57. Island of Lost Souls

by Stephen Mullen

The Island of Lost Souls is another of those films that might be more horror and adventure yarn than science fiction, though it is certainly science fiction. The basic plot is SF – a mad scientist in his lair, short-cutting evolution with surgery and cellular manipulation, creating monsters to roam the world – though none of this is given a lot of weight. Dr. Moreau’s fictional science is treated as the given of the story, and they move on from there. But the film is also science fiction at a more significant level. The horror themes (monsters, body horror, the slippages of identity and so on) run alongside themes more associated with science fiction: man vs. nature; science’s attempts to control nature, with mixed results; the question of progress, whether progress is necessarily an improvement, whether it is reversible, and so on. These themes run all through the film, they are embedded in its style as much as its story; the story, the film, present a microcosm of dystopia, and a dystopia very much made by human attempts at science. Its science fiction is wrapped around its horror tropes and vice versa – working very well at both.

Criterion’s edition of the film contains an interview with Gerry Casales and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, taking about the film’s influence on their ideas and music, its relevance to 1970s Akron, and so on. What did they see in it? They talk about Ghoulardi (who showed it on late night television); they talk about Kent State (where they were students at the time of the shootings); they talk about de-evolution, about the film and its look (its masks, shadows, monsters) and its themes, and what it meant to them. They mention a strange fact – how this film set on a lost jungle island in the south seas looks like what’s outside their doors – 5 o’clock at the Goodyear plant, says Mothersbaugh. It’s true – the film has a strong dose of German expressionism in its veins, and the beast men emerging from one of Moreau’s stone doors and passing a wall where their shadows loom as they shuffle out of the shot, bent knees and backs, look like factory workers shuffling out after their shifts. The same image turns up in another 70s era rust belt song, Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness”: “Image object illusion, go down to the corner, where none of the faces fit a human form, nothing I see there isn’t deformed, maybe in a secret lab works Dr. Moreau” – it’s less the images of deformity that catch you, than the beginning – go down to the corner – this is what it looks like, now, today, Cleveland in the 70s.

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