ISLE OF THE DEAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 401, 28 February 1947, Page 22

ISLE OF THE DEAD

(RKO Radio)

HE name of Val Lewtona as producer took me well out of my usual way to see this film at a double-feature, second-run theatre. For to

those in the know, particularly those who remember Lewton’s Seventh Victim, that name is an almost certain guarantee that the thriller which carries it will be as far above the usual run of silly screen shockers as the works of Poe, Bierce, and E. F. Benson are outstanding in the literary field of the macabre and the terrifying. Isle of the Dead has not quite the sustained spiritual uneasiness of The Seventh. Victim; it is rat! >r slower to get moving and its be affects are achieved by more mechanical means: they depend rather less on that state of _inward terror in which the audience, its imagination having been set working, is left to frighten itself, than on such

direct, outward manifestations of nightmare as maniacal laughs, the eerie cry of a night-bird, the echoing silence of a dark corridor, and the horrid splintering of a coffin in which a woman has been prematurely buried. But these are jittery enough sights and, sounds in ail conscience, and they are here dispensed not with the heavy-handed obviousness which marks the usual horror movie but with the educated, almost pedantically literary flavour which has distinguished all the infernal little masterpieces to date of Val Lewton and his colleagues. This is the story of what happens when a well-assorted group of people, quarantined on a funereal little island off the Greek coast, following the death of one of their number by plague, begin to get on one another’s nerves, Their fear of death grows and spreads as pervasively and destructively as the plague which strikes them down one by one. Old superstitions begin to take control; there is vaguely disturbing talk, of a Something called the "Vorvolaka": and this preoccupation with death and the unseen produces a tension not matched by many films. Interestingly enough, but not surprisingly, the story has a reasonably logical explanation: it does not rely on any far-fetched supernatural: thesis. Nor does it depend for its macabre success on a plaster of weird make-up or the grisly posturings usually affected by players in this type of movie, though Boris Karloff; who plays the role of a haunted old Greek general, looks sufficiently like a Greek tragedy himself to cause a shiver in any but the most conditioned horror-fan.