Isle of the Dead (1945)
Directed by Mark Robson
On a Greek island during the 1912 war, several people are trapped by quarantine for the plague. If that isn't enough worry, one of the people—a superstitious old peasant—suspects a young woman of being a vampiric demon.
2 connections found
View:
2 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Isle of the Dead to
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth.
It is a dazzling pastiche of a Hollywood movie of the 1940s and 50s, part Gothic horror in the Val Lewton mode of Bedlam and Isle of the Dead and part noir- thriller in the psychiatric cycle that stretches from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, complete with the obligatory dream sequences, expressionist gestures, throbbing undercurrents of guilt and anxiety and bold narrative twists.
The director melds a number of arty influences into an organic whole: silent film, particularly by focusing on his actors’ hyper-expressive eyes; German Expressionism via the use of stark angles and paranoid pictorals; Symbolist painters by way of Jean Delville and Arnold Bocklin (Bocklin’s shivery Isle of the Dead springs to mind; a shot of Dafoe’s naked white body echoes Delville’s painting of Prometheus).
Eggers is assiduous and thorough, and I suspect he knows very well the entire lineage of his opening image of his characters’ approach to the island—Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead by way of Val Lewton’s 1945 film of the same title by way of the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)—and more likely than not that he’s caught up with the essential lighthouse films, such as Roy Boulting’s Thunder Rock (1942), as well.