The Isle of the Dead

First, there was a painting by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). Or actually, there were five versions of the same subject, painted between 1880 and 1886 (four still survive; another was destroyed during World War II). The paintings had no names; Bocklin did not believe in titles. But one of his early dealers, the shrewd Fritz Gurlitt, dubbed this subject The Isle of the Dead, which stuck and (inevitably) became part of the meaning of these paintings. This is the second version, now in Basel:



The irresistible combination of image and title provoked fascination, even obsession. What can you you say about an image that was beloved by Hitler, Freud, and Lenin? -- well, that it is suggestive, without question. Other artists took the bait over the years. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Max Reger, and the monumentally obscure Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen all wrote music based on Bocklin's work. August Strindberg incorporated The Isle of the Dead into his great play The Ghost Sonata. Novelists, film-makers, other painters have all responded in turn. (There might be a book-length study in this.)

Val Lewton was, as we have seen, a man of pronounced visual sensibility who looked to art not just for the "look" of his films, but also for suggestions as to subject matter (Hogarth prints as the basis for Bedlam, for example). He first featured Bocklin's Isle of the Dead image in I Walked with a Zombie, then spun a whole film off it (with a notable re-creation of the image a few minutes in).

The plotting is most inventive: Lewton's Isle is set off the Greek coast during the First Balkan War (1912-1913), on a tiny island that is beset by plague and quarantined. Into this fraught situation also erupt catalepsy, vampirism, premature burial, and plenty of general hysteria. The movie may have the creepiest atmosphere of any of the Lewton pictures; and of the ones I've seen, it certainly has the highest body-count ("isle of the dead," not kidding).