“When the seasons, and the cycles of the moon were right, then they came, one by one, and gathered among these stones. They selected a beautiful girl like you, and with their black robes blending into the night, they lit candles and gathered round… and then they waited… they waited for the moment when she would allow the powers of darkness to enter her… the moment when the gate would open and The Old Ones would come through… and a strange chant echoed in the night… Yog… Sothoth… YOG… SOTHOTH!”
I know, I know – Cronenberg and Fulci don’t make the cut, and yet this load of old hoo-hah is on the list? What gives? Well, to begin at the beginning: when I started reading (and by extension, reading about) H.P. Lovecraft as an impressionable teenager, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that there was little point trying to track down the various movies that had been made based on his work. Perhaps with the notable exception of the not-terribly-Lovecraftian “Reanimator”, word was that they were all godawful embarrassments – commercialised, watered down bowdlerisations of the master’s work undertaken by men with little interest in, or understanding of, the material they were adapting, with this 1970 AIP version of “The Dunwich Horror” being singled out for particular scorn.
And in many ways, the Lovecraft scholars were perfectly correct – arguably, there has still never been a film that has successfully captured the essence of the Cthulhu Mythos stories (the name of Lovecraft-film blog Unfilmable.com says it all really). But, taking off my po-faced Lovecraft fan hat (or sinister, diamond-encrusted tiara, I suppose) and putting on my trusty Weirdo Movie Fan fedora, I’ve got to admit that having now watched just about all of those much-maligned Lovecraft adaptations, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all on at least some level. If rarely leading to anything you’d file as an outright ‘classic’, a Lovecraft-based script almost always seems to lure ostensibly sane filmmakers over the hill into uncanny valley, inspiring the creation of some inexplicable, oddball films that trip themselves up in a rush to sidestep traditional horror tropes and find something eternally strange and confounding instead. Precisely the kind of films we like to watch around here in other words! “The Shuttered Room” with Oliver Reed, “The Haunted Palace” with Vincent Price, “Die Monster Die” with Karloff – all are well worth tracking down, but “The Dunwich Horror”, helmed by long-time AIP/Corman art director Daniel Haller, is the daddy of them all.
From one of AIP’s best ever animated credits sequences, to Les Baxter’s deranged ‘Black Mass in a tiki lounge’ score, to the heavy dosage of horny ‘70s pop-Freudianism, to Sandra Dee’s post-Manson naked hippie bloodlust nightmares, to endless freaky psychedelic lighting effects, a Shaw Bros style magical shoot-out finale and the erstwhile star of Gidget squirming in ecstasy with a copy of the Necronomicon between her legs on a storm-ridden cliff top altar set that looks like some it’s fallen straight out of an opium vision, I can only really quantify “The Dunwich Horror” as a hurricane of utter weirdness.
And who better to stand at the centre of this garish tempest than Dean Stockwell, in a career-best performance as the sublimely creepy Wilbur Whateley, using his questionable charms, piercing warlock-gaze and hypnotic pinky-finger wiggling to lure former beach movie queen Sandra from the confines of Miskatonic University back to the night-haunted backwater of Dunwich? Stockwell and Haller actually manage to build Whateley into a very compelling and funny character here – a self-made young master of the occult who has grown up in isolation and transcended his lowly hillbilly origins through sheer force of will, his book-learned charm mixing with an egotistical fixity of purpose to mask a poor lad who’s probably never had a chance at a proper, human relationship in his life.
As in Lovecraft’s story, the outside of the Whateley residence is a fetid, backwoods shack, but when Stockwell leads Dee inside, the scene changes to a kind of opulent, gothic entrance hall, full of esoteric murals and glowing, geometric oddities – presumably bought through mail order or painstakingly built by Wilbur himself, whilst Sam Jaffe as his embarrassing old granddad sits in the corner muttering (they have a kinda ‘Steptoe & Son’ thing going on). Perhaps my favourite moment in the whole film is when Wilbur graciously offers tea to his guest, and we see him duck through a side door into a crappy looking tract house kitchen, burning his fingers lighting the stove with a match, before he returns in majestic style with an oriental silver tea-set on a golden platter.
Then we’ve got cop movie/western veteran Ed Begley (you WILL recognise him) playing a Dr. Henry Armitage who acts as if he’s spent more time rubber-hosing informants in ill-lit basements than perusing obscure works of medieval theology in the Miskatonic library, and snigger if you will, but when the indescribable invisible creature in the Wheatley attic is eventually unleashed, I think the approach taken by the filmmakers is actually pretty effective, mixing scenes of terrified, shotgun-wielding villagers searching the woods and hills for an unknown adversary with treated stock footage of rivers overflowing, trees collapsing, undergrowth being flattened by high winds etc. Sounds unbelievably stupid on paper I know, but as handled here in tandem with gratuitous sub-2001 light show FX, I think it’s a pretty decent a way of filming the unfilmable. Oh, and Lovecraft’s dreaded whippoorwills calling home the soul of mad Lavinia Whateley is a beautifully creepy touch too – a great scene in the middle of all this raving buffoonery.
Not many people seem to like “The Dunwich Horror”, but I found it an absolute joy – a profoundly unheimlich artifact sitting right at the crossroads of so many things I love, and executed with such an unremittingly crass sense of wrong-headed inspiration – I can’t help but love it.
1 comment:
um, ditto!
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