ISLE OF THE DEAD

War, plague, superstition, premature burial and Boris Karloff, all trapped together on a tiny Greek island. Inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s famously ominous painting, ISLE OF THE DEAD finds producer Val Lewton at his most morbid, surrounding a handful of characters with death and slowly closing off every possible escape.

During the Balkan Wars of 1912, Karloff’s severe General Pherides travels to an island cemetery to visit his wife’s grave, only to discover that plague has arrived before him. The island is placed under quarantine, and as its inhabitants begin dying one by one, an elderly woman insists that disease isn’t the only thing preying upon them. She suspects a vorvolaka, a vampiric creature of Greek folklore. Pherides initially dismisses such beliefs as dangerous superstition, but as the deaths mount and isolation takes its toll, his certainty begins to crumble. Karloff gives one of his richest performances as a man accustomed to commanding soldiers who discovers that neither discipline nor reason can command death.

Lewton and director Mark Robson turn the island into a suffocating chamber of graves, shuttered rooms and mounting fear, where plague and superstition seem to spread together. Patient and dread-filled, ISLE OF THE DEAD saves its most terrible visions for the final stretch, when its restrained study of people under pressure gives way to one of the great nightmares of 1940s horror. Even James Agee, otherwise skeptical of the film, called its final half hour “as brutally frightening and gratifying a horror movie as I can remember.” Few films in Lewton’s extraordinary RKO cycle stare more directly into the grave.