Greece, 1912. It must be pretty miserable to hear that a spreading plague necessitates strict confinement to your home; when one of your house-guests is Boris Karloff, that misery takes on a new dimension.
‘Isle of the Dead’ is an RKO horror film, one of a series produced by Val Lewton. Whereas Universal had cornered the monster market, with increasingly exploitative meet-ups between Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and The Wolfman, Lewton specialised in less obvious, more psychological dramas. The horror here is more prevalent in what you don’t see. Whereas 1942’s ‘Cat People’ may be the most successful example of this approach, Lewton produced a hugely impressive body of work, among which this production stands tall.
When the shadow of Gen. Nikolas Pherides (Karloff) falls across a scene, there is an instant atmosphere of jeopardy, of cruelty, disease and fear. Pherides has a reputation for cruel efficiency, and he brings this to his authority when dealing with the house-full of potential plague carriers, himself amongst their number.
The stand-out scene for me is when Katherine Emery as Mrs. Mary St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery) falls into a cataleptic trance, is subsequently buried, and wakes screaming in her casket. We hear her fear and desperate scratching as the camera lingers on her incarcerated wooden tomb, the shadow of blowing branches fallen across it, relentless drip-dripping of the damp stonework upon it. The box splinters and is pushed open as the camera maddeningly pulls away to another scene. Her friend Thea (Ellen Drew) goes in search of the escapee in a perfect studio-set nightmare, her white nightdress blowing in the wind – St. Aubyn has seemingly been driven out of her mind by the experience and parades the house and its surrounding grounds like a vengeful ghost. No-one is safe it seems, especially Pherides, who, for all his sins emerges as a kind of misunderstood anti-hero …
Melodramatic it may be, there’s no denying the intensity brings with it a true spirit of dread.
When the bosses at RKO told producer Val Lewton he would be making his next few films with Boris Karloff, he feared that he would have a Universal style monster movie imposed on him. But Karloff didn't change Lewton. The producer wove the lisping Englishman seamlessly into the Lewton style and in return a grateful Karloff gave the best performances of his career.
This isn't Lewton's usual psychological horror. It is as dark and pessimistic as his earlier films but more conventional. In Greece, in the war against Turkey in 1912, some itinerants are quarantined on a tiny island where plague has begun to kill local residents. The travellers, led by a Greek General (Karloff as Pherides) must remain trapped there until the wind changes and the hot Sirocco comes to burn away the disease...
Like all Lewton films to this point, this is about rationality against the occult. Pherides arrives on the island as a believer in science. But as the people start to die, he regresses and puts his faith in the ancient customs he grew up with, and traditional remedies. He believes in the Vorvoloka, a malevolent spirit that inhabits and controls the body while it sleeps. Maybe this is causing the deaths, not the plague.
This is a typically scholarly work by Lewton's team. Ardel Wray's screenplay perhaps isn't as imaginative as usual; the horror set piece is the live burial of a catatonic, which is hardly original. With WWII ending successfully, audiences stayed away from its tired defeatism. But it is a haunting experience that lingers and leaves behind an uneasy impression of the ethereal, and the appeal of superstition to explain what we cannot see.