SOURCE: "The Horror Mythos and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead," in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 10, No. 3 Fall, 1982, pp. 119-29.

Telotte is a film scholar and educator whose well-respected books include Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (1985) and Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (1989). In the following essay, he discusses the ways in which Lewton's horror films—specifically Isle of the Dead—embody and transform fundamentally mythic notions about the individual's relation to the world.

We return to Greece in order to rediscover the archetypes of our mind and of our culture. Fantasy returns there to become archetypal. By stepping back into the mythic, into what is nonfactual and nonhistorical, the psyche can reimagine its factual, historical predicaments from another vantage point.

—James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

Myths, Claude Lévi-Strauss hints, have both creative and destructive functions...