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Isle of the Dead (film)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This SourceIsle of the Dead (1945) is one of producer Val Lewton's horror films made for RKO Radio Pictures. The movie had a script inspired by the painting Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, which appears behind the title credits. (Another of Lewton's films, I Walked With a Zombie, has the painting hung in the main room of the movie.) It was written by frequent Lewton collaborator Ardel Wray; directed by Mark Robson, the fourth of five pictures he directed for Lewton; and starred Boris Karloff, the first of three pictures he made with Lewton (although the second released).
The story is set on a Greek isle during the First Balkan War in 1912–1913, when a plague forces a quarantine on the island's visitors. As they die one by one, a young woman is accused of being a vorvolaka, a sort of vampire.
Filming began for about two weeks in July 1944 until production was suspended when Karloff required a back operation. It was completed in December 1944. In the interim, after Karloff had recovered from the surgery but before the cast of Isle of the Dead could be reassembled, he and Lewton made The Body Snatcher.
The cost of Isle of the Dead at completion was $246,000, the highest yet for a Lewton horror film, but with domestic rentals of $266,000, and foreign rentals of $117,000, it made only $13,000 in profit for RKO. It was re-issued in 1953 on a double bill with Mighty Joe Young, and made its television debut in 1959.
External links
- Isle of the Dead Movie The Karloff/Lewton film: images, Boecklin paintings, & history.
- Toteninsel.net: an encyclopedia in progress dedicated to A. Böcklin's Isle of the Dead: copies, parodies, inspirations.
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Last updated on Wednesday March 05, 2008 at 00:13:32 PST (GMT -0800)
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