The Films of Val Lewton - Part Twenty Three

Isle of the Dead - Part Four


The General, looking drawn and hollow-eyed, creeps into the front room. As Thea makes her way cautiously down the stairs, the General confronts her and orders her back to her room. He reminds her of his nickname and of his pledge, now renewed, to stand guard against the plague. His moment of uncertainty and bewilderment in the bedroom is gone. Now he has fixed his sights upon her as an adversary against which to direct his force. He admits to a degree of uncertainty about her nature, whether this is a ‘contagion of the soul that you carry’. If so, it can presumably be cured or exorcised. The General hovers between the language of medicine and that of religion, but he no longer has the Doctor to hand to lend the former the weight of his authority. He vows to keep Thea away from the others, and to kill her if necessary. He preys on her insecurity, showing that he’s learnt a thing or two about suggestive psychology from Kyra. ‘Can a vorvoloka in her human form remember the evil that she did at night’. He’s almost pleading with her to accept the role into which he is attempting to cast her, to provide him with the solid manifestation of evil which he needs to provide him with a visible combatant. Again, in modern terms, he’s essentially asking her how much she really knows what goes on in her subconscious, in her dreams. As she retreats back upstairs, he hastily adds ‘I hope that I’m wrong’, as if suddenly ashamed at his bullying. Perhaps some part of him realises that he is victimising a defenceless young woman.

The spirit of life in Death's mirror

Mrs St Aubyn sits in front of her mirror, the symbol of approaching death in the film. She stares intently, as if she can see something beyond the reflected surface. She smiles as she sees Thea enter the room in the mirror. If, as suggested earlier, the mirror reflects the approach of death, then the observation of Thea’s entry in its surface suggests the confusion cast in her own mind by the General’s questioning of her level of self-awareness. Perhaps she is beginning to succumb to the insistent attempts of her fellow countrymen to literally demonise her.

Thea takes over the brushing of Mrs St Aubyn’s hair, an impromptu act which indicates the unspoken ease which they feel in each other’s company. She asks whether Mrs St Aubyn was ill before she worked for her, a clear sign that she has indeed become infected with the seeds of self-doubt which the General has sown. Mrs St Aubyn reassures her that her illness, which is degenerative, has nothing to do with her. She tells her that she is ‘good…kind and generous’ and asks ‘how can anything bad come from goodness?’ She is saying that a person should be judged by their acts. As we have seen, Thea acts out of compassion, whereas the General and Kyra act according to the dictates of law and outmoded superstition. Thea still worries about what her wandering spirit may do, speaking about it as if it were a separate entity co-habiting her body. Mrs St Aubyn re-iterates her previous point, saying ‘your spirit is yourself, Thea’. She then tells her to ‘go to the young man’. She is setting herself up as Thea’s guardian angel, in opposition to the General’s guard dog. One guards over, one against.

Putting out the light before putting out the light

With the protection of Mrs St Aubyn giving her strength, Thea comes down and leaves the house. The General watches from his room and blows out his lamp, which has been his watchlight. This has the sinister connotation of the snuffing out of a life, and the decisive way in which he does it suggests that he’d have no compunction in doing the same to Thea. The gesture brings to mind the line from Othello, ‘put out the light and then put out the light’. Davis waits for Thea by the shore. On her way to meet him, Thea pauses fearfully by the mouth of the tomb and murmurs a quick prayer before moving past its entrance. Davis watches this and smiles with vaguely patronising indulgence. They embrace, but are soon interrupted by the General, who makes it known that he will follow them wherever they go, and that ‘when I am sure, I will destroy her’. Davis tells him that they intend to leave in the morning, for the sake of Thea’s safety.

A prayer for safe passage

In the morning, we see a shot of the bird in its cage, a reminder of the varying levels of entrapment, physical, psychological and metaphysical, to which the characters are subject. Upstairs, Thea is packing, and urges Mrs St Aubyn to come with them. But she says ‘I don’t dare go with you’. She is still held in thrall by the burden of fear her illness carries with it. She says that she will explain everything to Albrecht, which shows that she hasn’t thus far. They embrace and Mrs St Aubyn says ‘God bless you’ with some authority. The blessing sounds like it has actual force.

"God Bless You"

Down by the shore, Thea finds the boat smashed, however, and returns to the house to be confronted with the quietly self-satisfied Kyra, who sits in a chair in the front room like some malignant presiding spirit. It’s as if she has regained her ascendancy in the house. She knits, an image which provides a counterpoint to Mrs St Aubyn’s needlework earlier. She is the third of the Fates, and undoubtedly the one who cuts the thread. The General comes back in, and Kyra indicates with a nod of the head that Thea has gone back upstairs. The General looks very weary. It is as if Kyra is draining the life force from him. If there is anyone analogous to a vorvoloka in the house, it is her. She is a psychic vampire.

Malevolent Fate

Thea goes to Mrs St Aubyn, who immediately confronts the General; another woman standing up to him. She berates him for ‘terrorizing her with ugly, savage superstitions’, and becomes visibly upset, finally saying ‘I will not have it’. She is becoming a commanding voice to set against the General’s naturally assumed authority. She turns away, as if shaken by the violence of her own feelings. As the middle aspect of the triple goddess, she is used to being a balancing force, a negotiator and peacemaker. This display of forcefulness goes counter to her nature. The General is forcing her away from her accustomed state of equilibrium, setting off processes which he may be unable to control. As Davis enters, the General says in somnambulistic tones that ‘what must be done I will do’. His will no longer seems to be his own; it’s as if he regards himself as an instrument of fate. Davis’ angry upbrading over the destruction of the boat has little impact.

The anger of the meek

Upstairs, it is Thea who now stares into the mirror, as if something might reveal itself to her in time. Mrs St Aubyn staggers in, and Thea attempts to help her to the bed, but she collapses on the floor. Thea closes the door and prepares for a vigil. There is the sense that a series of pre-arranged actions is being put into action. Downstairs, at the table, Kyra makes insinuating remarks about the absence of the two other women. The birdcage is now ominously covered with a black cloth. Observations are made on the wind direction and a tense suspension of time hangs over everything. Everyone is waiting for something to happen.

The veil of night

Kyra keeps her vigil over Mrs St Aubyn through the night, plagued by Kyra, who observes a parallel anti-vigil outside her door. Repeatedly whispering vorvoloka, she comes out with a litany of superstitious wards against evil. The passing of time is marked by the shifting patterns of moonlight and shadow over Mrs St Aubyn’s body, the shadows once more serving to suggest a world just beyond the threshold of this one. As the shadows shift, so does the constant stream of whispered words which come from Kyra beyond the door. Thea paces and wrings her hands, assailed by the doubts which are being placed in her mind. She pleads with Kyra to stop, and then begins to question herself, and perhaps also the prone form of her guardian angel. ‘Is it my fault?’ But there’s no answer now, no compassionate voice to tell her that her that she is good, and therefore her spirit is good too. Just as the General need the balancing voice of reason which the Doctor provided, so Thea needs the blessings of Mrs St Aubyn. Without them, she is vulnerable to the mental poisons of Kyra’s dark arts.

No more words of comfort

In the morning light, we see Kyra at the window with the bird. She looks very restless and is wringing her hands in a manner similar to Thea the previous night. This has taken a lot out of her too, and she is uncertain of the impact her psychological warfare has had. When the General emerges, she immediately latches on to him, saying ‘I’ve been waiting’. They go upstairs. Downstairs, Davis and Albrecht hear a crash from above and rush to investigate.

A recurring image - wringing/washing hands

We see a tableau of the General facing Thea with Mrs St Aubyn’s body lying prone at her feet. This is all the proof he needs. Davis and Albrecht burst in and restrain him before he has the opportunity to do his duty, and Thea is ushered away to safety. Albrecht goes through the standard tests, holding the mirror up to Mrs St Aubyn’s lips. They discuss bringing up a box to serve as her coffin. Eventually, Mrs St Aubyn is left alone in the room. The camera focuses in on her face, and we see a momentary twitch of her lips.

Circumstantial proof

Thea wanders in the cypress glade, the ambient noise of the wind which is everpresent now punctuated by the hammering of nails into the makeshift coffin. She shivers, as if at the very notion of death, of the cold stone passages of the tombs. There is a dissolve, and she is waiting at the shore by the statue of Cerberus. This is the boundary zone, the debarkation point from a place which she longs to leave.

Looking out to the land of the living

Albrecht, Davis and the General pass, carrying the coffin back inward to the tombs. Thea faces the land of the living, but they still have business with the dead. Their footsteps develop an echo as they enter the empty space of the catacombs. The coffin is placed on a stand, and they pause for a moment before leaving, as if there is something more that they feel should be said or done. But no words come. But we remain as the camera slowly moves in on the coffin, which is fashioned from an old antiquities crate. We hear a slight murmur from within, amplified by the tombs resonant acoustic.

What to say?

Out on the ledge, Davis comments to the General that the wind has changed. But the General displays no delight at this news of their turning fortune. ‘I shall never leave the island’, he blankly declares, and when he gets up it is with a stagger. Davis understands that he has the plague, and helps him through the passage of the tomb towards the house as if he has now become his guide to the underworld.

A change in the wind

Back in the darkness of the tomb, the camera now glides slowly out from the coffin, and then cuts to a close up of the lid. There is a loud and terrified scream and the sound of scrabbling and then hammering. In the original screenplay, the horror of Mrs St Aubyn’s (or her counterpart Miss Wollsten’s) confinement is much more graphically portrayed, with shots from the interior of her panicked attempts to break out. This more subtle approach leaves us to imagine her terror.

Back in the house, Davis helps the General into his bed, where he is left with Kyra. She immediately adduces a supernatural import to his sickness. She has a comfortless bedside manner. ‘Soldier, you stayed your hand. Now the plague punishes you. The vorvoloka still lives, rose-cheeked and full of blood’. The plague is a vector of moral retribution in her mind, and the rosy cheeked health of Thea is an affront to her in the face of death and her own old age. But she utters a fearful ‘I am alone with her’ which displays genuine belief in the demons with which she tries to infect others. The General is given fresh purpose. ‘I am not dead yet. She shall not harm you’. Perhaps Kyra is cunning enough to manipulate the General’s emotional responses thus, refusing to let him rest and prepare for his own death.

Amplified raindrop

Outside, we see the flag visualising the winds’ currents before retreating once more to the tomb, which is all the more claustrophobic in contrast. Whereas the wind moves freely through wide open space, inside the tomb, the water drips on the coffin lid with a steady and repetitive rhythm. Thus, the elements delineate the difference between the kinetic dance of the world of the living and the dull heaviness and gravity of the chthonic underworld. In the original script, the dripping of the water spells out the syllables of the world in Miss Wollsten’s mind, effecting her subjective transformation into the creature. This corresponds to the nightlong attempt at suggestion to which Kyra subjects Thea. We cut back to Kyra and the General. Kyra is again voicing her fears, and now speaks of the other one, for ‘who dies by a vorvoloka becomes a vorvoloka’. This creature seems to be a regional variant of both werewolf and vampire, then.

Expressionist sounds - fear in the night

The rhythm of the film is speeding up as it reaches its climax, with a faster intercutting between scenes. From the tomb, the sounds of dripping water are joined by the creaking of wood. The use of sound here is brilliantly used to create a sense of anticipatory tension. Kyra and the General wait fearfully, perceiving the sounds of the tomb as if they are in the room itself. The wood splinters and cracks with a preternatural loudness. These are sounds amplified within the subconscious underworld of their own minds. This is an expressionistic use of noise as a manifestation of their own sense of guilt. They know it is coming for them.

Laughing at the 'bus'

The camera glides towards the entrance of the tomb, as if carried on a gust of wind. A distracted voice from inside mutters ‘shut me in the dark, shut me in again’. Mrs St Aubyn emerges from the shadows. She has been reborn. Inside, Davis and Thea watch Albrecht as he polishes a trident. Albrecht explains its providence: ‘Poseidon didn’t use it for fishing’ but for stirring the waves. In other words, this is not a weapon. The General is mumbling about the vorvoloka, so Davis sends Thea out to get away from him. Thus begins this film’s nightwalk sequence, a key component of Lewton’s films up until this point. She is drawn by the song of a bird in much the same way as Davis and the General were drawn by her siren song at the start of the film. Down in the glades, the bird’s song is suddenly overlaid by the discordant skronk of another creature, presumably an owl. This is the ‘bus’ moment familiar from Cat People and subsequent films. Here, it is inserted almost as an afterthought. Thea, after her initial jolt of fear, smiles at herself in self-mockery at her jumpy reaction. It is almost as if Lewton is giving us a nod and a wink at what he realises has now become something of a well-worn convention.

Wind elemental

In the house, Albrecht, a neglectful watchdog, is dozing off. With the General also asleep, Davis goes out to find Thea. She is still trying to locate the songbird, but its call is now joined by cracked and broken fragments of a troubled song. This stands in direct contrast to her own siren song, which was a seductive stream of sound. We see Mrs St Aubyn drifting through the glade, the white veils of her dress floating freely behind her. She looks as if she is being carried along by the wind, or has been reborn as some kind of wind elemental. Having emerged from the clammy rock and earth of the tomb, with its deadly rhythm of dripping water, she is enjoying the free flow of the air once more.

At the mouth of darkness

Thea is back at the shore debarkation point once more. Retracing the steps of the General and Davis at the start of the film, she follows this broken song up the rocky path into the dark passage of the tombs. The shadows of bare branches shivering in the wind are cast upon her face and look like long raking fingers. The choked syllables of the singer’s song bear the echo distortions of the tomb’s interior. Whatever is making these sounds is here with Thea. She tremulously asks if it is Kyra, a logical deduction since she is the only other living woman on the island. The uttering of this name is like a trigger. The name is thrown back as a yell of anger, and Mrs St Aubyn emerges from the shadows and flows out of the opposite exit. Thea runs back down the stone steps where she meets Davis.

The night's raking fingers

Mrs St Aubyn enters the house and sweeps past the sleeping Albrecht, instinctively picking up the trident from where he left it lying on his desk. She ascends the stairs, past the now veiled bird. The bird has its black night-time cloth to cover its cage, a presentiment of death as well as a blinker to shut out the world, to retreat into the shadows of limited vision. Kyra is awake and grasping her sheets with white-knucked terror, awaiting her fate. Mrs St Aubyn delivers it with a fatal stab of the trident to the neck. Kyra’s fears of being prey to a devilish creature which slowly drains away her life are belied by the swift expediency of her dispatch. There is no malice here, just a sure and efficient carrying out of justice. This is the destruction she willed the General to mete out on Thea. Effectively, she has been identified as the vorvoloka-like source of psychic infection, the ‘pale, half-dead thing that drains all the life and joy from those who want to live’ as Miss Wollsten put it in the original script, referring to Cathy. As such, she has been removed in order to disinfect the island.

Resurrected Fury!

The trident is a weapon which is not a weapon, a distinction carefully pointed out by Albrecht. It resembles the gun which the General pushes towards his disgraced colonel at the start of the film. This was also presented by someone from behind a table, designed, with conscious intent in this case, to be picked up by someone on the other side. Mrs St Aubyn picks up the trident which Albrecht has carelessly left lying on his desk without pause in her progress. It is in exactly the right place for her as she passes, and thus almost seems a tool of providence. It is the sacred object through which the agency of the gods is channelled, an agent of fate and an object which carries the symbolic weight of old beliefs. It is a tool turned to violent purpose in much the same way as the tools turned weapons in The Ghost Ship embody labour turned against itself. Here, Kyra is the subject of greater forces than the demons which she has feared and who she herself has referred to as the agents of the gods.

The weapon which isn't a weapon

Davis bursts into the house with Thea at this point, waking Albrecht up and explaining about Mrs St Aubyn’s trances. Thinking she is still outside, they go to search for her, whilst Thea goes up to her room. The General sees her ascend, and staggers out of his bed to follow. Thea goes to her bed, not seeing Mrs St Aubyn, who waits in the shadows, guarding over her with her trident. The General emerges from the top of the stairs, and we see a blurred point of view shot of the corridor. He is now half-blind, his distorted vision symbolic of the way his view of the world has been warped, the truth veiled. He is like the bird at the foot of the stairs, covered in its night-time cloth. He stumbles into Thea’s room, moving with the energy of will alone, already half-dead. Finding Kyra’s body with blood on its neck, he understands that he has failed in his pledge to guard her, and that Thea, in vorvoloka form, must be in the room. He blindly feels around for her, and when she makes a sound, fixes on her position and moves forward. Having waited until he presents a genuine threat, Mrs St Aubyn now emerges from the shadows and stabs him with her trident. Unlike her killing of Kyra, which was done in the guise of a cleansing Fury, acting to destroy an infectious soul, the General is put down like a dog which has become out of control, no longer responding to orders. Her work done, Mrs St Aubyn flows downstairs and out of the door. She seems almost to glide, an elemental of the scirroco wind, which has also come to burn away the disease.

The pitiful guard dog

Davis and Albrecht see her outside as she passes through the grove and the temple of Hermes before finally throwing herself off the cliff and into the sea. Hers has been a temporary resurrection for a specific purpose, just as the reawakening of ancient forces has been momentary and ruthlessly effective. Back in the bedroom, Thea has pressed herself into a corner as the General drags himself towards her. With his face looking up at her with hungry eyes, he really does resemble a pitiful guard dog, lame and powerless but refusing to give up its post. Davis and Albrecht come in, and Albrecht cradles the dying soldier.

Comforting lies

‘I saw the vorvoloka’, the General says. ‘The grave clothes, wings…eyes of death and evil’. ‘Yes, yes’, Albrecht replies, allowing him the comfort of his illusion. ‘She came out of the darkness…she must be destroyed’, he says, still feebly issuing orders. ‘It is done’, Albrecht assures him. ‘She has gone back to endless night’. Hearing this, the General allows himself to die. Davis immediately offers eulogising words; ‘he wanted to protect us’. This is a very generous summation of his motives, given that he was using the last ounce of his strength to try to kill Thea. It is a select ‘us’ which Davis refers to, and his blindness to the destruction the General has wreaked, both here and on his own people, demonstrates his own affinity with his journalistic subject. There is a sense in which the General’s attempt to kill Thea is an attempt to silence her opposition to his authority, her objection to his moral ruthlessness in pursuing any means to achieve an end which he has been ordered to effect. This is not something which Davis necessarily disagrees with, and his final apologetic could extend to the General’s wider actions. In the original script, Davis reveals to the dying General that Thea is his daughter, and there is a final reconciliation. Here, he dies with his illusions intact, and indeed fed.

Debarcation from the Isle of the Dead

The following day, Davis and Thea climb into the boat which will take them from the island, and the last shot of the film is of the statue of Cerberus. The General is left on the island to guard the dead from his grave, finally finding a role to match that of his analogous mythic beast. In the original script it is Albrecht, not Davis, who gives the summary line of the film. He blesses Davis and Thea, saying ‘may life be good to you both. As for the others, they will be quiet here, and I will be with them’.



Next, Karloff returns in Lewton's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Twenty Two

Isle of the Dead - Part Three

Noir Vermeer

Kyra is framed through a doorway pouring water from a jug into a bowl. It is a lit interior scene which resembles a Vermeer painting, particularly with Kyra’s head covering. The camera moves in to reveal Dr Drossos and Albrecht to either side of her, with Davis and the General accompanying them as if they are Seconds the metaphysical duel of ideas which is about to begin. Kyra, ever the voice of doom, declares that ‘you cannot wash away evil’. In her mind, illness and evil are equated, since she cannot accept that pain and death can be arbitrary and without moral cause or meaning. Dr Drossos mocks her superstitious attitude with a dismissive laugh, and the General smirks along with him. While the Doctor prevails, Kyra’s malign influence is diminished, but the tenets of science and rationalism are thinly layered strata over the instinctive bedrock of magical thinking, which seeks to impute meaning into the processes of the natural world. The Doctor’s outlook has to be repeatedly asserted and proved, and is constantly in danger of being eroded away by the tides of general fear and disbelief. Albrecht decides to play devil’s advocate and take up a counter position to the Doctor’s rationalist worldview. He points to his talk of ‘good winds and bad winds’ and suggests that this kind of language is little different from Kyra’s.

The Doctor explains the scientific underpinning of his statement, explaining how the disease is transmitted by fleas which have an 80% consistency of water, so that ‘the hot wind from the south literally burns them away’. This serves only to underline the fact that they are at the mercy of the winds of fate, however. Knowing the mechanism by which they will find salvation does them little good since they have no way of affecting its outcome. The knowledge that the disease is spread by fleas also makes the obsessive washing of hands and the instruction to avoid contact little more than a psychological salve to make everyone feel that they are doing something to keep the plague at bay. The washing of hands does in effect become a symbolic act of cleansing, which makes Kyra’s remark seem particularly pertinent.

Albrecht continues his devil’s advocacy by pointing out that, from Kyra’s point of view, ‘the gods send plague to punish men for harbouring the Vorvoloka’. The exchange may be an academic play of ideas between the Doctor and the archaeologist, but in the background we see the General following its to and fro intently, his face a picture of doubt and confusion. The nature of the debate is very real for him, the folk tales which are an object of study for Albrecht tapping into a deeper native vein which re-awakens something in his soul. Doctor Drossos, the disbelieving rationalist, provides the traditional professorial definition of the nature of the monster, which is for him is an element of folk history. A Vorvoloka is ‘an elemental wolf-spirit, some such thing in human form. They say it drains people of their strength and vitality until they die’. Again, this detailing of the nature of the beast has a visible impact on the General, with the camera focussing in on his face. The fact that the recitation comes from a man who would dismiss belief in such a creature as utter nonsense merely seems to strengthen its authority for him. It is as if it is being read from one of the ancient leather bound tomes of vellum-paged wisdom which denote unquestionable authority in horror films.

Albrecht goes on, providing the shading for the Doctor’s textbook sketch. ‘Kyra would tell you there’s more to it; that the Vorvoloka is an evil for which the gods punish us mortals’. These are the old gods which must be appeased. The punishment is not so much for moral misdemeanour as for neglect of tradition. This view of the Vorvoloka casts it very much in the mould of the Erinyes, or Furies of Greek myth. These were the three female avengers of broken oaths and matricide (and in some versions patricide) who were born from the castration of Uranus by the titan Cronus. Cronus threw the genitals into the sea, but three drops of blood fell upon the earth and gave birth to the Furies. Robert Graves, in his two volume Greek Myths, describes these figures as representing the Triple Goddess, the three stages of which are present in Isle of the Dead; the youthful Thea, Mrs St Aubyn, the wife, and Kyra, the crone in mourning black. As Graves puts it was the Furies’ ‘original function to avenge injuries inflicted only on a mother, or a suppliant who claimed the protection of the Hearth-goddess’. These were creatures protecting women from male power, which had usurped their former ritual authority. With this island on which female power seemed to prevail invaded once more by male command, maybe the Fates are stirring once more.

The General, whose inner struggle has been plain to see, gets up in a decisive manner and issues his verdict as to the outcome of the debate. The two participants perhaps do not realise the importance of the debate from his perspective. For them, it has just been an intellectual game, and interplay of ideas. But these have represented the General’s divided soul. His conclusion is delivered in the manner of a command. The Doctor is the Doctor and we’ll do as he says’. This decisiveness on the General’s part indicates the absolutism of his world view. He must wholly believe in one thing or another at a level of complete certainty. This all or nothing mentality makes him vulnerable to the insinuations of others should the basis of his belief be undermined. Albrecht bows to the General’s authoritative air, which doesn’t invite debate or disagreement, but fatalistically adds ‘one might as well go out on the cliff and build a votive fire to Hermes’. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is something of a misnomer here, altered from Hades in the original script. As the god of the underworld, this would have been a more apposite figure to invoke, but no doubt the studio felt that the audience would confuse the name with the Christian (or Jewish) appropriation of Hades as an alternative name for Hell.

A dangerous metaphysical duel

Albrecht then proposes a wager, an extension of the game which he and the Doctor are playing. ‘The Doctor can use his science, I’ll pray to Hermes. We’ll see who dies and who is saved’. It is a dangerous game, which seeks to make light of death but which threatens to have a far more serious effect on the non-participants. It is the General’s faith in rationalism rather than the world view of Albrecht and the Doctor which is at stake. If Albrecht ‘wins’ then the General is in effect offered up to Kyra’s influence. The General, once more asserting his authority, allow the wager to go ahead. It is sealed with a handshake, a gesture which immediately breaks the no contact rule and which seems to thereby carry with it the signature of doom. But both sides are basing their actions on false precepts. With fleas as the vector of the disease, such brief contact is of no consequence. And Albrecht is praying to the wrong god. Their assertion of male authority over the areas of science and tradition is highly questionable. The General once more declares that the Doctor’s orders must be obeyed, but his sense of his own authority seems slightly shaken. All the while, Davis watches over the tense scene, the non-intervening journalistic observer.

The Three Fates divided

Mrs St Aubyn is in her room with Kyra, in black as ever, and Thea waiting hesitantly in the background. Youth, middle and old age gathered in one room, they appear as three aspects of the one figure. They are reminiscent of the three archetypal aspects of the divine found throughout religion and mythology. But here, whatever unity may once have been shared has been fractured. Mrs St Aubyn upbraids Kyra over her treatment of Thea, telling her that ‘evil breeds evil’, as if it is a virus. Kyra contemptuously interrupts her warning, voicing the fatalistic opinion that ‘we die when we must’. In her mind, Thea has not adhered to this natural law, living beyond death.

Gazing at Death in the mirror

In the next room, Mr St Aubyn is very ill, and regards himself in a small hand mirror. Mirrors are associated with death in the film in much the same way as the are in Jean Cocteau’s Orphee. In that film, Death’s chauffeur Heurtebise explains to Orphee the secret of mirrors. ‘Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la mort vient et va. Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans une glace et vous verrez la mort travailler comme les abeilles dans une ruche de verre.’ (mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. And look at yourself in a mirror throughout your life and you will see death working like bees in a glass hive.)

Orphee - Approach of Death in the mirror

Mirrors in Isle of the Dead also serve to detect whether the breath of life has left the body, although in this function they prove deceptive. Thea comes in to tell him that Mrs St Aubyn ‘has her illness again’. It is perhaps significant that this has occurred after her confrontation with Kyra. In the original script, Mrs St Aubyn’s equivalent Miss Wollsten confronts Cathy, the character whose corrosive influence most resembles that of Kyra, telling her that she rather than Thea resembles the Vorvoloka; ‘a weak, pale half-dead thing that drains all the life and joy from those who want to live’. Mrs St Aubyn isn’t given the opportunity to articulate her feelings so clearly in the film itself, but her comment about evil breeding evil makes the analogy between Kyra and the Vorvoloka which she is so keen to invoke in others. She is the psychic vampire, who replicates her fear fuelled ideas in a similarly viral maner.

Mr St Aubyn lays down on his bed to die. There is an intercut shot of the statue of Cerberus. The statue serves the same role as symbolic insert which we have already seen with the figurehead in I Walked With a Zombie and the fountain in The Leopard Man. Here, it is immediately followed up by a shot of the General pacing up and down the corridor. The General’s role of watchdog in the tomblike corridor of the house’s upper floor is made clear. He is patrolling outside the deaths door of Mr St Aubyn. Finally he pushes the door in and finds Thea sitting by the bedside. The Consul is dead. Evidently she had sat with him, keeping him company as he faded away. The General asks her where Mrs St Aubyn is, and when Thea tells him ‘she sleeps’, he orders her to go and wake her and bring her in. Thea refuses, and the General is furious at this seemingly nonsensical act of defiance. She is frightened by his anger, but stands her ground, leaving him to repeat her no as an incredulous question.

The needle test - inflicting the compassionate wound

At her husband’s bedside, Mrs St Aubyn stands with Doctor Drossos and refuses to concede his death. The Doctor makes further tests, including using the mirror into which St Aubyn had gazed at his approaching mortality to detect for signs of the faintest breath of life. Mrs St Aubyn is at the edge of panic, asserting that ‘the breath can stop, the heart can stop; it still doesn’t mean death’. It’s as if she believes that there is some deeper component of death, one which takes place beyond the physical. Doctor Drossos offers a clinical definition for her fears, introducing us to the term cataleptic trance, which will become an important element later in the story. But this is not such a case. The General begins to pull the sheet over St Aubyn’s face; the bed has become the tomb. Mrs St Aubyn stays his hand and he defers to her, relinquishing control under these circumstances. ‘What difference does it make’ he shrugs. ‘Uncovered or covered, the eyes see no more’. But is there some other mode of vision which is still active? Once the others have left the room, Mrs St Aubyn takes out a clothing pin and pricks her husband’s flesh. When she sees that there is no reaction, she covers him with the sheet and weeps in earnest. Her anxiety was over the possibility of his being stranded in a half-dead limbo. Actual death comes almost as a relief. Now she can mourn.

Rationalist prayer flag

Outside, on the terrace adjacent to the openings to the tombs, Davis stands with Doctor Drossos, erecting a flag to indicate the wind direction. The elements assert their presence throughout the rest of the film. As the characters place themselves in the hands of fate, these elements take on the mythic significance with which they were embodied by ancient cultures. We have already seen the washing of hands in bowls of water, which has more of a ritualistic than practical rationale. Davis’ fabrication of a wind direction indicator is as much prayer flag as means of scientific divination. The situation of the flag near to the temple of Hermes suggests that maybe the invocation of this god’s aid is not so misguided after all. His winged golden sandals gave him the power to travel as fast as the wind, and thereby identify him with this element. He was also a god of boundaries who guided souls into the Underworld of Hades and had the gift of augury, of seeing into the future. Davis tells the Doctor that the General has put all his hope in him, and he replies ‘yes, I know. That frightens me more than the plague’. He bears the burden of the General’s belief, of propping up the flimsy construct of his faith in man’s control over the mechanisms of a rational world.

Connecting without contact

Mrs St Aubyn emerges from the darkness of the tomb and asks to have a word with the Doctor alone. She confides in him her overwhelming fear of premature burial, and outlines her history of illness, speaking of ‘trances with almost complete suspension of heartbeat and respiration’. In the original script, it was the General whom Miss Wollsten, Mrs St Aubyn’s equivalent, took into her confidence. Thus, she awoke the second of his sleeping ‘Cerberus’ heads. One was fixed on watching over Thea, who he believed had come back from the dead, and one on Miss Wollsten, who feared entering the Underworld before she was dead. Thus the General fulfilled the two traditional duties of Cerberus. In the film, it is the Doctor assures her that should she appear to fall victim to the plague, he will make every possible test. They almost shake hands, before remembering that this small gesture of human contact is denied to them. Their small microcosm of society has become atomised, everyone isolated inside their own solipsistic worlds. But Mrs St Aubyn’s voicing of her fears has reassured her, restored her to some measure of calm acceptance of the proximity of death. ‘Now that you understand, I am no longer afraid’, she says. Her condition also goes some way to explaining the secretive behaviour of Thea, who evidently also knows of her condition and who has been acting out of a sense of protectiveness. In the mouth of the blackness of the tomb, everyone seems to be pinning their hopes on the Doctor. He has become the living embodiment of rationality, of a world which can be measured, understood and managed.

The Rituals of Time

There is now a sequence in which the elements are given full voice. There is an insert shot of the statue of Cerberus, in the manner of Lewton’s symbolic punctuations. Then we see waves crashing against rocks, the interaction of the elements of water and earth. The ebb and flow of the waves measures the passing of time, as well as hinting at the build up of violent forces which work to erode the seemingly solid and indestructible fortress of the rocky shore. We see the vortex of a whirlpool urgently circling inside a bowl, with a montage of hands desperately seeking to cleanse themselves in its rushing waters. Then there is another glimpse of Cerberus preceding another shot of waves and rocks, all conveying a sense of waiting and watching. Then we complete our tour of the elements with a shot focussing on fire in a brazier.

Sacred Flame

We are back at the still point of the ruined temple to Hermes. Albrecht is performing his prayer to the deity who he still erroneously believes to be the god of physicians. Dr Drossos arrives, announcing ‘I just came to see if your prayer would entertain me as much as my medicine seems to amuse you’. It’s a remark made in friendly good humour, with no trace of rancour. Having listened for a while, Drossos adds his own stick to the ritual pyre, adding that it’s ‘my way of saying amen’. In conceding defeat and drawing an end to their game, Albrecht realises that Doctor Drossos is letting him know that he has recognised the symptoms of plague within himself. ‘My friend, what can one say?’ he says, his respect for the Doctor demonstrated by his admission of the emptiness of language in the face of death. Drossos accepts his fate with equanimity, announcing ‘I’ll meet my old familiar enemy, death’.

The flickering lifeforce

Mrs St Aubyn walks along the dark corridor of the upper floor of the house, which has again come to resemble that of the catacombs. The General has taken up his guard dog position outside the Doctor’s bedroom door, which has again become the door to a tomb. He asks Mrs St Aubyn whether she is afraid, and she pointedly says ‘I’m not afraid of dying’. This meeting at death’s door is between the two who have most to lose from the Doctor’s death, the two who have placed their hopes in his abilities as a physician and scientist. There is some kind of understanding between them, and the General allows her passage.

Guardian of Death's door

Inside, the Doctor refuses the opiates Mrs St Aubyn offers to ease his death. He wants to remain aware and observant. His words, weakly voiced but strongly phrased, are unsparingly unsentimental and offer little in the way of hope or comforting faith. They are a rationalist’s prayer; ‘fight death all your days then die, knowing you know nothing’. The General, entering the room at this moment, looks crushed on hearing this. This was the man upon whom he had pinned all his hopes, and whose certainties he used as his anchor. His face is a picture of pitiful sorrow, both for the Doctor and for himself. You can almost hear the sound of his belief in the rational order of the world crashing into a ruin of dusty rubble.

Hearing the Doctor's philosophy laid bare

The General paces restlessly behind Mrs St Aubyn and Thea. Mrs St Aubyn is doing some needlework, her manipulation of the thread to create a picture making her resemble a modern descendant of the Fates. These three inseparable women, physically joined together in some versions of the myth, spun, measured out and cut the thread of life of each living soul. They are essentially another version of the three aspects of the goddess whose dominant influence on earlier societies is preserved in later myth. Thea sits next to Mrs St Aubyn, intently watching her work as if she is involved with it herself.

The Fates - benevolent

Doctor Drossos is dead and buried, and Albrecht now recommends prayer as a preferable and equally efficacious alternative to the washing of hands. He admits he’s been mocking in his advocacy of it up until now, and starts to drift into aimless reminiscences of a platitudinously sentimental nature; just the sort of thing which the Doctor rigorously eschewed on his deathbed. Mrs St Aubyn interrupts, and suggests they offer a prayer to a god who is ‘the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers’. It is an appeal to a more feminine god, one who is an embodiment of compassion and protection; New rather than Old Testament. The General conspicuously refuses to join in the group prayer, standing aside and warming his hands over the indoor brazier.

A prayer for the weak

Albrecht offers a rather patronising view of belief as a source of comfort, as if Mrs St Aubyn’s intervention needs the blessing of his seal of authority. The General dismisses this out of hand, seeing it as a retreat into an illusory world. ‘When I was a boy’ he says, ‘I was taught by the village priest and old women like Kyra’. He makes no distinction between Christianity and the old beliefs; they are all to be put aside in favour of ‘what I can feel and see and know about’. Albrecht cruelly punctuates his declaration of faith in the material with the words ‘like Doctor Drossos’. Such a materialistic philosophy loses its practical value when you are dealing with something which you can neither feel nor see nor know about. The Doctor’s dying words have seemingly pointed to the despair which such materialistic self-reliance invites. It is a male philosophy which seeks to wrest the world according to the pattern of one’s needs, and it has no place for powerless, or indeed for the weak. It is the complete converse of the worldview conveyed by Mrs St Aubyn’s prayer, which is why the General, who is no hypocrite, has refused to join in. But he has no response to Albrecht’s unwise and unkindly goading jibe, and walks on out on the assembly. Davis, with customary sympathy for the General, suggests that he felt he could guard them all against death.

A mocking shadow

The General has walked out to stand at the pyre in the temple of Hermes, to which he adds a stick as a votive offering, an immediate refutation of his remarks inside. Kyra emerges from the shadows, as if she has been waiting for him, and laughs with mocking triumphalism. She senses that he is on the verge of wholly surrendering his ‘modern’ worldview, and ready to plunge headlong back into the deep past. She changes her tone as she seeks to draw kinship with him. We see her putting aside her sly, ever-suspicious distance as she seemingly speaks from the heart. Whilst the General has just been fuelling the votive fire of Hermes’ temple, Kyra suggests that they feel the pulse of an even earlier age, one which predates the flowering of classical Greek civilisation. ‘We are dark people out of an old soil, with old blood that moves to ancient sorceries, magic; good spirits and bad spirits’.

The reference to ancient sorceries may be Lewton’s nod to the Algernon Blackwood story of that title, which was a major influence on Cat People. This statement is as close as Kyra gets to a direct articulation of the core of her beliefs, of the world as she sees it. The identification with the soil, the element of earth, suggests a chthonic origin which predates the gods of the Greek pantheon. Perhaps she traces her roots back to the Titans, the race and culture analogous to the gods which were usurped by Zeus and his brethren. Some versions of the mythic stories have the Titans confined to Tartarus, the lowest depths of the Underworld. The linking of blood and soil also suggests a peasant identification of people and land, a localised and national sense of identity bound up in place. In the original script, this is reduced to the level of village blood feuds. The General had defied one such in order to marry his wife, who came from the neighbouring village. But she was forcibly repatriated by her own kin, and died shortly thereafter.

"We face death here"

Kyra draws the General’s attention back to the central fact of their situation, which has become so self-evident that it may have lost some of its gravity. ‘We face death here’, she says, speaking with emphatic directness. ‘And worse things than death’, she continues. ‘Evil things that I know and that you know and Thea knows’. She introduces Thea into their bond of native kinship, invoking an almost mystical vein of inherently intuited cultural knowledge which flows in the blood. She attempts to further elucidate this exclusive, nationalist form of mysticism, describing ‘things that we cannot tell in words, but which we feel – feel and fear’. Her assertion of a level of knowledge which language lacks the capacity to describe seeks to put her beliefs beyond the rational analysis of intellectuals like Albrecht and Doctor Drossos. She could almost be describing the unconscious, the demons and malevolent shadows which she conjures up being culturally specific forms given to universal dreads.

Kyra immediately starts to direct her suspicions towards Thea once more. The Titan Cronus devoured his own children for fear of being displaced. A similar fearful hatred of youth, of the younger generation emerging to displace the old seems to be playing out in Kyra’s mind. It is a pattern which can be seen on the personal and the cultural level, as she seeks to preserve the old ways in the face of mocking contempt from the inhabitants of the modern world, the new Greece. Kyra’s insinuations have now all but fully metamorphosed into direct accusations. With her uncertain origins as well as her youthful bloom in a place of sickness and death, Thea provides a convenient figure for embodying unconscious fears and dreads. Casting her as a demon, a vorvoloka, is a way of deflecting a genuine existential terror of the void, the prospect of the nullity of death. Evil becomes a comforting concept, allowing the creation of something concrete against which to battle. Digging further into the realms of the subconscious, Kyra points to the hours of sleep as a time when suppressed urges are allowed free reign. ‘Think on the hours when one sleeps’, she says. The body may lie still in bed, but what happens to the thoughts, the spirit? With what ancient demons does it spend its time and in what deeds?’ Kyra is quite insightful in pointing to the continuity at the essential or subconscious level of an unchanged human nature, which underlies the surface sheen of modern rationalism. But she lacks the language to formulate these insights in any terms other than projections of peasant bogeymen and night ghouls. She looks pleased at the effect she has had on the General, the purchase her ideas have evidently taken on his mind. He walks back into the house in a speechless daze, as if trying to break free of the mesmeric influence which her proximity casts. The suspicious glance which he throws at Thea as he passes her indoors affirms Kyra’s colonization of his fragile ego.

Identity crisis

Retreating to the solitude of his room, the General wearily takes to his bed. His physical, moral and psychological strength seems to have ebbed to a low level of dazed confusion. At total odds with his customary air of brute strength and certitude, he now seems almost pathetically vulnerable. Davis comes in, and the General addresses him as Oliver for the first time. At a moment of existential crisis, the affinity which these two men feel for one another comes to the fore. The General asks a series of circling questions, spiralling in on the core of the doubts which trouble him. Oliver finds it difficult to answer. The General has been the object of his journalistic portrait, the man whose opinions and views he has sought, and it is disconcerting to have the roles reversed. The General asks whether he is different from other men, and then tries to refine this by asking whether his thoughts are different. He then opens the question out from the personal to a more general ‘are Greeks different?’ He is trying to re-establish some sense of his personal identity, to account for his sense of isolation here. He continues to worry away at the nub of the matter, and asks whether his attitude towards the plague is different. To this question, Davis immediately agrees. He tells him he differs from the others in his insistence on fighting it, like he’s fighting ‘something bigger than the plague, wrestling with something you can’t see’. He likens this to Kyra’s attitude, emphasising a kinship which only serves to direct him further towards her. The General is listening anxiously to Davis, with the same eager and hungry look with which he listened to Doctor Drossos during his debate with Albrecht. He is looking to Davis to provide him with an alternative outsider’s viewpoint with which he can counter the influence of Kyra. He fails to do this. When he asks him about Thea, Davis, rather than provide a definitive refutation of his fears, merely says ‘she’s young’. This evasive answer seems to re-awaken some resolve in the General and he warns Davis against going out to see her. The journalist brushes him off, telling him that they may all be dead tomorrow. But his dismissal of the General is too lighthearted. He has failed to notice a dangerous new sense of certitude which has settled in his mind.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Twenty One

Isle of the Dead - Part Two

The other guard dog

The gateway to the isle is marked by a statue of Cerberus which rises on its plinth above the landing place. This is another remnant of Classical Greece which suggests that this is also a gateway into the past, or into an enclave which is still haunted by the old gods. In an underlining of the symbolic congruence of the General with Cerberus, which in the original script was left to the audience to pick up, Davis blithely points at the statue and says ‘there’s another watchdog for you, General’. Whilst not denying any analogous kinship, the General points out that ‘he only guards the dead. I have to worry about the living’. In fact, Cerberus was a border guard who had to keep an eye out on either side, ensuring that the dead didn’t stray back into the world above, but tearing apart any living soul who might attempt to enter the underworld. In the original script, the statue’s symbolic properties are clearly delineated: ‘two of the heads have been carved to represent sleeping heads; the third head glares towards the mainland with a sightless, unseeing, but ever watchful stare’. Jorge Luis Borges, in his Book of Imaginary Beasts, describes the three heads of Cerberus as representing a view of the past, present and future. If the two thirds slumbering beast here represents the General, then he only looks to the present. But his stay on the island will force the other heads to awake into confused consciousness.

Where the siren song leads

The General goes down into the darkness of his wife’s tomb and emerges with the news that it has been broken into and her body taken. His eyes flicker around uneasily, and he seems apprehensive and fearful for the first time. Back at the boat, they hear a female voice singing a mournful song. The camera pans up the wet, moonlit stone steps which ascend the rock face and lead towards the tombs, from which the sounds seem to emanate. This is very much like a siren song, coming from the rocks. Again, there is the sense of an enclosed world in which the ghosts of the old religion can still be felt. The voice combining with the moonlight lends it the feel of a feminine environment, which may explain the continued unease of the General, who is now outside of the male world over which he can exert his unquestioned authority. They follow the sound, which leads them on through an open doorway into the dark shadows of one of the tombs, the further entrance a clearly outlined door of light at the far end of a corridor of darkness. Their voices echo against the stone inside the tomb, which is marked out as a space separate from the world outside by this dislocating shift in the nature of sound. Words suddenly sound hollow, at a remove from the people who voice them. Feeling their way through the darkness between the two doors is like crossing some threshold, with the world into which they emerge on the other side not the same as that which they have left behind. They come to a door on the other side, which has the feel of the entrance to a gatekeeper’s cottage. The singing stops, and the General, as if reasserting his masculine dominance, pounds heavily on the door with his fist.

The door is opened by a friendly and welcoming man, who will soon introduce himself as Doctor Albrecht, a Swiss archaeologist. In the background, a woman looks on nervously. If this is a female domain, then its presiding have momentarily been cowed by the General’s aggressive entrance. The General is immediately recognised by Albrecht, an instant notoriety which is absent in the original script, where he has to join in the general introductions. The original would have placed him as just another soldier, whereas here, word of his deeds evidently precedes him. The General eschews Albrecht’s hospitable greeting, and immediately goes on the offensive regarding the desecration of the graves. Albrecht’s apology and explanation that it had taken place a long time ago suggests a steady and ongoing crumbling of the precepts of a civilisation which has long since declined. The desecration of the tombs is caused by peasants looking for antiquities to sell, asset stripping their own past. The General’s immediate response is to tersely inquire ‘has anyone been punished for this crime’, the wider observation of his culture’s decline passing him by. He is attempting to shore up the crumbling structure of his country’s past through the rigid application of the law. The fact that these peasant’s are supplying a demand from other countries for the antiquities of classical Greece is irrelevant in his eyes. It is his own people who must accept responsibility and who must be punished accordingly. Albrecht all but confesses to his own part in this destructive market, this wholesale export of a country’s history. As an archaeologist, the island was ‘his great find’, with ‘antiquities dating back to Homer’. Again, the sense is conveyed of an enclosed world from which the past has yet to leach. Albrecht accepts moral culpability for the transformation of a living past into a commodified set of objects ripe for plunder. But the General refuses to admit the impact of a wider world, of a marketplace which reaches in from beyond the borders of his country. His sense of justice is rigidly codified, and allows of no mitigating circumstances, no recognition of the changing pattern of the system of the world. His sense of punitive justice is directed inward, at his fellow countrymen. ‘The legal guilt is theirs and must be reported to the authorities’. The authorities for whom he is a good and loyal guard dog.

After this initial awkward exchange, further introductions are made. It is at this point that significant differences from the original script become apparent. Albrecht first introduces Madame Kyra, an old woman dressed in black who has been watching the newcomers with a look of wary suspicion. It is a look, and an attitude, which seems permanently frozen on her face. Albrecht explains that he bought the house from Kyra, its original owner, and she stayed on as housekeeper. Kyra thus represents the displaced native population, forced to become servants in their own country to outsiders who come to pick over the relics of their past. She immediately draws the General to one side, separating them from these other outsiders. In the original script, this character, referred to as Ida, makes only a briefly functional appearance to pour Albrecht’s guests wine and is not seen again. But she is a central figure in the final film, serving as a poisonous influence, a whispering voice which awakens ghosts of peasant superstition from within the General’s subconscious. She is like the General’s Iago, feeding him suggestions which guide him towards actions which he believes to have been arrived at through his own volition. This role in the original script was taken by a character called Cathy, who was the daughter of Mr St Aubyn, the British Consul who will be introduced shortly. Her motives for playing on the Colonel’s confused state of mind relate to her search for a replacement father figure, someone who she can have all to herself and who will protect her from the world at large. Thea, the young Greek girl who her father has taken in as an orphan in the original script, is a rival for this attention and so she uses the Colonel as another passive weapon. Making the character who serves this role an old, dispossessed Greek woman shifts the motive from the Oedipal (or its Electra counterpart) and makes it dovetail more neatly with the wider theme of internecine conflict. It becomes another example of a culture and people turning on each other with unbridled self-hatred. The venom which Kyra directs towards Thea also introduces the psychological element of the jealous resentment of the old for the vigour and optimism of youth.

spreading the virus of fear

Albrecht introduces the other guests at the table as being ‘travellers, refugees from your battle’. Kyra, meanwhile, is beginning her campaign to cast her spell over the General. We see them profile to profile. She makes an offhand confession to having destroyed the bodies, but talks of ‘one among them, an evil one, wicked’. The General dismisses her tales as nonsense. ‘These are new days for Greece. We don’t believe the old foolish tales anymore’. But there is a hesitancy, a flicker of belief in his face as he says this. One of the great subtleties in Karloff’s performance is the way he manages to convey the General’s inward struggle, the conflict in his mind between the rationalism of modernity and the superstitions of older traditions which he has supposed to have been exorcised. Kyra is very much the dark side of the island’s female nature, the crone whose wisdom has turned inward and thus bitter and sour. The other guests at the table include Mr St Aubyn, the British Consul from Adrianople, and his wife, Mrs St Aubyn. The latter has already been pointed out to the General by Kyra, who draws his attention to her pallid appearance with a sly emphasis which ensures that he makes a mental note of it. In the original script, Mrs St Aubyn is replaced by a character called Miss Wollsten, who is the secretary of Mr St Aubyn. She and St Aubyn are in love, but the needy dependance of Cathy has prevented this love from blossoming, and it has remained suppressed, a furtive and secretive affair. In the original story, Cathy effectively seeks to remove this rival for her posthumous paternal affections by neglecting to divulge her knowledge of Miss Wollsten’s tendency to fall into cataleptic trances, thereby condemning her to premature burial.

A cockney far from home

The third person at the table, a small, rather distracted man, introduces himself as ‘Robbins, Henry Robbins, tinware’, a well worn greeting which marks him out as a salesman even before he proffers his card. Robbins is played by Skelton Naggs, one of Lewton’s regular and most distinctive actors, here essaying a rather stilted attempt at a cockney accent. Robbins is full of a melancholy longing for the familiar pleasures of home, an English variety of sehnsucht. ‘I’d give all the blooming statues in Greece for one whiff of fish and chips’. People have different notions of what constitutes culture, what is personally representative of the essence of civilisation, which permeates all levels of society. The idea of a country, what images, sounds and smells resonate in the mind when trying to sum up a mental collage, has to encompass all of its social levels, all its different regions. ‘Each to his own taste’, as Albrecht says, rather dismissively. But what really could be more evocative of England than the smell of fish and chips? Robbins stumbles off to bed, clearly feeling unwell, something Mr St Aubyn, the British Consul, ascribes, with a definite whiff of social snobbery towards his fellow countryman, to ‘plain drunkenness’.

Youth, art and Death

The sound of Robbins tripping and falling heavily on the stair brings a rush of motion, and a light is cast upon a young woman who is bending over him. This is the woman to whom Kyra has insinuatingly referred, contrasting her health and youth with the sickly pallor of Mrs St Aubyn and leaving the General to draw the connection. Her feeding of his subconscious suspicions has evidently had its effect, as he watches her intently as she walks into the room. She is introduced to Davis as Thea, and it was her who sang the siren song which drew them here. As another Greek native, she automatically takes up the role of servant, pouring wine from a jug for the guests, a role taken by the minor character Ida in the original script. The character of Thea as originally written was very much a mirror reflection of Cathy, the two young women being inverted doubles. Whereas Cathy is trying to maintain an exclusive relationship with her father, and then find a suitable replacement in order to remain in a suspended state of protected childhood, Thea is fearful of the General, who she soon realises is her father, and shies away from revealing her identity to him. St Aubyn, in the original script, had adopted Thea (Theodosia, as he explains her full name to be) as his daughter Cathy’s companion; effectively as a second daughter, something which it is made clear that Cathy deeply resents. There is some initial awkwardness about her role, and Mr St Aubyn firmly points out that ‘this girl..is not a servant in my household’. This is clearly not the case in the film as it came to be made; and Thea, whose origins are left unexplained, is now the companion and nursemaid of Mrs St Aubyn and is expected to pour the wine. As she does so, we notice a picture on the wall behind her of an artist’s self-portrait, with death’s bony visage peering over his shoulder, playing a danse macabre on its fiddle. This memento mori is a reminder of the nature of the island, and of this house which otherwise seems so full of life. It also places the film itself within a long artistic tradition which serves to remind us of our mortality. The Latin phrase Et in Arcadia Ego, found in Virgil’s Eclogues, is perhaps the earliest example of the memento mori. It means I can be found even in Arcadia, a region which Virgil depicts as a pastoral paradise. This is usually interpreted as death declaring his presence in the midst of the most bucolically carefree days. Such reminders of mortality have always been a spur to the creation of art as a means of evoking the precious transience of life. This creativity becomes one response to the shadow of death, and even a validation of it. Lewton himself replied in provocatively hyperbolic terms to an order that his film should contain ‘no messages’ by saying ‘I’m sorry but we do have a message, and our message is that death is good’.

When Thea hears General Pherides’ name mentioned, she refuses to pour him wine. Her assertion that ‘he is a cruel man. He has a bad name’ is made with some feeling, and she is taking a moral stand. But again, it is notable that it is with a fellow countryman that she discovers the limits of her willingness to serve. The General allows himself to be argued into staying the night under the pretext of being able to make an inspection of a battery on shore before his troops break camp. Kyra immediately breaks through this self-justificatory use of ‘military efficiency’ by declaring ‘you stay to guard us’. In the strange atmosphere of the island which the General finds so disconcerting, she senses that she is already beginning to prevail.

the bed as temporary tomb

As everyone retires to bed, we move upstairs. This is an area of darkness and shadow and becomes associated with death and suppressed secrets throughout the film. It is the house’s equivalent to the tomb passages of the island. The corridor is the equivalent of the catacomb through which the house is reached, and the bedrooms are the sarcophagi. Lewton thus draws a parallel between sleep and death, an analogy which has been a recurring motif in literature over the ages. Virgil again provides an early example, in The Aenid this time, depicting the world of dreams as a borderland on the edge of the beyond: ‘There are two gates of Sleep, one of which it is held is made of horn and by it real ghosts have easy egress; the other shining fashioned of gleaming white ivory, but deceptive are the visions the Underworld sends that way to the light’. Such are the deceptive visions with which the General’s mind is clouded, and which lead Thea to doubt her own nature. Shelley links death and sleep in his poem The Daemon of the World, and the following lines could easily have served Lewton as one of his opening literary epigraphs, echoing his message that ‘death is good’: ‘How wonderful is Death,/ Death and his brother Sleep!/ One pale as the yonder wan and horned moon,/ With lips of lurid blue,/ the other glowing like the vital morn,/ Then throned on ocean’s wave/ It breathes over the world’. We see Thea walking along the dark corridor with her antique lamp. The light in darkness is a recurrent motif in the film. We have already seen Davis holding his lamp before him as he and the General cross the battlefield at night. As bearers of light, these two young characters are already subliminally linked. Davis, sharing his room with the General, is in a cheerful mood. For him, the marker of civilisation is the ability to luxuriate in a warm bath. He mocks the General for stripping his bed, as if he is still in a military barracks. The General has no time for the niceties of civilisation, preferring the asperities to which he has accustomed himself. Davis makes passing reference to Thea’s refusal of her hospitality, and the General replies that he doesn’t care what she thinks in a manner which makes it plain that the opposite is in fact the case.

Thea’s room is in darkness and she sleeps soundly. The camera slowly pans across the room to reveal Kyra watching intently from her bed. The sound of troubled moaning drifts in from next door and Thea wakes and goes to see what’s wrong. She wears a white toga. Kyra gets up to follow, slipping on a black robe and becoming part of the shadows. In the manner of many Mediterranean widows, Kyra seems to dress in nothing but black. She seems a part of the darkness which defines her character, a tenebrous soul whose tendrils curl out to infect others. For her, Thea’s compassion is immediately interpreted as predation. Thea is in fact attending to Mrs St Aubyn, whose room is striated with the film-noirish shadows cast by slatted blinds familiar from previous Lewton films. As before, these are suggestive of a world beyond, or slightly an angle to this one, or of the tentative nature of the tangible.

the light in darkness gutters

Thea offers to go to Mr St Aubyn and fetch her medicine, which entails going out once more into the dark corridor. Along the way her lamp is blown out, just as the light of Davis’ lamp blinked out on the shore where he had left it. The snuffing out of the lamp’s light serves to create an atmosphere of suspense, of course, but is also symbolic of the extinguishing of life and hope, of being plunged back into the shadows of superstition and fear. Lamps, with their feeble and vulnerable light, will be a recurring symbol of the human spirit flickering above the abyss.

Looming from the shadows

Thea collects the medicine, eliciting not a trace of suspicion from Mr St Aubyn, and goes back out into the darkness, all the more impenetrable now her light is out. The General suddenly looms out of the shadow and blocks her passage. He clearly takes pleasure in her fear, asserting his brute masculine power once more. He’s been sent up by Kyra, who has told him of Thea’s movements and cast them in the most suspicious light. He is acting as her watchdog. He asks Thea why she refused to serve him wine, and she reasserts her moral position by answering with a further question: ‘Why do you kill your own countrymen?’ This is a direct statement of the film’s themes of internal strife and self-destruction, of violence turned inwards. It is embodied in the way Kyra and through her the General direct their hatred and superstitious dread on Thea. Thea tells the story of how the General collected taxes from her village ‘with field artillery’. She represents an opposing force with which he is seldom confronted in his masculine military world and this confuses and troubles him. Thea represents the female power of the island which is the obverse to Kyra’s dark designs worked through suggestion. Her statement that ‘laws can be wrong and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel’ is a challenge to the ethos which has become the General’s raison d’etre. She posits a world where judgement is tempered by compassion. She is also implying that the General has no real power of judgement, no moral compass to guide his actions, and is wholly reliant on the rules laid down to him by others to provide a framework for his hollow soul. He has no response to her challenge, and is visibly rattled, his earlier triumphalism, occasioned by his ability to instill fear, entirely dissipated.

the caged bird sings in the face of death

The following morning, the General is still disturbed, and proclaims that he’ll be glad to get off the island. He’ll be back in the masculine world where his authority goes unchallenged, away from this feminine domain. But everything changes with the news that the hapless Henry Robbins has died in the night. The General sends for Dr Drossos and insists that until then everyone must stay on the island. When the doctor has arrived and made his tests, he announces the presence of the septicimic plague. There is a pan across the room and all who are gathered listening to this terrible news. On the wall is cast the shadow of a bird which is singing. Caged birds are a rather common symbolic device, and we have already come across them in Cat People. The cage most obviously represents the fact that they are trapped on the island, but it also acts to suggest the symbolic cages of social and nationalistic status and custom, as well as the more metaphysical cage of the span of life. The louvred shadows cast by the blinds upstairs could be seen in a similar light. Once the doctor has made his diagnosis, the General immediately takes over. ‘No one may leave the island’ he intones imperiously, blankly repeating it in the face of objections or demands to be excepted until it is evident that this is a command which brooks no questioning. ‘We will fight the plague’ he solemnly declares. The General has imposed his own brand of martial law on the island, asserting male dominance over this female realm. He is gearing up to meet the rider on the yellow horse. He has declared war on Death.

'No-one may leave the island'