What Has Sunk May Rise: The Dunwich Horror (1970)

1970 // USA // Daniel Haller // May 8, 2013 // DVD - MGM (2005)

Based On: “The Dunwich Horror” (1929)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]

The 1970 film “The Dunwich Horror” was the third H. P. Lovecraft adaptation from legendary B-movie assembly line American International Pictures—fourth if one counts their distribution of Tigon’s Curse of the Crimson Altar.  Unlike AIP’s The Haunted Palace (1963) and Die, Monster, Die! (1965), which possess a dose of timeless gothic stateliness, The Dunwich Horror feels unequivocally like a horror film that could only have been made in 1970. Its screenplay might be adapted from a story originally published in 1929, but The Dunwich Horror is riddled with post-60s anxieties. Certainly, the plot has a Manson Family flavor: the villain is an offbeat yet alluring stranger who murmurs Free Love bromides but is secretly a malevolent occultist, and he employs mind-control mojo to enthrall a naïve coed for his apocalyptic schemes. The film’s vintage is also apparent in its eccentric style, which draws from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, and Rosemary’s Baby (all 1968) in shallow but unmistakable ways.

In terms of literary pedigrees, a low-budget horror feature could scarcely do better than Lovecraft’s short story, which is regarded as a central work in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle. The villains of the tale are members of the loathsome Whateley family, a degenerate clan dwelling on the outskirts of the New England village of Dunwich. One of several corrupt, faintly inhuman bloodlines to populate Lovecraft’s fiction, the Whateleys are widely known among the local populace as a tribe of warlocks and devil-worshippers. The events of “The Dunwich Horror” concern the emergence of Wilbur Whateley, spawn of the albino imbecile Lavinia and an unidentified father, later revealed to be the Outer God known as Yog-Sothoth. Wilbur’s preternatural parentage is apparent in his alarmingly rapid growth to adulthood and in his affinity for black magic, the latter encouraged by his maternal grandfather. The young Whateley’s unsavory occult research eventually brings him into conflict with Miskatonic University librarian Dr. Henry Armitage, who manages to trammel the madman’s schemes. Unfortunately, Wilbur’s subsequent demise—by the jaws of a university guard dog, no less—unleashes a hidden monstrosity at the old Whateley farm. The titular Horror of the story is a colossal, invisible abomination once bound and satiated by the family’s arcane rituals, and upon Wilbur's death it bursts forth to maraud across the New England countryside.

While narratively straightforward, “The Dunwich Horror” is a thematically intricate monster tale. Lovecraft’s story draws heavily from the works of Welsh writer Arthur Machen, and in particular from the latter author’s renowned fantasy-horror novella, The Great God Pan. That work’s conceit of an aberrant god-spawn recurs in “Dunwich,” although Lovecraft places it into the context of his own alien mythology rather than Machen’s Victorian paganism. While Lovecraft’s story touches upon several strains of physical, psychological, and existential horror, its chilling core turns on a well-worn campfire tale technique: the slow reveal of the Creature in a manner that inspires maximum terror. From the outset, it is obvious to the reader that something unspeakable is concealed at the Whateley farm, and that it will eventually appear in all its writhing, blasphemous glory. Like many Lovecraft stories, “Dunwich” is told in the third-person omniscient past tense, and the author ruthlessly exploits early hints that Something Bad has befallen Dunwich in order to create a sensation of swelling doom.

The film adaptation aims for a similar mood, although it emerges mostly from the off-kilter setting and the hokey familiarity of the monster movie beats. Little credit can go to the frankly dreadful screenplay. That script is a collaborative effort from a trio of writers, all new to feature films at the time: rookie television scripter Henry Rosenbaum, former editor Ronald Silkosky, and an untested fellow named Curtis Hanson. (Hanson would go on to an enduring and respectable career as a writer, director, and producer, hitting his zenith roughly three decades later when he helmed the back-to-back L. A. Confidential and Wonder Boys.)  As in prior AIP Lovecraft films, the screenplay is only loosely based on the original story. However, the narrative core of the feature is more or less preserved from the source material, and some scenes are translated with only scant modification. When it was released, The Dunwich Horror was arguably the most faithful Lovecraft adaptation that AIP had produced up to that point.

That said, the changes that have been applied to the story are fairly significant. The film shifts the setting from 1920s New England to contemporary northern California, turning fabled Miskatonic from a tiny Ivy League bastion into a kind of Lovecraftian community college. While the original short story spanned roughly fifteen years from Wilbur’s birth through the Horror’s climactic rampage, the film compresses the tale’s events into what is apparently a single weekend. Most conspicuously, The Dunwich Horror initially centers the story’s action on a new character, guileless history student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee). She serves as a tissue-thin clone of Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse: a hapless, unholy Virgin Mary, whose primary purpose in the story is to be sexually terrorized by demonic forces.

The Dunwich Horror was the first Lovecraft adaptation in which a well-known horror character actor was not given top billing. In lieu of Vincent Price or Boris Karloff, the film offers quintessential girl-next-door Dee, who by 1970 was on the downslope of an acting career once characterized by All-American ingenue roles (Gidget, The Wild and the Innocent, A Summer Place). Opposite Dee is former child star Dean Stockwell, who had pulled off the tricky leap to well-regarded adult performances (Compulsion, Long Day’s Journey Into Night) before receding from acting and into the haze of 1960s counterculture. (He would, of course, eventually appear in David Lynch’s 1986 masterwork Blue Velvet and later in the beloved time-tripping television series Quantum Leap.)

In the film’s prelude, the bedridden Lavinia Whateley (Joanne Moore Jordan) writhes and wails through an agonizing childbirth, as her father (Sam Jaffe) and a pair of albino hags look on in cold-blooded anticipation. In case the “Not Quite Right” vibe of this scene wasn’t obvious, Lavinia’s sweaty brow is conspicuously marked with an esoteric symbol, which recurs throughout the film in association with the Whateleys and Yog-Sothoth. Following this unsettling opening scene, the film breaks into a splashy but unpolished animated credit sequence, in which the silhouettes of cloaked cultists and ravenous demons glower over their helpless victims.

The Dunwich Horror then fast-forwards roughly two decades, alighting at the buzzing, sun-dappled campus of the College of the Redwoods... er, Miskatonic University. There the viewer meets the tale’s principals: sweet blonde coed Nancy (Dee), her brunette and thus slightly more worldly friend Elizabeth (Donna Baccala), and their mentor, the historian Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley). The professor tasks Nancy and Elizabeth with returning the grimoire known as the Necronomicon to its display case in the university library. Skulking about is dark, handsome, and exceedingly odd Wilbur Whateley (Stockwell), who is a little too eager to sneak a peek at the vile litanies inscribed in the notorious book. Dim-bulb Nancy gladly hands over the tome because... well, apparently because Wilbur says “please." (Setting aside the singular perils of the Necronomicon, Nancy’s willingness to pass a one-of-a-kind book to a total stranger would seem to make her a distinctly awful choice as a courier of historical artifacts.)

Fortunately, Dr. Armitage appears and quickly reclaims the book, interrupting the younger man’s recitation of one of the blasphemous invocations contained therein. However, Wilbur proves disarming and conciliatory, and when the professor discovers that the younger man is the great-grandson of the Necronomicon’s author, the foursome are soon discussing the book’s history over drinks at a local tavern. Armitage is intrigued by Wilbur’s lineage and his amateur scholarship, but the professor flatly refuses the young Whateley’s repeated requests to study the text in private. Charmed by Wilbur’s slick and soft-spoken manner, Nancy agrees to drive him home to the nearby village of Dunwich. Along the way, they encounter that most durable of horror movie characters, the ominous small-town gas station attendant, who becomes spooked when he overhears Wilbur’s surname.

The Whateleys, it turns out, are persona non grata in Dunwich. Wilbur’s great-grandfather was lynched for witchcraft in the town square, and bizarre rumors concerning the clan are still whispered around the coffee pot at the local general store. Wilbur conveniently neglects to mention his family’s unsavory reputation as he ushers the cheerfully oblivious Nancy into the Whateley homestead, a vast, draughty wooden house stuffed with gaudy nineteenth-century bric-a-brac and the odd mod furnishing.

Wilbur goes straight to the sexual predator playbook: small talk is exchanged, drugged tea is brewed, the car is secretly disabled, and before long Nancy is encouraged to slip into a black nightgown and spend the evening. She agrees, though whether due to monumental stupidity or an Outer God mind meld is an open question. Confoundingly, Nancy consents to the sleepover after she catches an earful of the strange thudding and gibbering that emanates from behind a locked door on an upper floor. Nor is she dissuaded by an encounter with Wilbur’s doddering, bug-eyed grandfather, who is still alive and apparently pursuing his passion for maniacal ranting on a full-time basis.

That night, Nancy’s dreams are filled with distorted visions of writhing, naked cultists who chase her through coastal meadows while cackling merrily and coaxing her to join their carnal rites. This sequence is unnerving in a kitschy sort of way, although the revelries more closely resemble a Rainbow Gathering than a Sabbat to the Outer Gods. Nancy’s hallucinations are essentially the worst nightmare of the era's so-called “silent majority”: a California wilderness swarming with free-spirited heathens, eagerly pursuing orgiastic delights while clad in little but dreadlocks and body paint. It’s easy to titter at the reactionary silliness of Yog-Sothoth-worshipping hippies, but Haller dribbles in just enough strangeness to lend the nightmare a feral edge. Between the aboriginal look of the mad cultists, the trippy soundtrack, and the lush green surroundings, the dream sequence faintly suggests an Italian cannibal film, with all the pitch-black moral ugliness that entails.

The next day, Wilbur gently reassures Nancy, speculating that her dreams are merely a symptom of Dunwich’s invigorating atmosphere and her own sexual hang-ups. Shortly thereafter, a concerned Dr. Armitage and Elizabeth arrive to fetch Nancy back to Miskatonic. Unfortunately, the girl is now completely under the spell of Wilbur’s sensitive male schtick, and likely some Outer God voodoo as well. She resists her friends’ urgings to leave the Whateley place, insisting that she is madly in love with Wilbur and his masculine facial hair.

It’s at this point that The Dunwich Horror settles into the somewhat bland shape it maintains for the rest of its running time. Dee’s top billing aside, any pretense that Nancy is the hero of the story is discarded, and she is essentially reduced to an addled victim who must be rescued from Wilbur’s clutches. Meanwhile, Dr. Armitage digs into the unseemly history of the Whateleys in Dunwich, in the hopes that his research will uncover some critical clue about the family’s motives and the extent of their supernatural power. The professor eventually meets with local physician Dr. Cory (Lloyd Bocher), who knows a Whateley family secret or two, including the current whereabouts of Wilbur’s unfortunate mother Lavinia. In the meantime, Wilbur makes a clandestine foray back to the Miskatonic library for the Necronomicon, which he needs in order to complete his dark designs for Nancy’s poor body and soul.

There's also the matter of that locked room and its prisoner. The film’s monster storyline lurches into motion once Dr. Armitage and Elizabeth split up. The latter unwisely returns to the Whateley house on her own, where she is attacked rather spectacularly by the Horror confined in the upstairs chamber. This is probably the most riveting sequence in the film, which abandons realism in favor of harrowing sensory terror. There are dim flashes of flailing pseudopods, stomach-churning noises, bursts of radioactive color, and endless screaming from Elizabeth, whose clothes vanish for no particular reason. It’s at once brazenly exploitative and desperately “arty”, but damn if it isn’t effective. Thereafter the Horror slithers through the rural landscape devouring anything in its path, including a posse of rifle-toting Yankee rednecks and an entire farmhouse complete with cowering family.

No specific reason is given for the Horror’s sudden escape, beyond its agitation at the proximity of Elizabeth’s vulnerable flesh. This is a shame, as the link between Wilbur’s death with the liberation of the Horror was one of the more ingenious and skin-crawling aspects of Lovecraft’s original story. In the film, Wilbur and the Horror seem to be moving on parallel tracks, and while the two come together at the end of the feature, the reunion feels tossed-off and almost incidental. This is merely one aspect of the film’s broader story problems in its second half, which is burdened with at least three subplots. Dr. Armitage works to discover the truth about the Whateleys, Wilbur presses forward with his fuzzy but plainly unwholesome ritual, and the Horror slouches through the woods in search of prey. In spite of all these moving parts, the film starts to feel weirdly inert after a while. Clearly, Wilbur and the Horror must be stopped, but this is about the extent of the film’s understanding of its own stakes. Even the threat that Wilbur’s ritual dagger poses to Nancy’s quivering virginal body doesn’t hold much drama—Dee’s character is just an erotic object on a sacrificial slab after a point.

As a creature feature, The Dunwich Horror is enjoyable stuff, although it’s not particularly frightening or shocking. If one is familiar with the monster movie form, it's obvious how things will unfold from the first shot of that locked door rattling ominously on its hinges. It’s not a matter of whether the imprisoned Horror will break free and munch its way through Dunwich, but when. There’s a kind of elemental pleasure in watching this sort of scenario unfold, but The Dunwich Horror is too unfocused to thrive as a pure monster-in-the-dark tale. The Horror doesn’t appear until after the first act, and with the exception of its jarring and highly stylized assault on Elizabeth, the filmmakers don’t do anything especially imaginative with the creature. The film is fairly stingy about providing glimpses of the Horror; the adaptation seems to retain the original story’s conceit that the abomination is naturally invisible. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing: when the creature design is weak and the visual effects are shoddy, as they are in The Dunwich Horror, the last thing that a film needs is more well-lit, lingering shots of its signature monster.

Director Daniel Haller oversaw AIP’s Die, Monster Die! and therein achieved a gratifying blend of gothic mustiness and Atomic Age weirdness. In The Dunwich Horror, however, Haller at times seems a bit lost. His go-to replacement for costly visual effects is vague, endless panning shots of windblown grass and trees, which are overlaid with the Horror’s moist growls and wheezes. These sequences are in turn punctuated with attention-grabbing point-of-view shots as the creature looms over its screaming, stumbling victims. It’s midnight drive-in stuff, and while there is a trashy charm to such methods, Haller employs them in manner that is ham-handed and a bit tedious. (Not until The Happening would rustling grass be employed to such an underwhelming effect.)

This is not to say that the The Dunwich Horror is a dull cinematic experience. While it is undeniably a cruder, less absorbing film than Die, Monster, Die!, there is an adolescent charisma in its modestly self-aware cheesiness and its weirdly glib expression of familiar Lovecraftian elements. Most distinctively, the film conjures an unsettling atmosphere of supernatural menace from an otherwise benign Pacific coast landscape. Intentionally or not, the soft-focus northern California setting clashes so strongly with the horror of blood sacrifices and other-dimensional entities that it actually amplifies the film’s uncanny aura. Summoning dread in a grey New England fishing village or mouldering English castle is one thing; plucking it from the art colonies and bed and breakfasts of Mendocino County is a different matter. The mood is enhanced immeasuably by the surreal Les Baxter score, which is a strangely transfixing blend of cosmic tones, quasi-exotic rhythms, and silly-then-sinister orchestral bombast.

The film’s dialogue is generally appalling, although at times it shades into such mesmerizing goofiness that it becomes borderline endearing. Occasionally, the script almost seems to be poking fun at AIP’s own catalog of mutant monster flicks, but The Dunwich Horror never quite saunters over the line into full-fledged satire. The actors generally seem to be having a grand old time, which is the primary reason the film manages to be so entertaining, despite its narrative flaws. Of all the performers, Dee is the least game or memorable: she just smiles demurely and sighs her lines in a dreamy, empty-headed way, although she can hardly be blamed for the shallowness of the character. The rest of the cast keenly appreciates that they’re making a Bad Movie, and although their approaches to the fundamentally ludicrous material vary, the sheer grab-bag quality to the performances is captivating.

Stockwell is essentially off in his own film, giving a mannered and hyptnotically insolent performance. He portrays Wilbur as a perfidious and unstable fanatic, magnetically mellow one minute and cartoonishly deranged the next. Eight years before Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers unearthed the nasty, sexist side of the oh-so-reasonable Leftish 1970s male, Stockwell had already figured out what could be unnerving about a quiet, liberal guy in a corduroy jacket and New Age jewelry. Begley goes comparatively low-key, conveying his character’s pompous earnestness while retaining a relaxed air as a performer. Jaffe plays to the rafters in the fine tradition of Bela Lugosi, with spittle flying and crooked, accusatory finger trembling. Bocher, in what is probably the most flat-out amusing turn in the film, aims for a distillation of every exposition-spouting doctor from every genre picture from the previous twenty years. It’s a guilty pleasure to watch him stride around the room, sonorously explicating backstory while ostentatiously puffing on his pipe.

Little touches like Lochner’s performance are what ultimately elevate The Dunwich Horror from a fumbled adaptation into a diverting B-movie pleasure in its own right. The film’s allure is one of outré fifty-cent spectacle, and while that places it light-years away from Lovercraft’s writing, it’s hard to dismiss any work of horror that is so eager and offbeat in its approach to genre conventions.

What Has Sunk May Rise: Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

1965 // UK - USA // Daniel Haller // February 17, 2013 // DVD - MGM (2005)

​Based On: "The Colour Out of Space" (1927)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]

The titles of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” and its 1965 film adaptation Die, Monster, Die! promise very different experiences, and both works deliver on their pledges. “Colour” is one of Lovecraft’s finest short stories, a frightening alien encounter tale that stands as both a paragon of the author’s distinctive prose and the purest expression of science-fiction-as-horror in his bibliography. Like most of the writer’s work, it’s an exercise in slow-burn dread, in which stalwart but guileless New Englanders slowly discern that a terrifying, unfathomable entity squirms just beyond the borders of their understanding.

Die, Monster, Die!, meanwhile, is what one would expect from American International Pictures in late 1965: a low-budget, flamboyant horror film replete with hammy dialogue, lush sets, and gruesome makeup effects. The film’s climactic rampage by a glowing, super-strong Boris Karloff is a weirdly emblematic moment, an almost perfect embodiment of the schlocky yet shamelessly entertaining character of Hollywood horror and science-fiction in the 1950s and 60s. Yet despite Die, Monster, Die!’s significant divergences from "Colour" in terms of both plot and tone, it quite capably conveys its source material's mingling of secular and Puritan dread.

“The Colour Out of Space” is in some ways the essential Lovecraft story, as it concerns humankind’s inability to adequately describe the breadth of the universe with its primitive scientific vocabulary. The meteorite that falls on the Gardner farm near Arkham, Massachusetts in 1882 is subjected to all manner of experiments, producing remarkable yet perplexing results. Most prominently, spectrographic analysis indicates an otherworldly new color that is dissimilar from any conventional hue. (Lovecraft performs some fascinating linguistic acrobatics in order to convey the striking qualities of this alien shade without referencing the familiar colors on the red-to-violet spectrum.) The meteorite and the mutagenic, mind-shattering entity that it carries to Earth are not mystical in nature, but “hyper-scientific”. They represent natural cosmic phenomena that lie so far outside the bounds of human understanding that our species’ crude science can characterize them only incompletely.

Cunningly, Lovecraft embeds this extrastellar nightmare within a rural New England landscape that is thick with spiritual fears, spooky folklore, and all manner of whispered Indian and colonial legends. While “Colour” suggests that a secular framework is ultimately the correct one for understanding the alien horror that gradually overtakes the Gardner farm, the occult anxieties of the locals lend the story a unsettling resonance. Moreover, the learned men who are so flabbergasted by the meteorite’s properties eventually return to the city after collecting their specimens and recording their observations. It is the superstitious country folk left behind who witness the area's subsequent slow-motion ecological catastrophe, as the local flora and fauna—and, most chillingly, the Gardners themselves—undergo disturbing changes. In this way, Lovecraft portrays the demon-haunted bumpkin worldview as flawed, while simultaneously enjoining the reader to value rural people’s intimate familiarity with their natural surroundings.

Exasperation with the wild fears of rural landowners, combined with dismissal of their environmental observations, would eventually became a hallmark of government and corporate attitudes wherever twentieth century progress sought to extend its reach into “underdeveloped” American spaces. Significantly, “Colour’s” tale of 1880s terror is couched within a 1920s framing narrative about just such an endeavor. The “blasted heath” where the Gardner farm once stood is scheduled to be drowned beneath a new reservoir, and a nameless land surveyor has coaxed local eccentric Ammi Pierce to provide his recollections of the weird havoc once wreaked by the meteorite. Upon hearing Pierce’s fantastical and unnerving tale, the surveyor confesses relief at the forthcoming inundation of the accursed area...and a resolve to never, ever drink Arkham city water in the future.

As H. P. Lovecraft short stories go, “Colour” has obvious advantages as source material for a cinematic adaptation. Its core scenario is relatively straightforward—a falling space rock brings radioactive terror to a small town—and would have been quite familiar to the young Atomic Age filmgoers that AIP notoriously coveted. The story contains several fascinating visual hooks, from the ominously glowing meteorite to the twisted vegetation spawned by its alien emanations. There is, of course, the vexing matter of that ineffable color that plays such a prominent role in Lovecraft’s tale, a hue that by definition no cinematic work could adequately convey. (This is likely the most abstract example of one might term “the Lovecraft problem,” the difficulty in translating the author’s baroque yet ambiguous descriptions into effective images.) The screenplay for Die, Monster, Die!, penned by genre television writer Jerry Sohl, sidesteps this problem by cutting out references to the impossible color altogether. Indeed, the script completely strip-mines “Colour” for its essential components and then recasts them in a more conventional gothic horror mold, complete with a forbidding ancestral estate and a comely virginal damsel.

It’s easy enough to see why executive producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson would push the film in this direction, even if it resulted in a feature that bore little resemblance to Lovecraft’s original story. AIP had just completed its Corman-Poe Cycle of films with The Tomb of Ligeia in 1965. Faithfulness to Edgar Allan Poe’s works had not been a prominent characteristic of those features—to put it mildly—and yet the films had been wildly successful. Doubtlessly, this was due partly to Poe’s status as an iconic American horror brand, partly to the presence of lead actor Vincent Price, and partly to viewers' ambivalence to concepts like “literary fidelity”. Certainly, Lovecraft’s name did not enjoy the same level of mainstream recognition in '65 as Poe’s. Indeed, this is what led AIP to disingenuously market 1963’s The Haunted Palace as a Poe adaptation, when in was in fact based on Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Even in the case of Die, Monster, Die!, the first film to properly credit a Lovecraft work as its sole source, the writer’s name is spelled out on the movie poster in the tiniest text not reserved for legalese. A keen-eyed cinema patron could surmise from this graphic design snub that the faithfulness of the adaptation was not a significant concern for the filmmakers.

Although short on devotion to its source material, Die, Monster, Die! possesses a bevy of classic horror landmarks that quickly orient the viewer. Indeed, a filmgoer who had dutifully lined up to see the features in the Corman-Poe Cycle would have been right at home in Die, Monster, Die’s crumbling, fog-shrouded surroundings. Upon disembarking from a train in the English village of Arkham, American scientist Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) questions the local residents on where he might acquire transportation to the outlying Witley estate. He is rebuffed with almost comical gruffness by the villagers, who treat him as though he were asking for a lift to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Forced to make his way on foot, Reinhart passes by an enormous earthen crater surrounded by decimated trees and shrubs that crumble to ash at his touch. He eventually arrives at the Witley grounds, where he is unknowingly followed by a veiled, black-clad figure to the front door. Upon entering the grim manor, Reinhart is quickly confronted by the elderly, wheelchair-bound Nahum Witley (Karloff) and his owlish manservant Merwyn (Terence de Marney). The master of the house acidly but reasonably demands to know why Reinhart is trespassing despite ample signs that visitors are not welcome.

The scientist hastily explains that he is a former classmate of Nahum’s daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer), and it was she who extended an invitation to visit the estate. On cue, Susan delightedly bounces down the stairs to embrace Reinhart, providing a fresh-faced, almost jarring counterpoint to the suffocating Old World atmosphere of the Witley manor. Despite the glowering objections of her father, Susan insists that Reinhart meet her ailing mother, Letitia (Freda Jackson), who wheezes behind the curtains of a massive four-poster bed. Susan and Reinhart’s not-so-secret engagement pleases Letitia, but she asks to speak to her future son-in-law alone. In fearful whispers, she tells him of a servant girl who was similarly ravaged by a mysterious illness and subsequently vanished, and then begs him to take Susan far from the estate as soon as possible.

The encounter with Mrs. Witley rattles Reinhart, but he and Susan resolve to stay at the manor for least another evening, notwithstanding Nahum’s smoldering hostility to the younger man’s presence. It’s at this point that Die, Monster, Die! settles into a narrative pattern that consists almost entirely of Reinhart wandering around and attempting to untangle exactly what sort of foul strangeness is transpiring at the Witley estate. The film is not entirely beholden to his perspective, as it occasionally follows Nahum while he skulks about and pursues his own sinister agenda. In the main, however, Reinhart’s halting explorations are the means by which the plot unfolds, creating a sense of a piecemeal revelation. Bizarre occurrences abound: Merwyn collapses suddenly at dinner, an unnatural light pulses within the greenhouse, Letitia's condition suddenly worsens, and Reinhart is violently ambushed by the veiled stranger. As he begins to unmask the estate’s secrets, Reinhart finds that all of the weird goings-on seem to point to the aforementioned crater and the force that created it. Meanwhile, Nahum seems to be losing what little control he once possessed over a mysterious glowing object in the cellar.

This narrative approach doesn’t exactly lend itself to propulsive drama, as most of the film’s plot points consist of Reinhart discovering horrible things about the Witley manor and about Nahum’s schemes. Many of the film’s significant events would arguably have occurred whether or not Reinhart was even present at the estate. This leaves the protagonist in the awkward position of having no particular role in the story other than as a vessel for exposition, although he does ultimately deliver Susan from the film’s requisite climactic inferno. In this respect, Die, Monster, Die! is actually comparable to many Lovecraft stories—including “The Colour Out of Space” itself—in that the “hero” plays the part of a glorified bystander while fearsome cosmic forces lurch to and fro. Such stakes-free storytelling is risky, but it’s to the credit of Sohl and director Daniel Haller that the film is still quite engaging, even when it’s doing little more than gaping in fear at mutant horrors. The filmmakers maintain an appropriate sense of the uncanny throughout the feature, keeping the viewer slightly off-balance with intense but carefully parceled shocks.

Neither Haller nor cinematographer Paul Beeson have the same flair for widescreen compositions that Roger Corman and Floyd Crosby exhibited in The Haunted Palace and the AIP Poe films. Still, while Die, Monster, Die! is not exactly a visually stunning film, it is rich in memorable sights thanks to the vivid special effects by Ernie Sullivan and Wally Veevers and the downright stomach-churning makeup by Jimmy Evans. Nearly all of the film’s standout scenes center on a bizarre practical effect that sears itself into the mind’s eye. Karloff’s regression into a blank-eyed atomic brute at the film’s conclusion is a particular highlight, as is a startling sequence in which a revolting mutant stumbles through the estate in a bloodthirsty frenzy. There is even an all-too-fleeting glimpse of a formless, classically Lovecraftian monstrosity gibbering in a darkened cell. Haller and editor Alfred Cox—a veteran of Hammer Films horror features—present all of these weird, disturbing components in a manner that maximizes their horrific impact.

This sense of ghastly showmanship distinguishes Die, Monster, Die! from its more academic-minded source material. Nonetheless, both the literary work and film adaptation skillfully exploit the narrow, unsettled area where science-fiction and horror overlap. On paper, Die, Monster, Die! is a “pure” example of the former genre, given that the film’s menace originates from outer space and the story has no place for magic or other supernatural forces. (Indeed, the film draws attention to the hokiness of the “Satanic” devotions that were once perpetrated by the Witley ancestors.) However, Die, Monster, Die! relies to a significant extent on well-worn horror elements, from the mysterious locked room to the suspicious midnight burial. The result is a curious hybrid of an atomic monster feature and a cobwebby gothic mystery. While it doesn’t ever discover the singular, almost agoraphobic dread that characterizes “The Colour Out of Space,” the film does succeed in resolving its disparate generic constituents into a satisfying and genuinely frightening work.

What Has Sunk May Rise: The Haunted Palace (1963)

1963 // USA // Roger Corman // January 14, 2013 // DVD - MGM (2003)

Based On: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941)​

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]​

In 1963, the revelation that the first cinematic adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s work would be an American International Pictures production was probably not greeted with enthusiasm among devotees of the author’s distinctive stripe of Weird Fiction. Set aside for the moment the still-simmering question of whether Lovecraft’s particular brand of cerebral, cosmic horror can be successfully translated to film at all. AIP’s output at that time did not suggest a studio that was capable of (or all that interested in) the cinematic equivalent of the author’s fussy, vividly descriptive prose. James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, the founders and executive producers at AIP, had developed a simple formula for cranking out low-budget features that generated robust ticket sales: they made the kind of movies that teenaged boys wanted to see. By 1963, the company was accordingly known for its “wild youth” pictures featuring hot rods and untamable coeds (Reform School Girl, Daddy-O), its grim yet cheesy science-fiction and horror features (It Conquered the World, The Amazing Colossal Man), and the occasional gestalt of those two currents (I Was a Teenage Werewolf). (The company also produced, improbably enough, La Dolce Vita). In other words, aficionados of verbose, obscure Jazz Age sci-fi magazine authors were not generally in AIP’s target audience.

That said, films based on works of American horror literature were not completely outside AIP’s wheelhouse. In 1963, the company was in the middle of its highly successful “Corman-Poe Cycle,” a series of exceedingly loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations helmed by AIP fixture Roger Corman and starring (with one exception) the lusciously menacing Vincent Price. The Haunted Palace was the sixth film in this cycle, and it has the dubious distinction of not being an actual Poe adaptation at all. (The author’s 1839 poem provides the title and the tacked-on closing lines, but that’s it.) The film is, in fact, the first feature film based on one of Lovecraft’s works; specifically, his masterful novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, penned in 1927 but not published until 1941, four years after the writer’s death.

The Haunted Palace is the thinnest sort of adaptation, drawing little from Lovecraft’s tale other than the rough outline of its scenario, the names of the principal characters, and a memorable detail here and there. (Compared to some of the other films in the Corman-Poe Cycle, however, it’s positively reverential.) The film opens with a prologue set in the fog-shrouded New England village of Arkham, in what one can reasonably deduce to be the late eighteenth century. The menfolk of the village have just reached the point where their outrage over the nefarious deeds of wealthy eccentric Joseph Curwen (Price) has overtaken their fear of the man. The suspected necromancer has been making a habit out of magically luring Arkham’s lovely maidens to his palace at night, to do Devil only knows what to their minds and flesh. Gathered at the local tavern, the villagers are spurred to action by the sight of yet another victim (Darlene Lucht) shuffling through the gloom towards the wizard’s estate. Led by the hotheaded Ezra Weedan (Leo Gordon) and the considerably more perturbed Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the residents of Arkham take up pitchfork and flame in order to confront Curwen on his own doorstep. Unconvinced by his flimsy explanations for all the recent virgin-enchantment and grave-robbing, the mob ties Curwen to a tree and sets him aflame. In his final moments, the doomed sorcerer speaks a dreadful curse, declaring that the descendents of his executioners will suffer for all time.

The film then jumps ahead one hundred and ten years, as Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) and his wife Anne (Debra Paget) arrive in an Arkham that seems not to have changed one jot since the time of Curwen’s unholy trespasses. As it happens, Ward is the wizard’s descendent, and has recently come into possession of Curwen Palace. The superstitious villagers—who, like Ward, bear a startling resemblance to their 1700s forebears—do their best to dissuade the Wards from venturing up to the estate, and even the more rationally inclined Dr. Marinus Willet (Frank Maxwell) advises that the couple return to Boston posthaste. Ward, of course, is not about to walk away from his inheritance on account of a few ghost stories. Within the structure’s walls the couple discovers not only an unsettling portrait of Ward’s necromancer ancestor, but also an unctuous live-in groundskeeper named Simon (Lon Chaney, Jr.), whose grayish-green skin is just one of numerous glaring signs that all is not right in Curwen Palace.

The painting of Curwen both spellbinds and disturbs Ward, and in short order he is acting quite strangely, as the spirit of the damned warlock begins seizing control of his body for extended periods of time. Unbeknownst to Anne, Curwen-as-Ward meets secretly in the bowels of the palace with Simon and another sickly-complexioned retainer, Jabez (Milton Parsons). The diabolical trio labor to not only resurrect Curwen’s exhumed mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but also to complete the twisted ritual that was interrupted over a century ago by the little matter of the sorcerer’s lynching. The logistics of this rite are a bit unclear, but it culminates in the offering of a living woman to an abomination dwelling in a pit beneath the palace. Meanwhile, Curwen finds himself distracted by the fleshy opportunities afforded by his Ward guise, not to mention by his longing for a blazing revenge against his murderers’ families. There is also a somewhat neglected subplot about the strange deformities have proliferated in Arkham; in particular, Ezra Weeden’s descendent Edgar (Gordon again) is imprisoning a Thing that seems to be his own feral, misshapen child.

Corman’s film deviates extensively from Lovecraft’s story, such that The Haunted Palace is less a straight adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward than a complete reconception of it by way of the cinematic horror conventions of the 1950s and 60s. If one were feeling generous, one could ascribe the same single-sentence summary to both novella and film—dead eighteenth century necromancer takes over the body of his modern descendant—but there the similarities end. In the book, Ward is an introverted university student and hobbyist antiquarian who is quite familiar with the unsavory legends surrounding Salem refugee Joseph Curwen, even before his genealogical connection to the sorcerer is uncovered. Charles Beaumont’s screenplay changes Ward into a devoted middle-aged husband (Price was fifty-two in 1963) who has never heard of Curwen prior to Dr. Willet’s somewhat redundant explanation of the events from the film’s prologue. In Lovecraft’s tale, Curwen’s eighteenth-century lair—a country bungalow with concealed catacombs and arcane laboratory—has vanished into ruin, and its present-day location is one of the book’s more significant mysteries. The film, meanwhile, observes darkly that Curwen’s opulent estate was reassembled stone-by-stone from “somewhere in Europe,” which has evidently preserved it against the ravages of time. (Simon apparently responded to his master’s incineration by throwing white sheets over all the palace’s furniture and working out an upkeep agenda for the next century.) The film script also switches the setting from Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island to the more provincial fictional village of Arkham, which elsewhere plays a central role in the author's “Weird New England.”

These various alterations make it easier for the filmmakers to ground The Haunted Palace in conventions that would doubtlessly have been more familiar to a mainstream audience than those of Lovecraft’s musty, bookish brand of horror. None of the elements in The Haunted Palace would feel out of place in another low-budget period horror picture from AIP or from its British equivalent, Hammer Films. There are almost too many classic horror signposts to count: the glowering, undead lord who wishes to reclaim his former power; the lost scion of a noble lineage who exactly resembles an antecedent; the outraged mob that storms the palace; the twisted man-thing locked in an attic; the cobwebby secret passage; the magical painting; the cursed village; the women swooning about in ludicrously lush, revealing costumes.

This kitchen sink approach to the narrative makes the film feel a bit unfocused at times, cluttering up the story with B and C plots and too many underdeveloped avenues that might have paid dividends, terror-wise, if they had been given more space to breathe. Often, it’s not clear precisely whose story Corman and Beaumont are interested in telling. Lovecraft’s novella benefits from the unambiguous presentation of a pitiable victim in Ward and a stalwart (if a bit slow-on-the-uptake) hero in Dr. Willet, but Beaumont’s script muddles this clear-cut approach. Price is clearly the lead of The Haunted Palace, so the filmmakers understandably feel a bit obliged to linger on him. However, Movie-Ward is not much of a protagonist. He isn’t really characterized beyond his dismissal of the supernatural and his fondness for his wife. After the arrival at the palace, Ward spends most of the film doing one of three things: staring into space in fright as Curwen’s spirit slowly works his mind-control voodoo; being temporarily but wholly consumed by the necromancer’s personality, and therefore effectively off-screen; and occasionally rousing himself from his ancestor’s enthrallment in order to wince and grimace and thereby convey the battle of wills raging inside him. (None of this is a slap to Price, who—with an assist from the makeup department—does a fine job of smoothly switching between the malevolent Curwen and the anodyne Ward, often within the space of a line or two.)

If not Ward, then, who is the film’s protagonist? Compared to the rest of Arkham’s villagers, Dr. Willet is honorable and at least somewhat clear-eyed, but the physician is far too passive and spends too little time on-screen to be the Real Hero. Anne is mainly present to look concerned about her husband’s eroding sanity, to be verbally abused and sexually menaced (at a PG level) by Curwen-as-Ward, and to be rescued from the necromancer’s clutches at the film’s fiery climax. The blinkered, snarling Edgar Weedan gets an unusual amount of screentime, given how little the subplot about his mutated son eventually matters, but he’s plainly a secondary character (given that he is dead before the third act). This leaves the film in a rather unpleasant situation where its loathsome villain turns out to be the most active, compelling character, if not exactly the “real” protagonist. There are films that have pulled off this trick, but they tend to be pitch-black, modern-day character studies (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, American Psycho, Spider), not Roger Corman horror flicks from the 1960s.

Conspicuously absent is the novella’s focus on Curwen’s necromantic experimentations, which entail not only the creation of twisted servitor creatures but also the summoning of deceased ancients in order to plunder their knowledge. In the film, the only undead resurrection is that of Hester, who doesn’t seem to have much of a purpose given that Anne becomes the object of Curwen-as-Ward’s’ carnal appetites. This watering down of Curwen’s supernatural activities turns him into a much more vague antagonist. Book-Curwen is almost monomaniacally bent on acquiring esoteric knowledge and magical power in order to secure his position in a future Earth ruled by the unfathomable Outer Gods. Movie-Curwen, meanwhile, pursues several different, unrelated schemes, including a rather prosaic revenge plot to burn alive the descendents of his original murderers. Moreover, the wizard’s most far-reaching plan is annoyingly fuzzy: evidently, it involves breeding women with gibbering horrors in order to spawn monstrous demigods... or something... for some reason.

Its story problems aside, The Haunted Palace is nonetheless an entertaining work of camp horror, chock-a-block with shockingly gorgeous widescreen visuals and a typically lip-smacking (if lesser) performance from Price. Both Corman and regular AIP cinematographer Floyd Crosby are in fine form, and there is an abundance of aesthetically breathtaking sequences, particularly for a low-budget film with repurposed sets. An early highlight is the first foray into the cavernous Curwen Palace, filmed in a single shot that pushes in through the front door and sweeps through the Great Hall. Moreover, for all its silliness, the film succeeds in being genuinely frightening at times, alternating adroitly between suffocating dread and pure shock. One of the most memorable scenes in the film falls unambiguously into the latter category: Curwen suddenly emerges from the shadows of nocturnal Arkham, douses a passing Peter Smith (Cook) in oil, and sets the unfortunate man ablaze, barely lingering to watch him burn. Corman perfectly conveys the out-of-left-field, appalling violence of this moment, leaving the viewer dazed and unsteady.

Given that The Haunted Palace is such an carelessly loose adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—not to mention the studio’s shameless Poe bait-and-switch—it’s unsurprising that the footprint of Lovecraft’s wider mythology in the film is light. During one of Dr. Willet’s three or four exposition scenes, he mentions both Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth almost offhandedly, as though the non-fan should know exactly what those nightmarish god-things are and shudder appropriately. (Aside: How strange is it from the vantage point of 2013 to hear Cthulhu’s name spoken aloud in a film made during the Kennedy administration? Really strange.) The notorious grimoire The Necronomicon makes a faintly ridiculous appearance, its leather cover helpfully printed with its English title in gold lettering. At least Willet has the good sense to dissuade Anne from opening and reading from it, as she is plainly and inexplicably tempted to do. The most disappointing object to be borrowed from Lovecraft’s work comes directly from the source novella. In the book, Dr. Willet’s encounter with the Thing in the Pit is one of the standout moments of raw horror, a slow-burn descent into stomach-flopping dread that culminates in a characteristically hazy glimpse of the monstrosity. In the film, when the creature is finally revealed as an unmoving rubber prop under a wavering green light, it’s a colossal letdown. Moreover, this sight demonstrates just how unsatisfying it is when Lovecraft’s unspeakable abominations, described with his long-winded and yet unsettlingly nebulous prose, are plucked out of the mind’s eye and put to celluloid. (Many similar disappointments will no doubt emerge as this series of posts proceeds.)

The film’s thematic kinship with Lovecraft’s body of work, although thin, is more substantial than its literary allusions. The bleak, almost nihilistic worldview of the author’s fiction doesn’t receive much attention, but it is there, bubbling beneath the surface. It’s most evident in the film’s final shot, which intimates with a sort of cynical smirk that Ward can never completely escape Curwen’s control, and that he was doomed from the moment he set foot in Arkham. The passivity of most of the characters throughout the story creates the sensation of a downhill slide to the film’s nasty conclusion, underscoring that the warlock is ultimately unstoppable. The “victory” for Good at the end of The Haunted Palace represents little more than a speed bump, a short-term disruption in Curwen’s generation-spanning efforts on behalf of the Outer Gods. One of the film’s more disturbing, distinctly Lovecraftian lines actually contradicts the book’s portrayal of Curwen. The novella paints him as a power-crazed wizard, not an actual worshipper of blasphemous entities, and certainly not a fanatic in the service of anyone’s goals but his own. However, the film presents the madman as a devoted disciple of the Outer Gods, and even permits him a moment of fearful humility. Late in the film, Curwen betrays a flicker of awestruck dread, as he admits to Anne and Dr. Willet that his masters are beyond his comprehension: “We don’t fully understand ourselves. We obey. That is all. We obey.”