[In Cinema, Horror]: Although prolific in representations in horror cinema and television shows, the island as an object of horror has yet to be further studied. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the island has been the stage for numerous horror films and television shows. Notably, the island is generally represented as the stage for horror, very rarely being the source of horror itself. However, there are some notable examples where the island itself represents the horror whether because of its inhabitants, for example in Doomwatch (Sasdy 1972) or The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), or due to its fauna and flora, like Jaws (Spielberg 1975), and The Bay (Levinson 2012). The characteristics that the island evokes can be read in a binary. Instead of representing a private paradise, these islands usually represent individual (or group) seclusion that brings about the need for survival. The island often functions as the representation of exclusion from ‘normal’ society and the characters’ inability to reach it safely, often connecting it to the idea of the supernatural, such as in Blood Beach (Bloom 1981), The Woman in Black (Watkins 2012), an adaptation of Susan Hill’s homonymous work (1983), and Sweetheart (Dillard 2019), or of madness, for example in Shutter Island (Scorsese 2010) or The Lighthouse (Eggers 2019). It also evokes the feelings of imprisonment, limited resources, strange or foreign life forms, and a place where privacy can mean the concealment of horror to outsiders, such as Midnight Mass (Flanagan 2021), which evokes religious horror that is kept at bay from the rest of the world and contained because it is set on an island, or Fantasy Island (Wadlow 2020), where the notion of paradisiac and idyllic islands is subverted into its dystopic opposite. The island in horror films has been studied from a postcolonial perspective (Williams 1983; Martens 2021), particularly concerning films of Northern-American or British production that set the horror on foreign islands, namely those which are not European and white-centred, focusing, for instance, on the representation of African-Caribbean religions and practices and the zombie figure. It has also been studied through the lens of diabolical isolation and as the site for scientific experiment, like The Island of Lost Souls (Kenton 1934), the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Mureau (1896), creation and/or concealment, as in Sedgwick’s study about ‘Nazi Islands’ (2018). However, it is from Australia that the study of the island as a horror site seems to be more fertile, specifically studies of ‘Ozploitation’, that is, films that explore the Australian island landscape as a product of colonisation and of disconnection from the (main)land (Simpson 2010; Culley 2020; Ryan and Ellison 2020).
Bibliography:
CULLEY, NINA. “The Isolation at the Heart of Australian Horror.” Kill Your Darlings, Jul-Dec 2020, 2020, pp. 263-265. Informit, search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.630726095716522.
MARTENS, EMIEL. “The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’. Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2021, doi: 10.3390/h10020062.
RYAN, MARK DAVID, AND ELISABETH WILSON. “Beaches in Australian Horror Films: Sites of Fear and Retreat.” Writing the Australian Beach. Local Site, Global Idea, edited by Elisabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien. 2020. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
SEDGWICK, LAURA. “Islands Of Horror: Nazi Mad Science and The Occult in Shock Waves (1977), Hellboy (2004), And The Devil’s Rock (2011).” Post Script, special issue on Islands and Film, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2018, pp. 27-39. Proquest, www.proquest.com/openview/00ccdba578653d3fe1a5b2e7b5bfb0b5/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=44598. Accessed January 27, 2022.
SIMPSON, CATHERINE. “Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge: animals, eco-nationalism and the ‘new nature’.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43-54, doi: 10.1386/sac.4.1.43_1.
WILLIAMS, TONY. “White Zombie. Haitian Horror.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 28, 1983, pp. 18-20. Jump Cut, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC28folder/WhiteZombie.html. Accessed January 27, 2022.
Filmography:
Blood Beach. Directed by Jeffrey Bloom, The Jerry Gross Organization, 1981.
Doomwatch. Directed by Peter Sasdy, BBC, 1972.
Fantasy Island. Directed by Jeff Wadlow, Columbia Pictures, 2020.
Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Studies, 1975.
Midnight Mass. Directed by Mike Flanagan, Netflix, 2021.
Shutter Island. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Paramount Pictures, 2010.
Sweetheart. Directed by Justin Dillard, Blumhouse Productions, 2019.
The Bay. Directed by Barry Levinson, Baltimore Pictures, 2012.
The Island of Lost Souls. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, Paramount Pictures, 1932.
The Lighthouse. Directed by Max Eggers, A24, 2019.
The Woman in Black. Directed by James Watkins, Hammer Film Productions, 2012.
Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy, British Lion Films, 1973.
Further Reading
CHIBNALL, STEVE, AND JULIAN PETLEY (eds.). British Horror Cinema. British Popular Cinema. 2002. London and New York: Routledge.
HUTCHINGS, PETER. Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. 1993. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
—. Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, 2nd edition. 2018. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
—. The A to Z of Horror Cinema. 2009. Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.
LEEDER, MURRAY. Horror Film. A Critical Introduction. 2018. New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury.
SMITH, GARY A. Uneasy Dreams: The Golden Age of British Horror Films, 1956-1976. 2000. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company.
WALLER, GREGORY A. (ed.). American Horrors. Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. 1987. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.