of the island, Madame Kyra, believes it’s caused by a vorvolaka, a vampire-like creature she thinks is embodied in the pretty young Thea (Ellen Drew), who is nursing the sickly Mrs. St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery). And when the doctor himself dies, the superstitious view begins to win out, especially with the general. But the narrative track of the movie, which inevitably includes a romance between the reporter and Thea, and which tends to come apart at the seams a little toward the end, matters less than the creepy effect it creates, including such horrors as the fear of being buried alive. Karloff gives the best performance, of course, as he degenerates from the imperious general who calmly sends a delinquent officer off to commit suicide into a man gripped by terrors he can’t face.