There is a rocky islet with tall cliffs on either side, surrounded by unknown waters. Within are dark green cypress trees, as high as the cliffs that surround them. Rectangular passages have been carved into the rockface, while at the shore there is a white stone jetty with steps. A boat is sailing towards the islet, with oarsman and a standing figure in white. The boat bears a coffin. In the dark below the trees there are stones suggesting that within lies a cemetery. There are echoes of Greek mythology, but nothing specific. It is a myth without a narrative. The theme, however, is our finality. We do not want to look, but we have to, staring into the dark interior that inexorably draws us in.
Arnold Böcklin’s ‘Die Toteninsel’, or ‘Isle of the Dead’, produced in six versions, five between 1880-1886 and one completed posthumously by his son in 1901, bids fair to be one of the most popular and influential of all paintings. The Swiss symbolist artist’s mysterious work hung in many a European home in the first years of the twentieth-century. It inspired Rachmaninoff to write a tone poem with the same name. It features in the stage directions at the end of August Strindberg’s play Ghost Sonata. Salvador Dali painted an obscure tribute to it, ‘The True Painting of the “Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus‘. The painting was a favourite of Sigmund Freud (who dreamt about it and hung a print in his office), Adolf Hitler (who owned an original) and Vladimir Lenin. A print also hung in the childhood home of Val Lewton.
Lewton was a Russian-born filmmaker, whose period as head of the horror film unit at RKO Pictures between 1942 and 1946 led to one of the most distinctive bodies of work in American film. Titles such as Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie created a melancholic, shadowy world in which troubled dreams supersede reality. Although others directed the horror films, Lewton was heavily involved in their scripting, and they display a strong personal element. This is especially so with the strange and disturbing Isle of the Dead, directed by Mark Robson and ostensibly written by Ardel Wray and an uncredited Josef Mischel, but in practice mostly the work of an uncredited Val Lewton.
The film is set during the Balkan War of 1912, when Greece and its Balkan League allies fought against the Ottoman Empire. A doctrinaire Greek general Pherides, played by Boris Karloff, leaves the dead on the battlefield to sail to an island with an American journalist Oliver Davis (played by Marc Cramer). The general’s wife is buried in the cemetery there, but he finds that the tomb has been robbed by locals seeking artefacts to satisfy the interests of archaeologist Aubrecht (Jason Robards Sr.). They are invited into Aubrecht’s island home, where his guests include a British diplomat St Aubyn (Alan Napier) and his ailing wife Mary (Katherine Emery), her Greek companion Thea (Ellen Drew), and a malign Greek housekeeper Kyra (Helene Thimig). She tells Pherides that a vampire-like folk creature called a vorvolaka haunts the house in the shape of Thea. Pherides rejects such superstitious beliefs.
One of the guests dies suddenly. A doctor (played by Ernst Deutsch) is called from the mainland who diagnoses septicemic plague. Pherides forbids anyone from leaving the island for fear that plague could spread to his troops. St Aubyn dies, and then the doctor, reinforcing Kyra’s belief that the plague is a punishment from God for harbouring a vorvolaka. Pherides’s faith in rationality starts to waver. Thea fears that she might indeed be a vorvolaka. Davis – now in love with Thea – plans their escape from the island, but Pherides holes the only boat. Pherides begins to show signs of the plague.
Mary St Aubyn is found seemingly dead. But she suffers from catalepsy and is buried alive. Water dripping on her morturary coffin enables her to escape, but driven mad she takes an ancient trident from Aubrecht’s collection and stabs first Kyra to death and then Pherides. His dying words show that he is convinced of the existence of the vorvolaka. Mrs St Aubyn jumps to her death from a cliff. With a change of winds the risk of plague subsides. Oliver and Thea sail away from the island.
Isle of the Dead is an attempt to explore the mystery embodied in ‘Die Toteninsel’. The painting features over the opening credits and when Pherides and journalist look out to the island it is clearly ‘Die Toteninsel’. By sailing into the island they sail into the painting. Leigh Harline’s music incorporates themes from Rachmaninoff’s ‘Isle of the Dead’. The result is an extraordinary clash between rationality and belief, of clinical and symbolic pestilence, of the corruption of a society from which Western civilisation sprang, of law against love, and of a progression from death towards life. One can read it in purely psychological terms, or as a metaphor for a ruined society about to collapse into cataclysmic war (the Balkan Wars helped light the tinder box that led to the First World War). The only ones to escape the island are an American (Davis) and the blameless Thea, the new world breaking free from the corpse of the old.
Isle of the Dead is the dream in Val Lewton’s young head when he stared at this strange picture on the wall. It was a dream of sickness and escape. He sailed into the island for the rest of his life, as did Lenin, as did Hitler. It hangs on a wall in Lewton’s earlier film, I Walked with a Zombie, set on a Caribbean island. Isle of the Dead’s horror is not one of shocks but of things made visible to the susceptible mind. Kyra says of the ancient beliefs that there are ‘things we cannot say in words but we feel and fear’. You could not find a more acute description of what Lewton sought to achieve with his films.
‘Dir Toteninsel’ on film
Arnold Böcklin’s ‘Die Toteninsel’ has inspired many other filmmakers. Below I have tried to list as many of these films as I can, but it is not an easy task. Such was the fame of the work in its heyday almost any film set on an island that is not in the South Seas could be claimed to have been inspired by Böcklin’s vision. It is not simply the shape of the isle but the cinematic qualities of the image, with its progression towards uncertainty even as it depicts life’s finality. A filmography that listed all films inspired by ‘Die Toteninsel’ would therefore be difficult, if not impossible.
For some films, such as The Island of Lost Souls (1932) and King Kong (1933), the claims made seem unsupported by textual or visual evidence. I have excluded documentaries and TV productions of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata which may or may not follow his stage direction to conclude with the painting. Also excluded is the Russian 1993 avant garde film Ostrov myortvykh/The Island of the Dead, which uses archive film as a form of tribute to Russian silent film star Vera Kholodnaya – the IMBb entry for the film credits Arnold Böcklin, so presumably his painting is in there somewhere. ‘Die Toteninsel’ reportedly hangs on Dracula’s wall in the animated film Hotel Transsylvania (2012), which I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing, and reportedly on a wall in 12 Monkeys (1995), though I couldn’t spot it. Isle of the Dead (2016) is a horror film set on a zombie-infested island. It probably doesn’t have too much to do with Swiss symbolist art.
De Dødes Ø (Denmark 1913)
Only a tiny fragment survives of this feature film, originally 1168 metres long (just over an hour). It was directed by Vilhelm Glückstadt and starred Robert Schyberg and Ellen Tegner. It was also known as Isle of the Dead and seems to have been an attempt to extrapolate a narrative from the idea of Böcklin’s painting. The Danish silent film database summaries the plot: “Prince Udo von Freundsberg leads a carefree and irresponsible life in the company of false friends and the beautiful Countess Irma, but in reality he is deeply in debt. At his seaside home, he meets the innocent Flora, daughter of a gardener. She is deeply in love with the prince, prompting a battle between the forces of light and dark inside the prince. Can Udo escape Irma’s seductive clutches? And how is he to reclaim his ancestral possessions, lured away from him by false friends? With the help of faithful supporters and Flora, Udo sets out for the place where his family’s treasure lies buried: on the Isle of the Dead. It is unclear whether the surviving clip features the island.
Die Toteninsel (Germany 1921)
This lost feature film, directed by Carl Froelich, was another attempt to tell a story inspired by and set on the island. Despite the fame of its leading actors, Lil Dagover, Bernhard Goetzke and Walter Janssen, who appeared together in Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod / Destiny in the same year, and that of its great producer, Erich Pommmer, little information seems to exist about the film and I can find no images. Advertisements indicate that it was expressionist in style and was a romantic tragedy. The newspaper advertisement above translates thus: “Island of the Dead. A tragic film in 4 acts. Starring: Lil Dagover, Walter Janson, and Bernhard Gützke. Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” provided the title and visual inspiration for this latest film in the Decla luxury class. A uniquely atmospheric magic pervades the entire film, captivating the viewer from the very first moment.”
I Walked with a Zombie (USA 1943)
Evidence of Val Lewton’s fascination with the painting comes in the 1943 film he produced, I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur. The film tells the story of a Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (played by Frances Dee) who visits a Caribbean island (called Saint Sebastian in the film but clearly inspired by Haiti), encountering voodoo rituals and the walking dead. The painting hangs on the wall of the doctor’s house where Connell encounters the wife of a sugar plantation owner who has been left in a zombie-like state. Our attention is drawn to the painting, but its meaning is purely personal to the producer. The film can currently be seen by UK residents on BBC iPlayer.
Isle of the Dead (USA 1945)
I’ve put it here here just in case anyone copies the list and wonders why it was missing. See above.
A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting (Canada 1946)
The Scottish-Canadian genius of the animated film, Norman McLaren, made this mysterious three-minute animated short in 1946. It creates images that develop out of a black-and-white copy of Böcklin’s painting. The hallucinatory effect is greatly aided by Louis Applebaum’s fine score. The film can be viewed on the National Film Board of Canada’s site and YouTube.
The Tales of Hoffmann (UK 1951)
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s visually dazzling ‘composed film’ is an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera. Famed for Hein Heckroth’s exuberant designs and its prodigious use of Technicolor, the film follows Offenbach in having a prologue followed by three stories in which Hoffmann has a vision of three different women who represent different aspects of his love, the ballet dancer Stella. The third part, ‘The Tale of Antonia’ is set on a Greek island that is clearly Böcklin’s. The tale concerns a consumptive soprano who is told not to sing to preserve her health. But she is tricked into doing so by an evil doctor and dies when she sings to the ghost of her mother. The reproduction of the isle, both exterior and interior, is faithful but the treatment rather flat compared to the rest of the film.
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Germany/France/UK 2005)
The Brothers Quay (twins Stephen and Timothy) make stop-motion animated films that are dark and unsettling. Their feature film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes combines live action with stop-motion. It is obscure in theme, performance and look (it’s not always easy to work out what is going on through the murk), telling the story of an opera singer who is murdered on stage only to be revived on an evil inventor’s island. The island is inspired by ‘Die Toteninsel’, not directly but suggestively. Moreover the film feels – probably not accidentally – like a summation of other works, filmic and otherwise, that have been inspired by Böcklin’s work, in particular Isle of the Dead (the woman brought back to life) and The Tales of Hoffmann (the woman singer falling victim to a malevolent man). It is well worth peering through the murk to study what lies within.
Alien: Covenant (UK/USA 2017)
Alien: Covenant is the sixth in the Alien series of sci-film horror films that pits humans (and androids) against ferocious aliens with a predilection for gestating inside human bodies before bursting out bloodily. A colony ship lands on a planet infested by the aliens. At a crucial point when the supposed gravestone of a crew member is discovered, for a few seconds the background scenery is a clear imitation of ‘Die Toteninsel’, while the place where two android characters find the gravestone echoes the interior of Böcklin’s isle. Though this area of the planet is not an island, the haunted look of Böcklin’s art helped inspire the film’s aesthetic overall. An added link is that another Swiss artist, H.R. Giger, famed for his designs that helped director Ridley Scott conceive the original Alien film, painted ‘Hommage à Böcklin‘, which is an adaptation of ‘Die Toteninsel’.
Hors-Cadre: L’île des morts, Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland 2017)
Hors-Cadre: L’île des morts (Unframed: The Isle of the Dead) is an immersive animation short, made by Martin Charrière, which takes the viewer on a boat journey towards Böcklin’s isle. By dragging the screen in whatever direction the viewer finds themself inexorably drawn into the painting while presented with extensions to its mysteries (we discover that we are on what is only one of many boats proceeding towards the isle, each with an oarsman, white figure and coffin – and then that there are multiple isles). It is not a dramatic film as such, but has sufficient dramatic elements to qualify on this list. It serves as a summation of the response to the painting’s cinematic qualities by generations of filmmakers. They are impelled to board the boat as the figure in white and discover that within which so entrances and disturbs them.
Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka/The Boy and the Heron (Japan 2023)
Böcklin is used as a visual reference in Hayao Miyazaki’s animation film The Boy and the Heron, about a boy searching for his dead mother in the company of a talking grey heron. The isle does not feature, only the cypress trees, which serve as the entrance to an oceanic world. Miyazaki’s extraordinary series of visual inspirations, including ‘Die Toteninsel’, is analysed and richly illustrated in Lee Dror’s article for Uncoated, ‘“The Boy and the Heron” is a journey of trauma and recovery through creation‘. Miyazaki clearly has a thing for the painting, as it appears on the wall of a hotel room in his 2013 animated feature Kaze Tachinu/The Wind Rises.
Links:
- Numerous web articles, filmographies, digitised journals and Reddit threads helped in putting together this list of films – many thanks to all those who shared their research. Particularly useful is John Coulthart’s 2011 piece for Reactor, ‘A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead‘, which covers the painting’s influence on art, music, literature and film. Also helpful – though difficult to read on account of its antiquated web design – is the site https://www.toteninsel.net, which documents the researches of Pascal Lecocq into every kind of ‘Die Toteninsel’-influenced creative work, including films
- Two fine analyses of Isle of the Dead (1945) are Dan Callahan, ‘A Flower in the Mud: Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead‘ for The Criterion Collection, and Robert Heath, ‘Isle of the Dead (1945)‘ for Film Freedonia
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