Isle of the dead

Set in Greece during the 1912 Balkan wars, a group of people are quarantined on a remote island in order to stop a rapidly spreading plague. Amongst the group is the tyranical Greek General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karlof), a sadistic man who initially orders the quarantine and then begins to terrorize a young peasant girl he believes to be some kind of vampiric demon. Producer Val Lewton, working this time around without the aid of his long time collaborator Jacques Tourneur, (together they collaborated on some of the most eloquent horror films of the 40’s including Cat people and I walked with a zombie) manages to create some chills from the material, (which was originally based on an Arnold Bocklin painting called Isle of the dead) particularly in the film’s eerie buried alive sequence. Cast includes Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helen Thimig, Jason Robards Sr.