General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Island of Lost Souls

Island of Lost Souls is a 1932 American pre-Code (era before Hollywood's 1934 moral code was strictly enforced) horror film directed by Erle C. Kenton for Paramount, adapted from H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist on a remote South Seas island uses vivisection to transform animals into human beings.¹ Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau, with Richard Arlen as the shipwrecked Edward Parker, Leila Hyams as his fiancée Ruth Thomas, Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law, and Kathleen Burke as Lota, the Panther Woman.² Banned or heavily cut in many countries on release, the film is today generally considered the best screen adaptation of Wells's novel.³

Key fact	Detail
Production	Paramount Productions, Inc.; directed by Erle C. Kenton; screenplay by Waldemar Young, adaptation by Philip Wylie, from Wells's 1896 novel¹
Running time	Reported as 67 or 70 minutes by the AFI Catalog, 70 minutes by Criterion, and 72 minutes by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia⁴^•²^•¹
Key crew	Cinematography Karl Struss; makeup Wally Westmore; art direction Hans Dreier; special photographic effects Gordon Jennings²
Panther Woman contest	A summer 1932 nationwide search drew more than 60,000 entrants; winner Kathleen Burke received a five-week Paramount contract at $200 per week⁵
Censorship	Found unsuitable for classification by the British Board of Film Censors on 13 March 1933; passed with cuts on 9 July 1958; banned in twelve countries⁶^•⁷
Copyright	Registered by Paramount Productions, Inc. on 29 December 1932 (LP3518)⁴
Later adaptations	Terror Is a Man (1959), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, Don Taylor), and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996, John Frankenheimer, with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Edward Parker, the sole survivor of the sinking of the S.S. Lady Vain, is rescued by the trading ship S.S. Covena and deposited, along with a shipment of wild animals, at the experimental station of Dr. Moreau, a mad scientist engaged in what the film calls "bio-anthropological research." The island is inhabited by half-man, half-beast creatures that Moreau has produced through painful surgical procedures intended to hasten the evolution of animals into humans.⁴^•³

Moreau keeps the beast-men in check through rituals of fear and group recitations of his commandments, led by the Sayer of the Law (Lugosi), whose litany asks "Are we not men?"³ He has created a single female, Lota, from a panther, and plans to mate her with Parker to produce the first animal-human offspring; Lota, however, is already reverting to her animal state.⁴^•⁸ When Parker discovers Moreau operating on what appears to be a man in his laboratory, the House of Pain, he tries to escape with Lota.⁴ In the climax, the beast-men learn that Moreau ordered Ouran to kill Captain Donahue, violating his own prohibition on spilling blood; they lose their fear of Moreau and drag him to the House of Pain to take surgical vengeance on him.¹^•⁴

Production

The Panther Woman contest. To cast Lota and publicize the film, Paramount staged a national search in the summer of 1932 for an unknown woman to play the Panther Woman, auditioning contestants in local competitions in cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston, St. Petersburg, and New York. More than 60,000 women entered; screen tests were held in the studio's Publix theaters, with Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille, Rouben Mamoulian, and Norman Taurog as the ostensible judges. The winner, Kathleen Burke, a Chicago dental hygienist, received a five-week contract at $200 per week and five weeks' accommodations at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and was often billed alongside her better-known co-stars.⁵^•⁷^•⁴ Paramount repeated the stunt the following year with a search for a "Lion Man" for a 1933 film.⁹

Design and performances. Wally Westmore, then head of Paramount's makeup department, crafted the beast-men's faces, though he went uncredited in the film; the makeup was the talk of the lot during production, when hairy extras strolled the grounds between takes.⁷^•³ Future stars Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott appeared under the makeup.³ Lugosi, in dire financial straits and facing bankruptcy by the time shooting began, accepted an enormous pay cut and earned $875 for the role.⁷ Laughton, in one of his first major Hollywood roles and already known as Nero in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932), modeled his appearance on an eye specialist he had visited, and his whip-handling came from training with a London street performer for the 1928 play A Man with Red Hair.³

The AFI Catalog records location shooting on Catalina Island, California, while a Criterion essay describes the jungle as shot on the Paramount Ranch near Malibu; both accounts credit cinematographer Karl Struss with tight, cramped framing among foliage and dark lighting.⁴^•¹⁰

Censorship and reception

The film's frank references to vivisection, its suggestion of mating humans with animals, and Moreau's delight in "feeling like God" provoked censors in many jurisdictions. It was banned in twelve countries, including England, where it was described as being "against nature."¹⁰^•⁷ The BBFC found it unsuitable for classification on 13 March 1933; it was finally passed for cinema release with cuts on 9 July 1958.⁶ In the United States, state censor boards cut lines and scenes according to local standards, and the film was rejected in toto by fourteen state censor boards.¹⁰^•¹¹ Paramount had little trouble with the Hays Office during production in 1932, in the loosely enforced pre-Code era, but the film faced heavy cuts for a 1935 re-release after Joseph Breen began strictly enforcing the Production Code.¹²

Contemporary reviewers were largely repulsed by its disturbing imagery, and some small-town exhibitors despised the film, but horror fans endorsed it enthusiastically during its theatrical run.³^•⁵ Time Out later judged its horror "more intellectual than graphic" but called it a remarkably powerful film.⁸

Wells's response and legacy

Wells disliked the adaptation because it changed Moreau from a well-intentioned visionary into a sadistic tyrant, a depiction the Science Fiction Encyclopedia also notes.³^•¹ Despite this, the film is generally considered the best screen version of the novel, and a 2011 dissertation chapter credits it with setting the standard for adaptations of the story for the rest of the twentieth century.³^•⁹

Its influence reaches beyond horror cinema. The beast-men's chant "Are we not men?" inspired the title of Devo's debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, and a short 1976 Devo film accompanies the Criterion edition; Wells's line itself paraphrased the song of the monkey people in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.²^•³ The film's makeup has inspired generations of monster-movie artists, and its themes of manipulating nature read as contemporary to audiences familiar with debates over cloning and animal testing.²^•¹⁰

Preservation. By the time Criterion restored the film for its Blu-ray release as Spine #586, no existing negatives survived; the restoration combined two 35mm prints supplemented with pieces from private collections.¹³^•²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026