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Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Alan Napier ... see more see more... , Jason Robards Sr. , Helene Thimig , Ernst Dorian , Skelton Knaggs , Sherry Hall , Ernst Deutsch , Erick Hanson

Inspired by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin's famous painting, this seminal horror film marked the first of three collaborations between RKO producer Val Lewton and British genre star Boris Karloff. Set d... read more read more...uring the 1912 Balkan Wars, Isle of the Death featured Karloff as Greek general Pherides who, along with an American journalist (Marc Cramer), visits the gravesite of his late wife on a deserted island. They find the grave desecrated and a group of travelers held hostage by the superstitious beliefs of Kyra (Helene Thimig). One by one, the inhabitants of the island are felled by what Dr. Drossos (Ernest Dorian aka Ernst Deutsch) terms the plague, but what Kyra insists is the work of Thea (Ellen Drew), a young nurse she believes to be a "varvoloka," an ancient Greek vampire. Thea's patient, Mrs. St. Aubun (Katherine Emery), suffers from death-like trances and, sure enough, during one of her spells, she is pronounced dead by Swiss archeologist Albrecht (Jason Robards Sr. and is interred alive. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

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1,675 ratings

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13 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 12 min.

Directed by: Mark Robson

Release Date: September 1, 1945

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DVD Release Date: October 31, 2006

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Flixster Reviews (103)

  • brooklynspo
    February 28, 2011
    brooklynspo
    Confused. Some nice plot kernels and plenty of great Lewton atmospherics but ... no. Too much going on here.
  • FilmFanatik
    February 10, 2011
    FilmFanatik
    This one came as a complete surprise to me. Here I was expecting a schlock horror film and what do I get? A very suspenseful and thought-provoking thriller. Fantastic I say! Like most thrillers, it takes it a bit to get going, but if you perservere with a bit of patience, you... read more'll discover your heart racing while the suspense is wound up slowly over the course of the film. You can cut the tension with a knife when the creeps start creeping in, and surprisingly, none of them from Karloff himself really. I just can't get over how effective this film was. You're bound to find this in a cheap bin at a local K-Mart or Big Lots! (which is where I found it), but it's definitely worth more than its purchase price. Pick this one up and give it a chance if you spot it.
  • ajv2688
    October 18, 2010
    ajv2688
    Vampires, plague, zombies, murder? What is this movie about? And why is it so boring? Karloff is good as usual, but the story isn't up to par.
  • mjgildea
    June 16, 2010
    mjgildea
    Isle of the Dead is another great movie in the Val Lewton stable of low budget but obscenely effective suspense/horror movies. It beautifully straddles paranoia, superstition and science in that trademarked Lewton wonderful world of shadows. Boris Karloff is great as a mistrustin... read moreg general stuck on a Greek island to avoid a plague outbreak amonst his soldiers. The introduction of others on the island plays out almost like an Agatha Christie mystery without the conventions. The cast is great and the last 10 minutes are some of the creepiest I've seen in recent memory. Katherine Emery running around the darkness was magnificently horrifying.
  • webalina
    October 15, 2009
    webalina
    Another eerie entry from the Val Lewton camp. This one stars Boris Karloff as a Greek general who takes it upon himself to police a group of people on a cemetery island after the plague breaks out among them. At the same time, he is fighting others, as well as his own, beliefs in... read more the old ways, including one which may implicate one of the group as an evil entity. Some spooky moments, but didn't stick with me like Cat People.
  • SirPant
    October 1, 2009
    SirPant
    Not Robson, Lewton or even Karloff?s best but a fine film all the same. As always, the title is a little misleading but the story was truly original for its time!
  • kingmob6
    November 3, 2010
    kingmob6
    Karloff portrays a world-weary general who quarantines a small island full of people to keep them from a plague, but as the days wear on Old-World superstitions begin to weigh on those assembled until they suspect one of their number may be a vampire-like creature.

    Worth a look,... read more a nice mood piece.
  • FangsFirst
    July 26, 2008
    FangsFirst
    I wandered away from the Val Lewton box set over the past weeks (well, I wandered away from watching films in general, but this in particular) and I'm not sure why, considering how pleased I was with all the ones I've seen so far. Still, it's what I did and that's that. I decided... read more to try and finish it off soon, so I grabbed one of the discs I had once purchased outside the set (but subsequently returned on discovering a film exclusive to the set) and just started it up, knowing that as per usual Lewton's films ran shy of even an hour and a half (occasionally just over an hour, usually around 70 minutes) and decided that it would be quick enough to get through even if it wasn't engaging. Somehow, I forget how charismatic its star is though--Boris Karloff. Unfortunately, Karloff is primarily known for Universal's monsters--The Mummy in 1932 and Frankenstein in 1931, the latter especially, while a fine performance, is awfully limited in terms of what skill Karloff can show--a role that would reflect his range if it were remembered alongside ones like the one in this film.

    Alas, my extreme appreciation of this film was soured, not by itself, nor trivia behind it, but by the news that apparently RKO (I suppose getting reduced returns on "their" films after losing control of the library, except as regards sequels, remakes, etc) has decided to remake this film. Admittedly, I liked Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of Cat People, but I fear any modern horror remake will show that same loss of subtlety and ambiguity--but without that bloody-minded sensibility that instead pushes things to down-and-dirty horror violence, instead inserting cheap (or expensive, but cheap-looking) CGI shots of fluttering ghostly images and sledgehammer jump scares based around flash-cutting and musical stings. I'm trying to learn to reserve judgment on these things (though most recently I've not been rewarded for this). Anyway, before I derail myself on that side passion (a hatred of burying originals behind inferior remakes that fail to bring anything new to the table), let me instead address the movie actually at issue.

    Like the other RKO films produced by Val Lewton, Isle of the Dead is misleadingly titled and was misleadingly marketed: Lewton always took titles given and twisted them into films that were usually at least creepy if not outright scary, thus fulfilling the horror requirements, but managing to remove any concrete ideas of the supernatural and injecting them with real pathos and realistic plotting, characters and dialogue--or at least these three things in a form that bore less resemblance to B-pictures and more to A-pictures. General Nikolas "The Watchdog" Pherides (Karloff) is a Greek general in the First Balkan War in 1912, first shown taking a hard-nosed approach to the commander of lagging troops--he hands him a gun, nods and sends him outside the tent he met him in, leading to a distant gunshot. Not the stuff of a particularly sympathetic protagonist, but, as always, we find our feelings more grey by the end of the film. Bostonian journalist Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) is not particularly a fan of the General's methods, but is interviewing him for his paper--in the process suggesting that he believes Pherides would sacrifice wife and child for Greece, discovering his social faux pas when Pherides mentions the death of his wife, and decides to visit her grave, bringing Davis along with him. Here we find the titular island of "the dead"--a cemetery island, where his wife is entombed. They find her body missing, the trail leading them back to Swiss archaeologist Albrecht (Jason Robards, Sr., father of the more famous "Jason Robards"--technically "Junior") and his staff and guests--British Counsel St. Aubyn (Alan Napier), his invalid wife (Katherine Emery), her assistant Thea (Ellen Drew), Avery Robbins (Skelton Knaggs, who narrated the earlier Lewton-produced, Robson-directed The Ghost Ship), and his housekeeper Kyra (Helen Thimig). When Robbins complains of feeling ill and collapses, dying shortly, they call in Dr. Drossos (Ernest Dorian) to determine the cause. He confirms their worst fears--septicemic plague. The General immediately quarantines the island, but is now subject to the unavoidable suspicions of superstitious local--and fellow--Greek Kyra that the real cause of their troubles is a vorvolakas, a being similar to a vampire or succubus that saps the strengths of others--and she's convinced the vorvolakas is none other than Thea.

    As per usual, Lewton's crew, here headed by director Mark Robson, who already directed The Ghost Ship and The 7th Victim for Lewton, and writer Ardel Wray who worked with Lewton on the prior screenplays for The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie, manages to come down on not only avoiding the supernatural, but in fact using the unfounded fear of it to promote terror. Factions form, but not in the barely contained fear and arrogance of Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but rather on calmer, more restrained lines--Albrecht sarcastically prays to Hermes while the relentlessly pragmatic General takes up with Drossos' science and medicine. Kyra clings tenaciously to her superstition about evil spirits, and Davis resigns himself to the seeming inevitability of death. The General's commanding nature leaves him most at a loss, though, when even Drosses winds up taking ill, as he has no definitive basis for his views other than experience, and when that dries up with Drossos, he leaps around to find some rock with which he can take up his fight with death, in contrast to the resigned nature of the rest of the characters. He begins to believe Kyra may be right, even. In all of this we begin to see something of the General as a human being rather than just a cold, ruthless commander. He fears death almost more than those around him, yet at the same time wishes even more to protect them--earning his nickname quite rightfully, even if his methods and logic are questionable. The extreme fear Kyra begins to show when she fears that Thea has finally claimed her mistress' life and in the process created yet another vorvolakas is almost palpable, leading to a grudging respect of her reasons for her beliefs--mortal fear.

    I'm not someone easily scared by film anymore--in my extreme youth nearly anything would scare me out of my wits, but these days it takes a good creep to really get under my skin (disturbing is another matter, and oddly less difficult, though still relatively so). This film manages it. I imagine it is only with an eye 65 years experientially (if, obviously, limited in the scope and coverage of those years) the senior of this movie that I heard Mrs. St. Aubyn speak of cataleptic fits--when first brought up, it would seem a ludicrous explanation, but for the cleverly written screenplay that makes it clear this is a desperate attempt by a wife to cling to the though of her husband's survival based on esoteric knowledge--and her admittance of suffering them, that I began to knowingly dread exactly what she feared: premature burial. I don't think it's ruinous to anyone in the modern age who gets to that point in the film to know that that cannot come up without being later relevant. Of course, perhaps Lewton simply wants to instill that primal fear of asphyxiation and paralysis when she finds herself in a coffin--but the image is absolutely chilling and induces a crawling-skin that was not easy to shake off, kicking the entire film into overdrive on such factors, the brilliant composition managing to perfectly emulate the fleeting shapes in the dark anyone remotely nichtophobic is familiar with.

    It's quite a loss how forgotten Lewton's films are by the public at large, but even then a loss that this one tends to be lesser thought of, or even known, even amongst those familiar with him. I am extremely pleased with anyone film that can successfully give me the heeby-jeebies, and one that stars the wonderful Boris Karloff, in one of his great performances (and with a nice head of strange curly grey hair, no less!) can only near perfection. Give this a shot if it ever wanders near you.
  • holmennnguy
    July 20, 2008
    holmennnguy
    Perhaps both Karloff's and Lewton's most underrated film, Isle of The Dead managed to creep me out! A fun plot, that I was confused with in the middle, good acting (one of Karloff's best performances), good lighting and cinematography, and some highly creepy moments are the highl... read moreights in this movie.
  • PlanNinePrint
    November 23, 2006
    PlanNinePrint
    Not a bad film, but very slow moving and anti climactic. Worth a view if you're into the Karloff/Lewton films.

View All Isle of the Dead Reviews

Critic Reviews

Variety Staff
November 14, 2007
Variety Staff, Variety

It's better handled and directed than most though thriller fans will still find its lack of action a drag. Full Review

Walter Chaw
October 22, 2009
Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central

quite bad Full Review

Fernando F. Croce
September 6, 2009
Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion

Mark Robson's direction here reduces a country's political/spiritual unrest to pronouncements by pinned-down actors about "uneasy conscience" and "fool's courage" Full Review

November 14, 2007
TV Guide's Movie Guide

Claustrophobic and nightmarishly atmospheric. Full Review

Dennis Schwartz
October 31, 2006
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Its poetical finale comes a little too late to save it from its general dullness. Full Review

Michael W. Phillips, Jr.
September 15, 2006
Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Goatdog's Movies

One of the few truly scary films of the 1940s. Full Review

June 24, 2006
Time Out

The film comes magnificently alive with the burial sequence, and with the zombie-like, white-robed woman roaming through shadowy galleries and shuttered rooms. Full Review

Steve Crum
January 2, 2005
Steve Crum, Kansas City Kansan

Zombies and Karloff...chills and thrills.

May 24, 2003
Film4

Full of expertly handled shocks. Full Review

Ken Hanke
October 16, 2002
Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)

One of the better post-Tourneur Lewton films

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