On a Greek island during the 1912 war, several people are trapped by quarantine for the plague. If that isn't enough worry, one of the people, a superstitious old peasant woman, suspects one young girl of being a vampiric kind of demon called a vorvolaka.

一对英国夫妇在希腊的一个小岛上休息，他们正在传播超出岛民想象的恐怖。只是偶尔停下来和任何移动的东西握手，不管是男人、女人还是动物。但他们会逍遥法外，还是伦敦的检察官能够结束他们的疯狂杀戮？

Film about the tragic, legendary Russian film star Vera Kholdnaya (1893-1919) is compiled from countless films from that age. The Island of the Dead is a film about the demise of the Russian Epocha Modern (a trend analogous to Western variations such as Art Nouveau and Jugendstil). The symbol of this culture was the legendary Russian film star Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919), who evoked a poetic image of the young urban woman on the silver screen (for instance in films by Yevgeni Bauer). Her death in Odessa in 1919, shrouded in tragedy and mystery, put a symbolic end to the pre-Revolutionary period. The Island of the Dead is composed of fragments from numerous films from this period, juxtaposed with other contemporary artistic expressions such as music and painting. Kovalov shows convincingly how the fragile beauty of the Russian Epocha Modern had to make way for the pressure of Futurism, Constructivism and other 'progressive trends', and how these '-isms' were then also relegated to the melting pot to be remoulded by totalitarian norms.