In the pantheon of horror films, Island of Lost Souls is the most audacious, ferocious and subversive shocker of the 1930s," says horror historian Gregory William Mank. "It's 'Golden Age Horror' at its most magnificently amok, the lurid tale of a mad doctor who, via vivisection, transforms a panther into a woman, and then hopes to mate her with a human male".
Laughton, then 33, was married to Elsa Lanchester (pictured), who went on to play the shock-haired Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Unknown Kathleen Burke (pictured) was recruited after a nationwide contest to be the Panther Woman.
Island of Lost Souls is an American science fiction horror film starring Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi and Kathleen Burke as The Panther Woman. Produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933 from a script co-written by science fiction legend Philip Wylie, the movie was the first film adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, published in 1896. The film was directed by Erle C. Kenton.
Both book and movie are about a remote island that is run by an obsessed scientist who is secretly conducting surgical experiments on animals. The goal of these experiments is to try to transform the animals into human beings. The result of the experiments is a race of half-human, half-animal creatures that live in the island's jungles, only tentatively under Moreau's control.
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