Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October horror 2012: The Dunwich Horror (1970)

We begin H.P. Lovecraft week with The Dunwich Horror, released in the first few weeks of 1970.  It was directed by Daniel Haller and starred Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee.  It also involved the Michael Fox who forced Michael J. Fox to use the J, which is kindof cool.  The movie itself is an adaptation of the Lovecraft story of the same name, written by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, and Ronald Silkosky.


The story is only loosely based on Lovecraft's short, some of the major differences being the timeframe that it takes place during and the Nancy character.  The original story unfolds over the course of several years, while the film is covered in less than a week.  Also, Sandra Dee's character doesn't exist in the original at all.

The core concept, however, has remained intact.  That is that Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) wants to "procure" a copy of The Necronomicon from the Miskatonic University library so that he can summon the Outer God: Yog-Sothoth, one of the Old Ones.  Since this is Lovecraft week, this is going to come up a lot.  The Old Ones were a race of other-dimensional beings that are coterminous with our space-time continuum.  There's a lot to suggest the Old Ones were also the gods of various ancient poly-theistic religions.  The mythology suggests they ruled the earth before the ages of men and are now trapped outside our universe, having been overthrown and all but destroyed by the shoggoths, a slave race of their own creation.  Now that I type it out it also sounds a lot like the Goa'uld from Stargate.  Moving on.

The cult imagery they use is kindof a hodge-podge of early Meso-American and Egyptian symbols, which seemed very unfocused because it was largely treated as dressing.  Lovecraft is all about this sort of magic, where words and symbols have mighty power and simple drawings can drive people mad.  So this seems like a missed opportunity to make the images actually symbolize something.

It's disheartening that the actual Dunwich Horror has become a B-plot in its own movie, with the mysterious entity sequestered in the Whately house being referenced visually only a handful of times and barely ever during dialog.  When it eventually escapes it racks up maybe 2 casualties before straight up vanishing, presumably during the climax at the end of the movie.  Its origins remain the same as the story but there is so little focus on it that it almost doesn't make sense its included at all.

In the film, everything that happens is the direct result of human action.  In the story, like most of Lovecraft's cannon, humanity is just along for the ride.  Wilbur is killed in the original during a pretty chance encounter, so there is no ceremony.  In the film the ceremony is an easily relatable and tangible thing that Armitage has to stop in order to save the day.  In the story, the thing to be stopped is an invisible monster that explodes out of the Whateley house to rampage across the countryside where it terrorizes the locales for several days before being killed by Armitage and several others from Miskatonic University.  So the Horror, the evil, was not called immediately by a human in a way that killing the human would stop it.  It is worth pointing out that this is one of the few Lovecraft works where a human manages to stop the monster, possibly because this is just a purely terrestrial creature with possible cosmic parentage, not an Elder God itself...or even a cult.

It's a fun movie that seems to nod strongly to Lovecraft while trying to update his pacing to something much more brisk.  Although, to be totally honest they may have moved things along a bit too quickly since it feels like something is always happening which prevents anything from having weight.  The summoning ceremony, which seems to have been basically invented for the movie, fits really well into the story.  However, it does make the climax seem really strange, since it basically consists of Armitage and Whateley shouting gibberish at each other until Whateley spontaneously combusts and falls of a cliff.  It's so early in the 70s, it really seems like it should be considered a 60s movie and the animated title sequence and cheese theme-music reinforce that.  Though one of the things I found really interesting was when the composer was making the contemporary theme music go off-kilter with theremin and merging it with the generically "exotic" theme they've been using as the cult theme.

Tomorrow: Lovecraft week returns with Die, Monster, Die! also directed by Daniel Haller and based on the Lovecraft short story The Colour of Outer Space.

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