Yes, it's a wonderful, haunting, dream-like movie with enormous power. The attempts on this thread to define it - or not define it - as 'horror' only serve to prove that it is impossible, and pointless, to try and categorize films - a good movie will always transcend genre, in fact will make the whole concept of 'genre' redundant (it's the same as trying to pigeonhole people). Interestingly (to me anyway) in Gore Vidal's excellent autobiographical memoir Screening History, he not only describes his awakening to the power of movies as a young child at a screening of Karloff's The Mummy, he ends the book at a movie show in an Army hospital, where he was recuperating, in World War 2, and where he had been trying to write what was to become his first novel, Williwaw. Stuck, and unable to complete the work, Vidal describes how the screening of Isle of the Dead for the troops/patients awakened something in his creative subconscious that he is still unable to understand... but whatever it was, the subtle energies in Isle of the Dead spoke to what he, and the Surrealists, called 'the Night Mind', and the rest of his novel flowed freely and smoothly. So yes, surrender to Karloff/Lewton/Robson's wonderful movie, and enjoy the haunting.
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