New Print Producer Val Lewton was a melancholy poet of the horror film. His best works grip with a terror that is made believable by its slow buildup in signs of the supernatural; these are quietly dropped along the way like so many falling leaves. Isle of the Dead is a lesser Lewton, but eerily affecting nonetheless. In 1912, a disparate group of Americans and British are marooned on a Greek Island during a quarantine for plague. Despite the best efforts of a doctor, the spread of the disease is attributed to the "vorvolakas," demons of local legend. A sacrifice must be made. The genteel wife of a British Consul suffers cataleptic fits and lives in mortal terror of being buried alive; when she appears to die of plague, the camera gives us a privileged moment of fear that is compounded by the ignorance of those on the "other side" of the screen. Joel Siegel in his book Val Lewton has written of the "ravaging" of the original screenplay which stripped the film of its "carefully rhymed elements of superstition and enlightenment." But what survives is an evocative transitional use of folkloric images to initiate us into the world of vampirish demons who would "drain all the life and joy from those who want to live."