FANTASIA OBSCURA: Karloff’s Forgotten Master Class in Horror
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you’re not sure who to fear more, the monster or the one fighting it…
Isle of the Dead (1945)
Distributed by: RKO Radio Pictures
Directed by: Mark Robson
As much as it brought him recognition and decent money from Universal, Boris Karloff was not all that happy with being Frankenstein’s monster.
The long hours in the makeup chair, the heavy prosthetics that aggravated health issues down the road, and the typecasting coming from being so identified with the brute; all of this wore on the actor, who tried not to be defined by his most famous role. And with the second wave of Universal monster films winding down, it made tremendous sense to branch out and show everyone that he was more than just the sum of his parts (#SorryNotSorry)…
Which is how we find the actor in unexpected places, both onscreen and on set:
After the credits, we see an on-screen text setting the scene that mentions in passing the vorvolakas, a mythical Greek horror that most resembles a vampire, which is the baseline the film settles with. We open we’re told in 1912 during the Second Balkan War, where General Nikolas Pherides (Karloff), nicknamed “the Watchdog,” is washing his hands as he hears Colonel Kobestes (Sherry Hall) explain how he lost men to enemy fire during a withdrawal. Pherides just gives him a set of piercing looks, and hands him his service revolver; without saying a word, the general makes it clear what Kobestes needs to do, and when we hear a gunshot off screen, we know his orders have been carried out.
At first this horrifies Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer), a reporter from the Boston Star embedded with the Greeks, but after a few moments of forcefully justifying his actions mainly through visual clues, the general finds a way to appeal to Davis, and the two warm up to each other. To show the reporter his humanity, Pherides invites him along on a side trip to a cemetery on an island off the coast, where he is going to pay his respects to his departed wife.
The general is shocked to find that his wife’s grave has been desecrated, and being the law-and-order type that he is (and understandably upset), he vows to see the guilty parties shot for this. The two men hear singing elsewhere on the island, and head over there to see if the person making music could lead them to the grave desecraters.
They end up at a cottage, owned by Albrecht (Jason Robards Sr., father of the better-known actor with that name), an archeologist. He apologizes to Pherides, as he believes his digs for antiquities encouraged the tomb robbing. Also at the cottage that night are Albrecht’s housekeeper, Kira (Helene Thimig), his house guests, the British counsel St. Albyns (Alan Napier), his wife Mary (Katherine Emery), Mary’s companion Thea (Ellen Drew), and homesick salesman Andrew Robbins (Skelton Knaggs). Just as they accept Albrecht’s hospitality and settle in for the night, Robbins turns ill and dies quickly. Pherides summons his medical aide Dr. Drossos (Ernst Deutsch, appearing as Ernst Dorian), who has some rather dire news for the islanders:
Not everyone, however, is taking the doctor entirely at his word. Kira has her suspicions that they’re facing not the plague, but a vorvolakas. She even has her suspicions as to who it is: Thea, who stays quite healthy even as Mary gets sicker and sicker. And as St. Albyns and Drossos succumb, what Kira sees and feels is harder to ignore:
But is she right? The fact that Mary suffers from catalepsy would just as easily explain her condition as being a victim of vampirism would. But with the doctor a fatality, who’s going to point this out to counter as strongly unexplainable fear? And when an aggressive fighter like Pherides needs an enemy, when he lacks something to fight, will he start looking for his target elsewhere…?
It’s a set of questions that keep needing to be asked right through to the last frame. The script by writer and producer Val Lewton, who brought Karloff to RKO that year for a set of horror films (the other two he did with Lewton being The Body Snatcher and Bedlam), keeps the viewer guessing, and with Robson’s strong directing one could go either way. Robson’s eerie atmospheric set ups and framings, filled with characters who keep their heads and stay grounded, helps establish a milieu where we have to question everything, the uncertainty of what is and isn’t the case putting us into an atmosphere of terror.
Bocklin’s inspirational painting, hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Which is quite appropriate considering the source that inspired the film. Based on a painting by Arnold Bocklin of the same name, the work’s depiction of souls being ferried away to another realm was one of the most popular and copied paintings to be found in Germany. We even see an image derived from a copy of the work as the island Pherides and Davis head towards at the beginning of the film. The work was also an inspiration to Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote a symphonic poem of that title; this derivative work inspires and infuses Constantin Bakaleinikoff’s score for the movie, a case where the original work feeds back on itself continuously.
Speaking of inspiration, Karloff’s character can be a revelation if you are not aware of his range and ability. As a hardened soldier who is capable of harsh actions without remorse, to the point where we discover from Thea that he may have committed a war crime earlier, his General Pherides is chilling in ways his more famous monster never could be. While his methods are extreme, his motivation is rational, something a viewer may be tempted to sympathize with even if its abhorrent. As we watch Cramer’s Davis warm up to him despite his stern, decisive punitive actions, we can easily see ourselves willing to be with him so long as we’re on his good side; heaven help those who can’t be so placed.
With Karloff being more man on the verge of monster than monster on the verge of man, we get a performance that demonstrates his range and precision as he shifts his fight from being against soldiers to against fate. And with solid performances from the rest of the cast on set to work with, the depth of his weaponized humanity makes him even scarier than any monster in this film, or for that matter any monsters he’d played before.
Sadly, the really scary part was how little the audiences embraced his three films for RKO. All of them lost money, with this one hurting the bottom line the least, all part of RKO’s journey in a few years to dissolution; unlike From the Earth to the Moon, the studio was still standing by the end of production. And with horror films losing popularity in the post-war market, Karloff had to then confront something scarier than a vorvolakas:
A transition into television and the post-studio film industry…
NEXT TIME: Yet more Lovecraft, which comes up while we Arkham for your forgiveness…
