Isle of the Dead

The year 1912, a Greek island during the Balkan war. General Pherides crosses to the island between battles; he means to visit his wife's grave. He finds it empty. There is a house on the island with several people staying in it: an archaeologist, a British consul and his wife, a servant, an old woman. That same night someone dies and a doctor diagnoses plague. A quarantine is declared; nobody may leave. The old woman offers another explanation: the young woman in the house is a vorvolakas, a being that brings death. The general does not believe it. Then he begins to. Mark Robson directs. Boris Karloff plays Pherides; Ellen Drew and Katherine Emery are in the cast. Val Lewton produced. The title and the visual setting rest on Arnold Böcklin's painting of the same name; the opening image rebuilds the painting directly. As in the other films Lewton produced, the horror is not shown; the threat stands outside the frame throughout. Karloff had back surgery during the shoot and the production stopped for months. The matter it treats is the tension between science and belief; the film puts neither side firmly in the right. Its most effective section is built on the fear of being buried alive and is worked entirely through sound. Its limit is scale; the budget is small, the location single and it runs short. Who it is for: viewers who like atmospheric horror of the forties and Val Lewton's productions. Who it is not for: it is slow, loaded with talk, and far from an expectation of modern horror.