#st is an ensemble cast without a doubt

[dungeon-master-mike]

the more i think about it, the more i realize how weird mike's role in the story is

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

Smart premises, atmospheric horror and ancient myths: Cat People and Isle of the Dead

By Jack Muscatello

Following immersion into two of RKO Radio Pictures’ more well-known horror projects of the early 1940s, Val Lewton’s stylistic endeavor becomes all the more apparent. In an era when horror became largely one-note, studio driven monster stories, the small RKO establishment presented a different idea. By the mind of Lewton and the skill of Mark Robson, who graduated to director on the second picture of this week, these two films – Cat People and Isle of the Dead – set the tone for what RKO sought to accomplish with small budgets and big aspirations. Though the films cover very separate storylines, histories and ensembles, their structure and style are very much indicative of Lewton and Robson’s influence.

Deciphering the similarities between Cat People and Isle of the Dead begins with their narrative structures. Opening with respective “legends” of old, one a Serbian legend of witchcraft and cat magic and the other a Greek tragedy of karma and suffering, both films follow modern collections of people grasping with the resurgence of these classic stories. And at first, they ignore it. In Cat People, Oliver laughs off Irena’s retelling of the legend, falling quickly in love with her and seeing past the ruminations on her Serbian tradition. In Isle of the Dead, Pherides laughs at warnings of the “vorvolaka”, asserting his power as General and taking the opportunity to gain acquaintances with Aubrecht and the other people on the island. He believes he knows better, much like Oliver does over Irena. But for the pair, the end of their story provides a tragic conclusion, arriving by their inaction, disrespect and eventual paranoid madness. Though Oliver escapes the mess surrounding Irena, and Pherides is not so lucky for his own plotline, the two stories dissect the paranoid tensions of group settings with delicate interest and precision. Robson’s style seems interested in the moments of though for the characters, allowing each scene to build in an ever-faster rise to complete madness. The atmosphere of the horrific situations is presented as more interesting than the horror itself, which as stated above is owed to Lewton and Robson’s desire to break the status-quo. Cat People began this trend, and Isle of the Dead is among many cinematic works to refine it. Even down the eulogy-like nature of both films’ conclusions.

However, the pair of films is not without differences. Primarily, Isle of the Dead applies much of the same thematic intentions from Cat People but to a larger footprint. Where Cat People concerns the interweaving of four individual lives, Isle of the Dead expands to a main lead and an entire group. This allows Lewton to expand on the narrative possibilities of his paranoia-based storytelling, pulling on each character to contribute some flaw or doubt to add to the mounting chaos. In Cat People, it’s just Irena’s personal history that breaks out and ultimately destroys her. In Isle of the Dead, an ancient history and a much more modern plague infect the group one-by-one, promising the demise of several characters in the midst of their growing distrust of each other. Irena becomes Pherides’ and Mary St. Aubyn’s, among several others. In addition, the setting for Isle of the Dead leans more into the historical angle of the Balkan War and the ancient vorvolaka. The film presents the group as almost destined to arrive in this place, to fall in the hands of the vorvolaka’s reputation for malevolence. While Cat People approaches from a more accidental framework, with Oliver being just the man to find Irena in Central Park that night – Isle of the Dead presents an almost fate-like intentionality to the cast of characters assembled on the island, lending to its more detailed setup. For as much trouble as the production went through to get off the ground, the limitations presented to the film almost benefited its artistic merit. In particular, the sequence involving Mary St. Aubyn’s premature burial applies Lewton and Robson’s desired exaggeration of dread and despair when “the camera coldly, tenderly approaches the coffin in a silence so intense as to be almost unbearable. When the shriek of the prematurely buried woman finally comes, it releases the rest of the show into a free-for-all masterpiece of increasing terror” (Siegel). While Cat People kept its focus small, peering more into the personal mentalities of the three main players in its story, Isle of the Dead’s detail-focused plot allows for more moments to shock-induced horror, which expands the signature anxiety storytelling of Lewton, Robson and RKO.