Are we not men?: Listening for answers in Island of Lost Souls and Kuroneko

From its opening apparition of a derelict ship emerging from a fog to its magnificent climactic images of beast-men rising up to exact revenge on their self-proclaimed creator, Island of Lost Souls (1932), photographed by Karl Struss—who won the first Oscar for his enduringly haunting work on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929)—is a feast of spectacle that veers between the seductive and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of land, sea and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of fire-lit faces and feline hands both delicate and claw-like, desperate to feel the warmth of a very confused castaway whose sexual desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

But the image that lingers with me most after watching the film, late on a chilly October night, is modest in comparison: that of a single, very hairy, pointed ear. What makes this image so memorable for me is that not only is it the first sign that something terribly strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed more than 50 years later in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)—but it is also a sort of mute instruction for all of us watching: listen. Among the shrewder choices made by director Erle C. Kenton and/or his collaborators in post-production was that of using Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s musical score, wonderful as it is, very sparingly. The film’s celebrated atmospherics are perfected by the absence of music to soften the agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” Those cries help make Island of Lost Souls a genuinely horrific horror movie. It was those cries I kept hearing as I tried to fall asleep.

The story, for those who don’t know, comes from H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, adapted here by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young. It follows the ship-wrecked 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 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—one played by Bela Lugosi—mostly very hairy humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant out the dictates of their patriarchal, neo-colonialist master. But there is also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unable to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out and toss into his muddying gene pool with Parker.

It’s unlikely Island of Lost Souls would have been made just a couple of years later when the Production Code was more strictly enforced, though the film’s explicit exploration of evolutionary mayhem and trans-species lust still managed to get it banned in the UK for 25 years. These days torture has somehow been domesticated as screen “entertainment,” but Moreau’s distinctive shadow still looms over the imagination. Wells’ Moreau had to move his experiments off the grid and away from prying eyes; today he’d more likely be enjoying a brilliant career in bio-mechanics, a visionary helping to shape our post-human future. The real horror has, it seems, already started to come true.

Criterion’s exceptionally well-compiled release features their freakiest menu since Videodrome (1983); interviews with the guys from Devo, who incorporated Island into the band’s conceptual framework and helped immortalize the line, “Are we not men?”; an interview with David J. Skal regarding Wells in Hollywood; yet another excellent, bouncy, info-crammed audio commentary from Golden Age horror historian Gregory Mank; and, perhaps most fascinating, an interview with Richard Stanley, co-scenarist and original director of the infamous 1996 Island adaptation with Marlon Brando.


Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), which Criterion released last week, is set during the Sengoku period, a time of seemingly endless war. The film begins with a horde of starved samurai entering a very modest abode inhabited by two women, the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and wife (Kei Sato) of a young man (Kichiemon Nakamura) who was conscripted into the army of a local warlord. The samurai consume all available food, rape the women and set their home on fire before disappearing into the grove from which they emerged.

The brutality of this sequence—not unlike many sequences in Island of Lost Souls—is intensified greatly by what is absent from the soundtrack. There is no dialogue whatsoever for the first ten minutes of Kuroneko, but the glances exchanged by the women and the invaders prompt you to steel yourself, and the image, manifesting only moments later, of the women’s bodies as they lay in the ashes of what was once their home—their cadavers soon approached by some rather curious cats—is both chilling and possessive of a spectral beauty that will return throughout the course of this elegant, unsettling ghost story riddled with vicious revenge and perverse reversals.

Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) scared the bejesus out of me when I saw Criterion’s release of it some years back, and Kuroneko wields a similar primal power, much of it deriving from carefully crafted details: a house that seems like a theatre of mist designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the kimono who’s outer diaphanous layer resembles the wings of a fly; the peculiar use of slow-motion or the breath that hangs in the frigid air. The script was founded on a Japanese folktale, yet it holds extra resonance due to Shindo’s class-conscious subtext. The film’s influence can be found everywhere in more recent Japanese horror films, though it received a negligent release in North America in its day. Metro Cinema screened it back in August and Criterion’s deluxe treatment should secure it the much wider audience it deserves. See it when it’s dark out. But listen carefully, too.

Island in the stream: The Invention of Morel

Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1968

In his prologue for the original 1940 edition of The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges makes an impassioned and, unsurprisingly, hugely articulate defense of fantastic literature. He laments its denigration, citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s reports on the British reading public’s scorn for the fantastic back in 1880 before continuing to note the disapproval it drew through the ensuing decades. I wonder what would Borges think of today’s climate, where the fantastic has gained considerable acceptance both among the general public and the literati, yet is so often employed either ironically, as an ingratiating nostalgic device, or in works of juvenile fiction that cross over into an adult reading public for reasons that may have much to do with a longing for the sort of strong narrative many fear has been forsaken by the authors of what we bizarrely choose to call literary fiction. (As opposed to non-literary fiction?) Of course, even now, in the year of the death of J.G. Ballard, the adult-geared, diverting yet thematically rich fantastic abides—most excitingly in the work of Spanish novelist Albert Sanchez Piñol, whose first two novels I'll be writing about later.

But among the attributes that remain so extraordinary about The Invention of Morel is this short novel’s simultaneous homage to its forebears and its tremendous prescience. It looks backward, most openly to Clemente Palma’s XYZ and to H.G. Wells and The Island of Dr Moreau, and forward, most especially to the ontologically vertiginous novels and stories of Philip K. Dick, with which it shares a special gift for scenarios so resonant as to inspire a kind of terror that never really leaves you, and most recently to the game Myst and the television show Lost. It’s author, Adolfo Bioy Casares, was only 26 at the time of its publication, yet his prose reveals a precocious blend of ambition and humility (“I don’t strive to make a big hit,” he wrote of the novel’s genesis, “just to avoid errors”), the result being vivid clarity in constant tension with near-baffling mystery.

Avoiding a prison sentence, a man flees to an apparently uninhabited island. A small group constructed a museum, a chapel, and a pool there in 1924 and then vanished—the island is said to host a grotesque, fatal disease. The fugitive is, we’ll learn, Venezuelan, though he seems to have traveled widely. We never learn the precise nature of his crimes. He is writing two books: Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. He’s also developing theories about immortality. He’s smart, smart enough to actually interpret the strange events he’ll soon encounter, but of the fact that he’s evading one kind of prison for another he seems not entirely cognizant. Much to his initial alarm, he’ll be joined by a group of tourists, including a woman, possibly Quebecoise, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Yet rather than threaten his liberty, they seem not to notice him at all. What’s more, they seem to be repeating the same actions over and over. The repetition, combined with the apparently unbreachable distance that separates him from the woman he’ll learn to call Faustine, only intensifies the fugitive’s longing. (Bioy Casares was apparently drawing upon his own fascination-from-afar with the actress Louise Brooks.) As Ocatvio Paz would later characterize it, the novel conveys how in our longing for what we cannot touch “we bow to the tyranny of a phantom… not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows.”

Bioy Casares with Borges

Bioy Casares with Silvina Ocampo

Even if he had never written a word, Bioy Casares would have a hallowed place in the literary pantheon of Latin America, and his home country of Argentina especially, by mere association: he befriended Borges in 1931, and the pair would go on to collaborate on a number of ventures, beginning with a pamphlet on the virtues of yogurt; and in 1940 he married Silvina Ocampo, another magnificent author of peculiar and bewitching imaginative powers. (Their complimentary yet distinctive styles and subjects, as well as the unusual conditions of their romantic relationship, align them to another sublime pairing of 20th century talents, that of US authors Paul and Jane Bowles.) My fear that Bioy Casares may be forgotten by much of the non-Latin world seems confirmed by the fact that for all of the wonderful supplementary essays, testimonies and documentaries on the Criterion Collection’s new deluxe two-disc edition of Last Year at Marienbad, mention of the pivotal influence of The Invention of Morel on that film is nowhere to be found. It’s a shame, since knowledge of one only enhances the reading of the other.

As with Marienbad, the “rotating eternity” that streams through the fugitive’s experience on the island, the sense of moments that always build toward a point that can never come to fruition, create a fusion of elements that penetrate the emotions as deeply as they do the intellect. That says something. And we’re so much closer to actually living the fantasy of The Invention of Morel; to the merging of the fugitive’s dreams of immortality with that of the scientist who visits his island—and who the fugitive fears may be be wooing his beloved Faustine; to the synthetic duplication of experience that in allowing us to, in some sense, live forever, is also draining us of life. But don’t let me spell all of this out for you—Bioy Casares does such a perfect, surprisingly lucid job of guiding us through this labyrinth. Go back to him. There’s a wonderful edition of the book still in print from New York Review Books Classics ($12.95 US/$16,95 Can.), translated by Ruth L.C. Simms and complete with Borges’ prologue, a very informative introduction from Suzanne Jill Levine, and the original illustrations by Borges’ sister, Norah Borges de Torre.