FAQ

While burying the dead during the First Balkan War [1912-1013], General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff), known throughout Greece as 'The Watchdog', and American reporter Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) decide to visit the grave of the General's long-dead wife on a nearby, uninhabited cemetery island. When they discover the crypt despoiled and hear a woman singing, they find retired Swiss archeologist Dr Aubrecht (Jason Robards Sr.) and his Greek housekeeper Madame Kyra (Helene Thimig), along with four British guests -- Mr St Aubyn (Alan Napier) of the British consulate, his pale and sickly wife Mary (Katherine Emery), her youthful companion Thea (Ellen Drew) (the singer), and English tinsmith Andrew Robbins (Skelton Knaggs) -- taking refuge. When Robbins dies of septicemic plague and St Aubyn follows suit, the island is subsequently quarantined. Slowly, the inhabitants begin to divide into two camps -- those who believe the scientific reasons for the plague and those who believe an old superstition that the gods have sent the sickness to punish them for harboring a vorvolaka in Thea's form.

Isle of the Dead is based on a screenplay by American screenwriter Ardel Wray. The story was inspired by the painting Isle of the Dead by Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. Böcklin actually painted five versions of Isle of the Dead, one of which can be seen in the scene where Pherides and Davis cross over to the isle in order to pay their respects at the grave of the General's wife.

In Greek myth, a vorvolaka (variant vrykolakas) is depicted as a harmful spirit in human form that drains people of their strength and vitality until they die. Often compared to a vampire, with the exception that the vorvolaka does not usually drink blood, it is more akin to an incubus, succubus, or what is known among the current vampire culture as a psychic vampire.

Septicemic plague is one of the three main forms of plague, the other two being bubonic plague and pneumonic plague. It is caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium commonly spread by bites from infected fleas, and is a particularly deadly form of the disease.

A sirocco is a hot wind that blows from the Sahara Desert in North Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to southern Europe. It can last from a few hours to three days or more. Dr Drossos (Ernst Deutsch) explains that, because the body of the flea that carries the plague-causing bacterium has an 80% moisture content, the hot sirocco wind will serve to 'burn them away' (i.e., to desiccate them) and that the danger of the plague will be over in 24 hours. For that reason, the guests on the isle are praying for a sirocco to start blowing.

That is Cerberus, the mythological three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades in order to prevent the dead from escaping and the living from entering.

Suddenly the winds change. The sirocco has arrived. Mary St Aubyn awakens from her cataleptic state and breaks her way out of the coffin. Mme Kyra warns that she who dies from a vorvolaka will return as vorvolaka. For whatever reason (e.g., revenge, trance, trying to protect Thea), Mary kills Kyra, stabs Gen. Pherides, and then falls off a nearby cliff. As the General lay dying, he swears that he has seen the vorvolaka (Mary) and warns that she must be killed. "It is done," says Oliver, sympathetic to the General's peculiar madness. In eulogy, he says "The General was simply a man who was trying to protect us. In the final scene, Thea and Oliver board a boat and leave the isle.