Island of Lost Souls

Admittedly, I have always been somewhat disappointed by old school Hollywood monster films. Whether it be Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi or Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) directed by Jack Arnold, I have been consistently letdown by the seemingly overblown reputation of early Hollywood horror flicks, especially when comparing them to the great phantasmagorical cinematic works of German expressionism. One thing that stands out glaringly regarding Hollywood monster movies is the atrociously recherché and inorganic nature of these mostly one-dimensional works, but I guess American audiences were fairly easy to convince during (and after) that era. The other day I took a somewhat hesitant chance on the early biopunk flick Island of Lost Souls (1933) directed by Erle C. Kenton, the first cinematic adaptation of H.G. Well’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). I can veraciously admit that Island of Lost Souls is the only early American monster flick that not only exceeded my expectations, but also resonated in my mind a number of days thereafter. Although obviously shot mostly on the restricting confines of a studio set, Island of Lost Souls manages to conjure up the eerie atmosphere of a genuine isolated island microcosm that mentally-feeble man-made monsters call home. Dr. Moreau (played royally by a charmingly sinister Charles Laughton) is the undisputed and self-appointed dictator of this island as he satanically created its inhabitants by somehow hybridizing man and animal via vivisection.  Of course, things change when a critical quasi-humanist named Edward Parker (played by Richard Arlen) finds himself stranded on Moreau's own morbid maniac version of Gilligan's Island.  Island of Lost Souls is thematically reminiscent of German horror writer Hanns Heinz Ewers' short story Mamoloi, a colonial weird tale featuring an exotic Haitian lady who sacrifices herself for her foreign Aryan lover, as the film features a forbid love affair between the film's protagonist Edward Parker and an exotic panther-woman. Naturally, being a vintage Hollywood production, Island of Lost Souls is full of wooden acting and absurdly contrived melodrama, but like most horror films, one can look past these somewhat irritating, consequential flaws.

In our modern and increasingly globalized and homogenized world, one does not always know what to expect when traveling to various parts of the world. With somewhat hostile Turks inhabiting large pockets (many times virtual ‘no go zones’ for indigenous Teutons) of Berlin, Germany and the nearly complete third-worldization of American cities with hostile and mostly unassimilable immigrants from every underdeveloped nation in the world, one would think that a shadow-hand is consciously speeding up a worldwide civil war and virtual cultural apocalypse of sorts. In Island of Doctor Moreau, a science fiction scenario of master versus untermensch is suspensefully played out in a closed-off and mostly uncharted cosmos of the dysgenically damned.  One could even argue that the film is an (unintentional) metaphor for the bloody and genocidal history (slave revolution of 1804) of Haiti when it was still part of the French colony Saint-Domingue. During Island of Lost Souls, the exceedingly pompous and obscenely self-confidant Dr. Moreau even has the gall to state, "Do you know what it means to feel like God?" (an infamous quote that UK censors found to be most contemptible) in regard to his self-righteous campaign to subvert nature and create subservient hideous beings that are neither men nor animals, but poor creatures who suffer the unideal fate of being somewhere schizophrenically in between. Inevitably, Dr. Moreau’s Mephistophelian display of cruelty and pathological narcissism, as well as his incontested sense of entitlement, leads to his most unpleasant downfall at the peculiar man-pawls of his creations/ex-slaves as he arrogantly never considers that his total control over his army of mongrel mammals will one day wane when these half-thinking monstrosities finally realize that freedom and, even destruction of ‘society’ as it stands, can become a reality.  Island of Lost Souls is essentially the fictional horror film equivalent of Harvard-educated eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard's prophetic work The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man (1922).  Stoddard predicted that, like the manimals in Island of Lost Souls, former Western colonies throughout the world would be overthrown and conquered in bloody revolts led by newly confident indigenous populations who were cognizant of the white man's curtailing power in the world. Personally, I found Island of Lost Souls symbolic of what one can expect for the future of the Occidental world, only the conclusion of the film is notably less frightening than the very potential dystopian destiny that might occur as a result of never-ending mass revolts spreading like rabid locusts in formerly civilized lands. 

One aspect of Island of Lost Souls that I found especially captivating is the strikingly realistic appearances of the various manimals, as many of the actors that played these miserable creatures are authentically deformed, apish, and carrying the grand misfortune of owning exaggeratedly sloped foreheads that were quite typical of prehistoric man.  I am sure that pioneering Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso would have approved of the casting for Island of Lost Souls. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that today, one can visit any major American city and see certain human-beings that looks as artlessly atavistic, mongrelized, and grotesque as the tragic monster-men of Island of Lost Souls. In fact, American horror author H.P. Lovecraft experienced a similar real-life personal horror scenario during his brief migration to New York City during the early 20th century. Lovecraft described new immigrants to NYC as, “The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.” In fact, such ‘horrifying’ privy encounters would influence the iconic sub-humanoid monsters Lovecraft would dream up for his Weird Tales and lead to his (somewhat arguable) reputation as America’s greatest writer of horror literature. One could only imagine Lovecraft’s reaction were he to visit the increasingly degenerate city today. Like all great science fiction works, Island of Lost Souls is a film that manages to combine a pessimistic premonition of the future with fantasy elements that somewhat cryptically manage to chill one’s soul. 

-Ty E