Island of Lost Souls

It begins with an immense, creaking ship emerging from a silver fog and closes with an island on fire, the myriad beast-men who inhabit it exacting orgiastic revenge on their self-proclaimed creator. Directed by Erle C. Kenton—notably, a former animal exhibitor—and photographed by the great Karl Struss, who won an Oscar for Sunrise (1927), Island of Lost Souls is a feast of spectacle that alternates dizzyingly between the beguiling and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of sea, land, and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of firelit faces and feline hands, delicate and claw-like, desperate to caress a very confused castaway whose desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

Yet the film’s most emblematic image is modest by comparison: that of a single, pointy, very hairy ear. The discovery of this ear by the aforementioned castaway is not only the first sign that something terrible and strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed a half-century later in Blue Velvet (1986)—it is also a sort of mute instruction for the audience to listen. Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s score, wonderful as it is, is used very sparingly; the film’s rich atmospherics are boosted by the paucity of music, giving us unobstructed access to the hair-raising agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture at the hands of Dr. Moreau, a megalomaniacal sadist and one of the cinema’s great evil vegetarians, in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” The film’s year of release, 1932, wasn’t even a generation removed from the real-life horrors of World War I, and Island of Lost Souls thoroughly exploited its spectators’ collective trauma.

The script, by Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie, is a liberal adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) that eschews the novel’s Swiftian satire yet cultivated an air of base terror optimized for celluloid. It follows the shipwrecked Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) as he’s rescued and then abandoned by a drunken sea captain on an island without a name, where mad scientist Moreau (the gloriously go-for-broke, super-queer Charles Laughton) has been vivisecting his way through the animal kingdom in search of the genes that he believes urges all animals to ascend to the traits of man. Moreau lives surrounded by mutants—including one played by Bela Lugosi—most of them hirsute humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant the dictates of their patriarchal master. But there’s also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unwilling to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out to Parker and add to his muddying gene pool. Moreau’s plan goes rapidly, fantastically awry, as such post-Darwin diabolical plans do, which only enhances the residue of nightmare the film leaves on your consciousness. I adore this movie, an audacious, ageless, genuinely chilling pre-Code horror masterpiece—not to mention an inspiration for Devo. 🩸