Horror Express: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

 Darker, creepier and more intense than the other ‘mad doctor’ movies Boris Karloff made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, this fourth and final instalment in the loosely connected series finds incoming director Edward Dmytryk really upping the ante, delivering a film which remains startling and somewhat unnerving to this day, in spite of its brutally foreshortened 64 minute run time and all too evident budgetary constraints.

A brief but highly effective prologue gets the antennae of us Lovecraft-fanciers tingling right from the off, as the daughter of Karloff’s Dr Julian Blair delivers an ominously deadpan voiceover narration, intoned over a series of very well done model-shots which take us on a slow pan toward the doors of a derelict, storm-lashed cliff-top mansion;

“In Barsham Harbour, on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters which face toward my father’s house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father’s house. I don’t know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave.”

I don't know about you, but I’m sold.

Thereafter, we rewind seven years, and the film’s first act settles down into a pattern very much in keeping with the Karloff’s other Columbia pictures, as the gentle and soft-spoken Dr Blair, a research fellow at a fictional New England college, astounds his fellow boffins by demonstrating that the human brain generates an electro-magnetic impulse which can be recorded, and potentially ‘read’, via electrodes attached to the subject’s temples, hooked up to a primitive, EEG-like encephalogram. (1)

Claiming that “the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger than man’s”, Dr Blair uses his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) as his primary experimental subject. His beliefs become both more questionable and more obsessive though when, stricken with grief after Helen dies in a car accident, he observes that his machinery is still recording the unique ‘signature’ of her brainwaves, convincing him that his wife’s spirit remains present in the ether, attempting to communicate with him.

As you might well imagine, ‘The Devil Commands’ becomes a gloomy and rather sad affair at this point, and Karloff conveys Dr Blair’s misery and exhaustion with almost painful conviction. Viewers who had previously turned out to see Karloff in Nick Grinde’s ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’ (1939), ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ or ‘Before I Hang’ (both 1940) will have been more than familiar with the path the good doctor subsequently takes, as his mental health gradually crumbles, and as he repeatedly ignores the advice proffered by the film’s procession of straight-laced supporting players, who urge him to give up his weird work and take a well-earned break.

The film’s tone shifts considerably however when, on the advice of his simple-minded assistant Karl (Cy Schindell) - only potentially mad scientists are assigned one of those, you see - Dr Blair attends a séance conducted by a renowned medium, the stentorian Mrs Blanche Walters (Anne Revere).

Though Mrs Walters is initially pretty pissed off when the doc busts up her phony séance, easily exposing the assorted gimmicks she has been using to hoodwink her clients, she nonetheless reveals herself to be as cold, avaricious and amoral an operator as any film noir spider-woman - so naturally, when Blair suggests that she could make herself a great deal of dough assisting him with his experiments, she’s all ears.

Before long, the doctor’s increasingly unhinged attempts to channel vast amounts of electricity through Mrs Walters’ brain in an attempt to make contact with Helen’s roving spirit lead to poor old Karl getting accidentally lobotomised. Blanche, who seems suspiciously well versed on how to handle such situations, suggests they duck out and make a quick getaway before anyone finds out about the accident, prompting the unlikely trio to flee the campus and hit the road, setting themselves up in the remote cliff-top manse we saw during the film’s prologue.

Once this memorably eerie set-up, reminiscent both of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and the unhinged finale of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X a decade earlier, has been established, palpable fear and loathing on claustrophobic interior sets is soon the order of the day. In a neat turn-around, we’re reintroduced to our characters a year or two down the line, through the eyes of the county sheriff, who comes a-knocking, investigating, oh, y’know, just some bodies which have gone missing from the local cemetery (uh-oh).

After the door is opened by a cowering, lantern-bearing maid (a great performance from character actress Dorothy Adams), the sheriff soon encounters the lumbering, Igor-like Karl, before Blanche descends the rickety, shadowed staircase, glaring daggers in full-on, imperious Lady Macbeth mode. And as to the good doctor, who shambles into view behind her, meanwhile… well, he’s certainly given up brushing the dust out of his hair, let's put it that way.

Under Blanche’s encouragement no doubt, Blair has of course gone full loony by this stage, and the crooked couple have indeed been re-appropriating the carcasses of the local citizenry for use in their experiments. In a breathtaking tableau of psychotronic weirdness, they have in fact wired up the mouldering corpses in what look for all the world like antiquated, metallic diving suits with flashing Tesla coils appended to their helmets. They are seated around a table with their arms out-stretched, in some perverse, quasi-scientific imitation of a séance, whilst the doctor’s banks of McFadden-esque electrical equipment whir and drone behind them. Good lord!

With shit like this going down, it’s naturally only a matter of time before a torch-wielding mob is called for - but, given that we know the house is still standing seven years hence, they’re required on this occasion to nix the flames and do their worst with clubs and wooden poles instead. Yikes.

Edward Dmytryk would soon of course go on to play a significant role in defining the aesthetic of film noir with the classic ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944), and he takes the opportunity here to prove himself a post-expressionist stylist per excellence here, ladling on angular shadows, spot-lighting, venetian blinds and dutch angles as if they were going out of fashion, and employing harsh, jagged editing patterns to produce a rather fevered, dissonant tempo.

The film’s production crew meanwhile douse practically every scene in thunder, lightning and squalling gales, undercutting the science-based plotting with the kind of quasi-gothic atmos you could cut up and sell by the pound, whilst mournful cellos saw away on the stock music score, emphasising the essentially tragic nature of the storyline.

Towering over the bumbling, submissive Karloff during the second half of the film, Anne Revere likewise acts up a storm, giving us the kind of vile, emotionless femme fatale / heartless bitch character who could eat Phyllis Dietrichson or Mrs Danvers for breakfast.

The uncertain nature of her relationship with Karloff’s character is in fact one of the movie’s most intriguingly perverse elements. Could they really have a romantic connection? Seems unlikely, given that Dr Blair is still utterly fixated on trying to establish contact with his late wife. We’ve already established that Mrs Blanche Walters is driven by a desire for money, but surely hanging around in a dilapidated mansion living off the diminishing resources of a crazy old geezer wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Does she just get a kick out of lording it over the doctor and his mindless servant, or - is she hooked on the thrill she derives from having thousands of volts of electricity (and potentially the disembodied brainwaves of the dead) blasted through her nervous system on a regular basis..?

The latter possibility could have conceivably made her an early precursor to Barbara Crampton’s character in Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of From Beyond, but, forced to rattle through its potent story at breakneck speed to hit the era’s one hour b-movie finishing line, ‘The Devil Commands’ is allowed little time to explore such niceties as character motivation, leaving a wealth of rampaging ambiguity in the gaps between scenes which makes the film all the more fascinating.

Of course, the title and poster blurb assigned to this movie by Columbia upon its release are a complete misnomer. The film contains no reference to the devil, and he certainly issues no commands. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there is no allusion to religion or Christian belief to be found anywhere in the film; even the obligatory blather about defying God’s law or somesuch which was routinely shoehorned into this era’s post-Frankenstein mad doctor movies in notable by its absence.

Perhaps one explanation for this is that the script for ‘The Devil Commands’ (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews & Milton Gunzburg) was loosely derived from William Sloane’s science-based supernatural novel ‘The Edge of Running Water’ (first published in 1939) - an acclaimed work, often hailed as a landmark in the field of ‘cosmic horror’, which I’ve been meaning to obtain a copy of for many years at this point. (2)

Whilst I’d imagine that the film probably ditches or reworks many of the details of Sloane’s story, disquieting remnants of what I understand to be his core premise remain. Namely, we’re talking here about the idea that, whilst Dr Blair believes that his experiments allow him to make contact with departed human souls, he is actually tapping into something else entirely.

This truly frightening concept, beautifully implied by the novel’s title, is realised rather more bluntly during the frenzied climax of Dmytryk’s film, wherein we see Dr Blair’s table of wired up corpses become possessed by some unholy St Vitus’ dance as the riled up mob of townsfolk approaches, summoning up what, in their audio commentary for the film’s blu-ray release, the ever-reliable Kim Newman and Stephen Jones identify as perhaps cinema’s first example of a full-blown trans-dimensional vortex.

If on one level ‘The Devil Commands’ remains a morbid and joyless rumination on the self-destructive futility of seeking solace from beyond the grave, it is simultaneously animated by a crazed spark of total morbid madness which proves extremely compelling. Crashing heedlessly into the realm of what-man-was-not-meant-to-know with a fervour far more alarming than than anything generally encountered in the rather sedate world of early ‘40s scientific horror films, it stands as a raw, wild and genuinely unnerving classic of the weird/cosmic end of the genre.

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(1) I’m no scientist, but it’s interesting to note that, whilst Karloff’s learned colleagues in ‘The Devil Commands’ treat his theories as if they pretty far-out speculation, Dr Blair’s initial ideas about brainwave activity are essentially correct, and paper-and-ink EEGs very much like the once he demonstrates in the film had actually been in use since at least the early 1920s.

(1) This 1967 Bantam edition of Sloane’s novel, with its IMPOSSIBLY CREEPY cover illustration, is a particular paperback holy grail of mine.

Lovecraft on Film: The Unnamable (Jean-Paul Ouellette, 1988)

“The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty: no freedom – we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron straightjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.”  - H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable’

First published in the July 1925 issue of ‘Weird Tales’, H.P. Lovecraft’s brief tale ‘The Unnamable’ is an odd business, even by its author’s usual standards. Though ostensibly a conventional horror story, with an old dark house, a graveyard, scary folk tales and a grisly climax involving an indescribable monster to be found within its few short pages, Lovecraft’s intentions in drafting this one actually seem to have lain somewhere else entirely.

Seemingly functioning more as an extended in-joke aimed at the author’s fans and correspondents, ‘The Unnamable’ is in fact an archly self-aware piece of niche literary jocularity. Chiefly centred around a faux-Platonic dialogue conducted between two gentlemen lounging around in an Arkham cemetery, it also meanwhile provides a vehicle for Lovecraft’s sincerely held views on the value of mystery and ambiguity within literature and culture (as opposed to the smug, Christian Science-derived rationality proffered by his hypothetical critics).

Though identified in the story’s final sentence as “Carter”, the narrator of ‘The Unnamable’ is clearly a stand-in for Lovecraft himself – an amateur scribbler of spooky tales, criticised by his more down-to-earth friends for his “..constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things”; “..a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my low standing as an author,” the narrator informs us, tongue firmly in cheek.

Beginning with the unforgettable opening gambit, “We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham and speculating about the unnamable,” the story in fact allows us a rare glimpse of Lovecraft’s capacity not only to recognise, but to happily lampoon, the excesses of his own style, as he proceeds to pepper his text with adjective-clogged sentences so patently absurd that they surely must have been intended as a kind of winking self-parody.(1)

Much of this literary jiggery-pokery is inevitably lost in Jean-Paul Ouellette’s 1988 movie adaptation of ‘The Unnamable’, but nonetheless, the first-time writer/director does a surprisingly good job of retaining the self-reflexive tone of the piece, remaining faithful both to the flimsy outline of the story, and to the reassuringly eerie atmosphere of Lovecraft’s fantastical New England.(2)

Immediately expanding upon Lovecraft’s story, the film opens with a historical prologue which seems designed to reassure nervous Weird Tales fans that they can nix that outraged letter to the editor of ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ – this movie’s got them covered.

In the drawing-room of a shadow-haunted, colonial mansion, an aged alchemist or warlock of some kind is chilling out with his extensive collection of grimoires. But, his contemplation of the Pnakotic Manuscripts is persistently interrupted by the unholy sounds emanating from the house’s gabled attic room, causing him to recall that this is where he has locked up the unseen, and indeed unnameable, creature which used to by his wife.

One cautious (and, it must be said, extremely slow) ascent of the perilous staircase later, following some shaky fingering of the wrought iron key which may perchance unlock the big, rusted padlock which keeps the door chained, and – surprise! – we’re treated to some of the best value late ‘80s gore that money can buy, and “the unnameable” is on the loose.

Though admirable in its intent to establish an authentically “Lovecraftian” feel, the meagre resources with which this film was produced are all too clearly on view during this prologue. Though the sets and lighting are pretty decent, and the grimoires and candles and stuff look lovely, some of the other period details have a bit of an Andy Milligan feel to them, which does not necessarily bode well for what follows.

(I just couldn’t get past the absolutely ridiculous nightcap/hanky thing the old man is wearing on his head, whilst the puritan minister who turns up to declare that the house should be sealed up and shunned for all eternity looks about twenty years old, and appears to be wearing a sheet of A1 printing paper with a hole cut in the middle around his neck.)

We’re on safer ground however – in terms of costumery, at least - as we zip forward to present day, where we find ourselves in a bucolic cemetery just down the road from Arkham’s Miskatonic University campus. Here, as per Lovecraft’s tale, a group of friends are indeed ‘speculating about the unnameable’. Admittedly, the mature adults of HPL’s story (in which the narrator’s rationalist antagonist is identified as “principal of the East High School”) have been recast here as fresh-faced students, and there are three of them, rather than two, but y’know – this is an ‘80s horror movie. Young victims are needed. 

Making an inter-textual jump never explicitly stated in the source text, Ouellette’s screenplay assumes that that our narrator, “Carter”, is in fact none other than Randolph Carter, protagonist of both HPL’s titular ‘Statement of…’ (1919), and his subsequent series of Dunsany-inspired “dreamland” fantasies.

As played here by the immediately likeable Mark Kinsey Stephenson, it is also clear that this Randolph Carter is going to be anything but a sickly, introverted Lovecraft stand-in. In fact, he comes across as a lively and rather charismatic figure right from the outset, becoming more-so as the movie progresses.

An oddball aspiring folklorist possessed of nervous energy and a presumably vast knowledge of esoteric lore, Stephenson’s Carter makes for a pretty great horror movie hero all round. It’s easy to imagine him having headed up his own TV show or on-going franchise in which he traipsed around New England, collecting old stories and investigating sinister goings-on, like some more collegiate equivalent of Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘Silver John’ character.

(Though this possibility sadly never came to pass, the appeal of Stephenson’s characterisation was clearly not lost on Ouellette and his collaborators; ‘The Unnamable’s 1992 sequel is sub-titled “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, with Stephenson top-billed.)

Unfortunately, none of the other characters here are quite so memorable, but again – we’re in ‘80s horror movie territory here, so they’re all just meat for the grinder, more or less. For the most part the cast acquit themselves fairly well, with Charles Klausmeyer standing out for his young Roman Polanski / John Moulder-Brown type look in the role of Carter’s younger buddy/protégé Howard Damon. (He also seems to wear a tweed suit and tie to campus every day, which lends a touch of class.) 

In this telling of the story, Carter’s rationalist antagonist in the graveyard discussion – business major Joel Manton, played by Mark Parra – becomes so worked up about his friend’s willingness to embrace the supernatural that he stomps off in the direction of the haunted house just across the way, declaring that he will spend the night there in order to prove that nothing untoward is going on within. (Good luck with that, fella.)

Shrugging this off, Carter and Damon meanwhile return to campus, where we re-join them the following morning in the Miskatonic University library, where they discuss Manton’s apparent failure to return from his impromptu camp-out.

Meanwhile, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a routine campus slasher, as two studious sorority girls (one of whom the shy Damon happens to have the hots for) are chatted up by a pair of generic frat-boys, one of whom proudly displays that universal signifier of jockitude, a woollen sweater hanging loose over his shoulders (where indeed it remains, worn like a cloak, for the entire remainder of the movie).

Claiming rather feebly that they need to undertake some nocturnal location-scouting for forthcoming initiation-related hi-jinks, the jocks manage to convince the reluctant girls to meet them at the spooky old house by the graveyard that evening for a thinly veiled double-date, and… well you don’t need to be much of an aspiring folklorist to figure out where all this is headed. (Toward a partial recreation of 1981’s ‘Hell Night’, if nothing else.)

This mixture of quirky, Lovecraftian atmospherics and rote slasher movie cliché may seem a little jarring at first, but ‘The Unnamable’s tone actually remains pretty consistent throughout, using hefty doses of humour and raised eyebrow self-awareness to distract attention from the minimal and formulaic plotting -- much as Lovecraft did in his original tale, in fact.

Despite the low budget, the film’s photography (courtesy of DP Tom Fraser) is pretty good, particularly once the action moves entirely into the cluttered, candle-lit interior of the derelict old house during the movie’s second half, making extensive, rather fantastical use of blue gel lighting, alongside some imaginatively patterned shadows.

So smitten do the filmmakers seem in fact by their creepy gothic lighting, the film actually begins to suffer from something of a middle act slump, as characters spend a very, very long time exploring the eerily lit interior sets. Feeling suspiciously like attempts to pad out a near non-existent narrative to feature length, these extended peregrinations could well induce severe wakefulness / attention-span issues amongst late night/inebriated viewers, but as a dedicated fan of ‘60s Italian gothics, I was personally happy enough to roll with ‘em.

Likewise, David Bergeaud’s ridiculously over-bearing, faux-classical keyboard score may prove an intolerable for some, but I actually found it weirdly endearing, functioning in a sense as a persistent reminder of the film’s independent/low budget origins and determined eccentricity, lest we begin expecting it to get too slick n’ professional.

As befits a movie dealing with the, ahem, “unnameable”, much of the drag in the middle half hour results from the filmmakers’ reluctance to reveal their monster. The mystery of what the creature actually looks like is maintained for what, by 80s/90s b-horror standards, feels like an exceptionally long time. And, when we do finally start to get some glimpses of our resident beastie, well…. the hairy goat legs were a bit of a surprise, I’ll tell you that much. [Cue momentary flashback to Dragnet (1987).] 

Unfortunately, most of the posters and box art for this movie rather give the game away, spoiling the eventual appearance of the monster by utilising stills which make it look a scrawny cousin of that demon thing from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’, but if we can put that out of our minds before viewing, the creature’s eventual Big Reveal within the movie itself is…. actually quite impressive.

Portrayed by actress Katrin Alexandre, who employs a series of extravagantly theatrical, choreographed movements, this creature’s amalgam of disparate monster tropes manages to justify the “unnameable” epithet about as well as anything which could be conjured up on this movie’s budget possibly could. 

Fans may be liable to declare that it looks absolutely nothing like the kind of entity we usually think of as fitting in to Lovecraft’s universe, but they’d be well advised to refer back to the source text, wherein HPL, who seems to been on a bit of a Cotton Mather-inspired backwoods folklore kick at this point, does actually state that his indescribable creature’s attributes include horns and cloven hooves, as well as the more familiar tentacles and shapeless, shifting clods of organic matter.

Obvious though it may be, the climactic scene here in which the monster skulks in the shadows whilst a doomed jock/sorority girl couple are making out in a deserted room (thus delivering the film’s requisite minimum quantity of gratuitous nudity), rolling a severed head into the view of the female partner, is very well done – a killer scare with some sharp editing. (Meanwhile, I’ve also got to admire the fact that the couple weren’t deterred by discovering a bloody femur bone beneath their makeshift bed.)

Another highlight in the lead-up to the film’s conclusion are the scenes which find a flustered Randolph Carter indulging in a few arch, rather Jeffrey Combs-esque line readings as he ploughs his way through the deceased warlock’s grimoire collection, which has apparently been left untouched for three centuries. Kicking up as much dust as you’d expect in the process, he eventually zeroes in on (what else?) the ‘Necronomicon’ itself, and, in a development almost certainly inspired by ‘The Evil Dead’, he’s soon located the requisite “anaal nathrakh”s necessary to send the unnamable creature which was once the ancient wizard’s wife back from whence it came. (3)

(Actually, it’s implied that Carter saves the day by invoking some kind of dryad-ish woodland spirits embodied in the trees outside the house, or something – an interesting, if under-explored, twist.) 

Though not a lost classic by any stretch of the imagination, ‘The Unnamable’ is nonetheless a noble effort. Ouellette was clearly a sincere fan of Lovecraft’s work, and his attempt to make a film which might actually appeal to his fellow cultists whilst also fulfilling the commercial requirements of a late ‘80s American horror movie demonstrates a certain amount of both daring and ingenuity.

Considering that he and his collaborators were working on a miniscule budget, utilising a largely inexperienced cast and crew, and working to a script which ultimately doesn’t add up to much more than a handful of well-worn genre clichés, I think ‘The Unnamable’ actually emerges as a surprisingly accomplished piece of work, within its own modest parameters. It conveys a ‘little-train-that-could’ style sense of fun and achievement, which seasoned connoisseurs of independent American horror should be able to appreciate, even if it couldn’t hope to hit the heights so recently scaled by Stuart Gordon and co in the field of Lovecraftian cinema. 

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(1)Just as an example, try this one on for size: “Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”

(2) After working in camera tech / continuity roles on a variety of marginal New York-based productions in late ‘70s, Ouellette seems to have gotten quite a big break when he was appointed as ‘second unit director (action)’ on ‘The Terminator’ in 1984, but sadly his career in the film industry never really seems to have gained much traction after this. Aside from the two ‘Unnameable’ films, his only other feature as director is a 1990 STV actioner named ‘Chinatown Connection’, and the remainder of his sparse CV comprises short films, a TV movie script and production credits on a few little-known projects in the early ‘00s. 

(3) Yeah, I know “anaal nathrakh” is actually from ‘Excalibur’, but gimme a break here – I just like it more than the ‘Evil Dead’ incantations.

October Horrors # 13: Dark August (Martin Goldman, 1976)

By far the biggest revelation unearthed by Arrow Video & Stephen Thrower for the second volume of their admirable American Horror Project, ‘Dark August’ is a low key supernatural thriller shot in Stowe, Vermont in 1976. Never a high profile cult item, the film has, I would suspect, flown entirely beneath the radar of the vast majority of cult movie aficionados prior to its HD resurrection this year; a circumstance that seems extremely unfair after watching it for the first time.

To put it simply, ‘Dark August’ is excellent. If you’re a fan of subtle, slow-burn horror, films with a folk-magic / witchcraft element or independent ‘70s U.S. cinema in general, I would recommend obtaining a copy of Arrow’s new transfer and watching it post-haste.

Although this was a 100% independent production, written, directed and performed by a small collective of Vermont residents with no external funding or distribution deals in place, the finished film exists on an entirely different plain from most of its competitors in the regional horror sweepstakes. Not a “higher” plain necessarily (I don’t want to sound like I’m belittling the noble tradition of independent commercial filmmaking in the USA here) - but a different one, for sure.

The first thing which struck me about the film is its uncanny mixture of stylish, technically accomplished filmmaking (particularly in terms of its editing, camerawork and presentation of the natural environment), and candid naturalism in terms of its performances, plotting and character interactions. A very ‘70s combination, I would suggest, but one which was rarely attempted, let alone achieved, by filmmakers outside of the artier end of the Hollywood industry.

Far away from the work of even the most sophisticated of ‘70s independents (Romero, Hooper etc), ‘Dark August’ instead feels more like a distant cousin to such studio-backed quasi-horror films as Altman’s ‘Images’, Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (definitely a conscious influence, I suspect), or even Philip Kaufman’s remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (which admittedly was made a few years later, but still).

Plot-wise, director Martin Goldman and actors/writers J.J. & Carolyne Barry keep things pretty minimal here, with a set up that on paper sounds like TV movie / short story material at best, but through careful attention to detail, and by zoning in on psychological nuance, they still manage to create an intriguing and open-ended narrative.

Following a messy break-up with his wife, forty-something New York advertising artist Sal Devito (J.J. Barry) has relocated to a small Vermont town to start life afresh, apparently following in the footsteps of his best friend Theo (Frank Bongiorno), who lives nearby and appears to have given up the rat-race to become a potter. During his first year of rural life, Sal has instigated a swell new relationship with Jackie (Carlyne Barry), who has recently established a small art gallery in the town.

Less happily however, Sal has also caused the death of a local young girl, killed when she ran in front of his jeep on a lonely road (a traumatic event which we repeatedly relive alongside him in flashback through the course of the film). Although Sal has been cleared of responsibility for this tragic accident in court, coming to terms with it is not so easy, particularly given the suspicion which already hovers over him as a loud and gregarious outsider moving into a small, insular community.

As the film opens, we see the dead girl’s grief-stricken grandfather turning to age-old sympathetic magic to exact vengeance upon Sal, who, as a result, is about to find himself haunted by something a little more tangible than mere repressed guilt and mid-life angst.

The very definition of a ‘slow burn’, ‘Dark August’ keeps its horror content simmering down at the level of vague, background uneasiness for a good forty-five minutes or so, but in the meantime, it gives us a generous and detailed portrait of the lives of this small group of interlocking friends (Sal, Jackie and Theo, plus the latter’s new age-y girlfriend Lesley (Kate McKeown)) as they haphazardly attempt to establish an idyllic, post-counter-culture environment for themselves in the depths of Vermont’s green hills, reinvigorating the sleepy local community with their arts n’ crafts, pot-smoking, tarot-card reading take on rural life.

Given that much of the film was reportedly shot in director Goldman’s own house, and that Bongiorno, McKeown and the Barrys all seem to have been real-life escapees from NYC, I’m guessing that ‘Dark August’s creative team had very direct, personal experience of the situations experienced by the characters herein, and as a result the quiet, subliminal tension between the locals and more cosmopolitan incomers is believably conveyed throughout.

Indeed, although we see this world through Sal’s eyes, there is a distinct ambiguity here regarding who we were actually supposed to sympathising with, suggesting that the film’s supernatural storyline could easily have functioned as an analogue for the filmmakers’ sense of uneasiness regarding their own intrusion into the community around Stowe, Vermont.

It is interesting to note that legendary comics artist Stephen R. Bissette, a lifetime Vermont resident who grew up near the film’s shooting locations, states in his essay accompanying the Arrow release that he finds J.J. Barry’s Sal a deeply dislikeable protagonist and was rooting for the locals throughout, gleefully anticipating the grandfather’s spiritual vengeance. As a city-dweller watching in his London flat though on the other hand, I personally found Sal and his friends to be quite relatable (his refusal to button up his shirt properly notwithstanding), and I enjoyed spending time with them. In keeping with the film’s inevitable designation as “folk horror”, could there be a deeper comparison to be drawn here with the moral ambiguities of ‘The Wicker Man’?

As Sal is increasingly plagued by stomach pains, inexplicable losses of control and unnerving glimpses of a hooded, “spirit of dark and lonely water”-like revenant haunting the woods around his property, Goldman does an excellent job of conveying the character’s increasing sense of paranoia and disorientation, ratcheting up the unease into full-blown menace and setting the stage perfectly for the late introduction of the film’s one ‘name’ performer, Kim Hunter – the widely esteemed method actress who played opposite Brando in 1951’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and went on to earn a steady living as Zira in the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise.

Here, Hunter plays Adrianna Putnam, a backwoods witch and psychic counsellor who takes up Sal’s cause after Lesley urges him to consult her - and by anyone’s estimation, she does so brilliantly, using her reportedly genuine interest in the occult to invest the role with the kind of unassailable, “shit just got real” gravitas which adds greatly to the film’s genuinely hair-raising finale.

The organic / atavistic treatment of magic(k) in ‘Dark August’ feels disarmingly matter-of-fact, yet also horrifically tangible, and as things build to a magic circle-bound, battle-of-wills showdown, there is a sense of real exhilaration to be savoured as we realise that a film which initially felt an off-brand version of one of those New Hollywood-type movies where Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton hang around on their porches mumbling to each other, has transformed itself into a full-on ‘The Devil Rides Out’ type proposition, having reeled us in slowly but surely until this transition seems completely natural, and indeed pretty terrifying.

‘Dark August’ is not a perfect film by any means, and I hope I’m not overselling it here. Since you’re asking, my chief complaint would probably be that the story could have worked a lot better if the revelation that the grandfather character actually was instigating a magical attack against Sal had been withheld until the end, thus allowing us to relish the possibility that his problems were solely the result of his own supressed guilt and paranoia, and making the blood n’ thunder action of the finale that much more powerful.

Given that this was a regional independent production offering little in way of obvious exploitation thrills though, I’m guessing that they simply had to put some horror signifiers up front in order to get the film even the very limited distribution it did achieve on the drive-in circuit; so, I won’t hold this missed opportunity against them, and it certainly doesn’t stop ‘Dark August’ from standing out as a vastly more rewarding film that I ever would have suspected – one of my top horror discoveries of the year, without a doubt.

Increasingly these days, dedicated genre film fans could be forgiven for thinking that mid-20th century English language horror films have been picked over so thoroughly – analysed, fetishised, celebrated and monetised – that we surely must have reached the end of the line by now. It’s all too easy to feel that everything special, weird and noteworthy within this finite canon must by this point have been identified as such and commended to our collective attention, leaving critics and blu-ray labels increasingly dredging up the silt as they struggle to remain relevant.

Huge and heartfelt thanks are therefore due to Arrow, and to Stephen Thrower, for renewing our faith and for reminding us of one of the core motivating principle underpinning any adventurous movie fan’s endeavours: there’s always another one. There’s still gold in them there green hills, and ‘Dark August’ is a nugget that proves it.

Some thoughts on… The Witch(Robert Eggers, 2016)

Arriving in my household this December on the back of a veritable avalanche of critical adulation (a major studio distributed horror film won “best director” at Sundance? Really?), Robert Eggers’ directorial debut proved… heavy going, to be honest.

Rendered in the dour, near-monochromatic style that so often seems to predominate in 21st century films that aspire toward “seriousness” (don’t get me wrong, I know life for the 17th century Pilgrim Fathers wasn’t exactly a riot of Technicolor extravagance, but I’d at least like to think they at least encountered the occasional dash of blue or green amid the grey, and managed to look at each other without frowning every now and again), ‘The Witch’ is nonetheless refreshingly unequivocal about its identify as a hackle-raising, scare-yr-pants-off horror film.

Indeed, in purely utilitarian terms, it succeeds extremely well in this area. Despite its overtures toward what I suppose we’re obliged to call in shorthand the “arthouse crowd”, I’ll readily admit that ‘The Witch’ was the most viscerally frightening film I’ve seen in years. Full-on sneaking-glimpses-of-the-screen-through-my-fingers terrifying in places in fact. So, yes - if you are the sort of person who is inclined to judge horror films based primarily on their capacity to be “scary”, you can anticipate a right doozy with this one, irrespective of its somber tone and subject matter.

Whilst I was busy being reduced to a quivering wreck by the film’s overpowering aura of dread and persistent threat of imminent, soul-wreaking violence however, I was also uncomfortably aware of the fact that the techniques Eggers was employing to generate these responses from me were just as cynically manipulative as those found in the most base of jump-scare filled slasher flicks.

From the slow, steady-cam crawls through unfamiliar locations to the nerve-shatteringly loud Penderecki-via-Hermann score, the rapid movements erupting from still life-esque quietude, semi-hidden tableaus of alarming Goya-esque beastliness and aggressive soundscapes of rumbling earthquake drone and chittering demonic feeding - every trick in the Hideo Nakata-via-David Lynch playbook for scaring the bejeezus out of your audience whilst still remaining artistically credible is exhaustively exploited here, whilst the more basic conceit of constantly imperiling children and other innocents simultaneously delivers the can’t-fail coup de grace to our ailing nerves.

Though it is confident in its execution and ruthlessly efficient in its effect, I couldn’t help but feel that this heavy-handed approach to the “scary stuff” was to some extent counter-productive, detracting our attention from the very elements that do actually make ‘The Witch’ a rewarding and genuinely disturbing piece of work – namely, those arising not from the heavy-handed direction but from the film’s writing and performances, which are both extremely good.

As the story initially got underway, I was surprised and rather impressed by the extent to which the script takes the strict puritan beliefs of its characters – a mind-set that is so alien to us in the 21st century West that it is almost impossible to approach it without implicit or explicit criticism – and presents them entirely at face value.

The “witch”, we initially feel, is an external force of parasitic evil whose wrath can be avoided only through a regime of prayer, obedience and enforced purity of thought. The soul of a child who dies prior to baptism meanwhile is headed straight to hell, and that is no laughing matter – especially as regards the burden of guilt which must subsequently be borne by the already grieving parents whose modest lapses in duty are seen as having allowed such a circumstance. Needless to say, it is in this invisible realm of Christian cosmology that the film’s real horror lies.(1)

As the story develops and we delve deeper into the internal lives of the film’s characters though, and as the situation facing them becomes increasingly desperate, ‘The Witch’s moral universe gradually shifts upon its axis in an extremely interesting fashion. Though the change is almost too subtle for us to even notice at first amid all the horror movie nerve-jangling, what eventually begins to emerge is a uniquely involving method of retelling an old, old story.

Though the notion that a seemingly external threat actually grows from within has been a given in haunted house and exorcism type narratives for decades (or indeed centuries, if we fall back on the gothic tradition), I have rarely seen this theme elucidated in quite such a compassionate and compelling manner as it is here, as, taking a page or two from the none-more-obvious reference point of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, ‘The Witch’ essentially becomes a tale about the way in which the seemingly unbreakable bonds of love and trust within a close-knit family unit can be strained, twisted and eventually destroyed in the face of stressful and traumatic circumstances.

As hardship and anxiety increases, minor vanities and personal failings that could be indulged and forgiven under more comfortable circumstances widen into fatal flaws, allowing nagging seeds of doubt to flower into full blown paranoia, which in turn becomes entwined with the family’s rigidly inflexible belief system, legitimising increasingly unhinged and dangerous patterns of behavior that move the story toward a far more nuanced and thought-provoking condemnation of religious extremism and its social & psychological consequences than we horror fans are usually asked to process via one-sided diatribes of the ‘Witchfinder General’ variety.(2)

Played out by a gifted cast with all the weighty intensity they can muster (I’d normally single out some names at this point, but frankly it’s just easier if I just refer to the IMDB cast list, as each member of the film’s central family is equally outstanding, the child actors in particular), it is this theme which serves to elevate ‘The Witch’ to a level of dramatic legitimacy that I confess makes all the Luciferian goats and monster-clawed hags that Eggers throws at us seem rather silly in comparison.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Witch’ might even have worked better as a naturalistic, real world drama rather than as a horror film. This may seem a stretch, but the more I think about it, the easier it is to imagine the essential structure of the script being transferred wholesale to, say, the travails of the family trying to survive in a contemporary Middle East combat zone, without altering the beats of the story in any significant fashion. Just exchange the “the witch” for “the war”, and everything pretty much falls straight into place, with a result that would likely remain just as emotionally coherent, and even more harrowing.

(Of course, THAT film could probably never make it to the screen in quite the way I imagine it, even via the neo-realist film traditions currently prevalent in countries like Iran, simply because it would be near unbearable to sit through. After all, the perverse webs of escapism and thematic metaphor that inform our enjoyment of fictional narratives here in the First World dictate that it is a lot easier to contemplate a baby spirited away by a witch’s familiar than a baby blown to pieces by a cluster bomb, even as the latter continues to be tolerated and enabled every day by the same global power structures that allow us the comfort in which to enjoy tales of the former…. but, I digress.)

One thing that would probably not work in the kind of substitution I have described above however is the ending of ‘The Witch’, which I hope I can briefly discuss without straying into the realm of out-right spoilers.

In essence, there is something fairly extraordinary about the way in which Eggers dovetails ninety minutes of relentless terror and misery with a few giddy, closing moments of what feels almost like a post-annihilation/ego-death liberation of sorts – a kind of ‘flip the script’ alchemical rebirth that leaves us feeling unmoored and light-headed, as the lingering fear we’ve become accustomed to falls away into acceptance. It’s a great ending.

As my wife insightfully observed, by the end of the movie, the mysterious witch cult that we have been living in mortal terror of thus far begins to seem very much like the coven of female convicts in Shunya Ito’s ‘Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41’ (1972) – a society of outcast women transformed into predatory savages because the authoritarian society that has rejected them allows them literally no other options for continued existence. And if I tell you that the ending of Eggers’ film succeeds in capturing even a fraction of the transformative spirit of Ito’s, readers familiar with the latter will know that they can take that as a pretty strong recommendation.

In my more pompous moments, I’ve been known to declare that the only kind of fictional narrative that can be considered in any way relevant to an understanding of the human condition is one that features no clearly delineated ‘villains’, but instead posits a variety of ultimately sympathetic characters who provoke conflict through their contradictory or misguided actions. As such, it could perhaps be said that Robert Eggers’ greatest achievement in ‘The Witch’ lies in his finding a way to combine this principle with a tale of shrieking, inhuman terror that leaves just about everyone dead and eternally damned, and to somehow make it work.

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(1) As a wanton digression that doesn’t easily fit anywhere else in this review, I should note that, purely in terms of supernatural horror, it was this earlier section of the film that I found to be by far the most frightening. Given that the family portrayed in the film (and indeed, the wider community from which they have separated themselves) seems to exist upon the edge of a wilderness largely untouched by humanity, I kept thinking, well, what the hell *is* this ‘witch’? Where did it come from? I mean, an old-fashioned witch cult existing as an off-shoot of an established Christian society – that’s something I can deal with. But the possibility of that *unknown other*…? Remember that quote (was it William Burroughs?) about how, before the white man came to America, and before the red man came, there was already something evil there, some lurking at its heart…? Now THAT’S a scary thought when you’re stuck in an isolated homestead surrounded by impenetrable forest. Though ‘The Witch’ doesn’t ultimately go in that direction, it hovers around it for long enough and convincingly enough in its first half to put the wind up me.

 (2) For wanton digression # 2, it behoves me to point out the similarities between ‘The Witch’ and what is quite possibly my all-time favourite horror film, Piers Haggard’s ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’ (1972). Not only are they amongst the only horror films I’m aware of that create and sustain a believable 17th century setting, complete with period appropriate dialogue, they are also the only two films in my experience of the genre to operate on the basis of a period-appropriate puritan Christian belief system without foregrounding a contemporary critique of said belief system. 

Whilst that may sound like an odd thing to celebrate on one level, it is this straight-faced portrayal of the characters’ beliefs that I think gives both films some of their unique power. Add a number of more nebulous similarities – the association of nature and “the woods” with untamed, pagan nastiness, the corruption of children by an insidious evil, the quasi-political implications of a coven of young/female/sexually active outsiders attacking a repressive patriarchal society – and one wonders how closely Haggard’s film might have played into the development of ‘The Witch’, despite the vastly different tone of the two projects.

Gothic Originals / Lovecraft on Film: The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman, 1963)

“Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acid. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.”
- HPL

I.

Ever since I started this weblog, one of my objectives has been to undertake a survey of films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft – more or less a rite of passage for any writer focusing on quote-unquote ‘weird horror’ - but somehow I just never quite got around to it. Until now.

As is widely acknowledged by just about anyone who shares a joint interest in Lovecraft and off-the-beaten-track horror films, ‘Lovecraft Cinema’ is a bit of a two-edged sword. Speak to any dedicated fan of Lovecraft’s writing, and they will no doubt tell you, correctly, that not a single motion picture adaptation has ever adequately captured the themes, ideas, images or atmosphere of the man’s work. Indeed, it is ironic that the few films that do to some extent trespass into Lovecraftian territory (Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ for instance, or Zulawski’s ‘Possession’) are those that exist entirely outside of his authorship or direct influence.

From a high-minded literary/artistic point of view in fact, the history of ‘official’ Lovecraft Cinema is a chronicle of travesty, failure, compromise and misunderstanding that it is best to draw a veil over, focusing instead on the vain hope that some long-promised ‘serious’ adaptation (Del Toro’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’? Richard Stanley’s ‘The Color Out of Space’?) may one day emerge to right the wrongs of the past and send punters screaming from multiplexes with a reassuringly soul-crushing vision of existential cosmic terror.

At the same time though, from our POV as b-movie / cult film fans, is it not within the darkness of travesty, failure, compromise and misunderstanding that some of our most cherished stretches of misbegotten celluloid can bloom? If none of the Lovecraft adaptations that have made it to the screen thus far can really be said to be ‘successful’ adaptations of their subject matter, they have nonetheless tended to be strange, fevered and twisted movies, borne of a collision between unwieldy literary subject matter and brutish commercial necessity, and I have found at least something to enjoy in just about all of them.

In fact I have a great fondness for many of them, even as they busy themselves with mashing the vision of one of my favourite authors into a confused and often unrecognizable mush. Time and time again in fact, the trace elements of Lovecraft in a film’s DNA seem to act as a trip-wire, sending potentially bland horror vehicles staggering off into the realm of something wholly other - and it is those moments, more than anything else, that I would like to think this blog exists to celebrate.

II.

This of course brings us to the film that American International Pictures insist we refer to as ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace’, better known to most of us of course as Roger Corman’s attempt to infuse new blood into his “Poe cycle” by ditching Poe altogether and mounting a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’.

As in so many things, Corman was ahead of the curve in choosing to adapt Lovecraft. Whilst HPL’s name may be ubiquitous in horror fiction today, he did not actually attract a widespread readership until mass market paperback editions of his work began to proliferate in the mid/late 1960s. At the time Corman was planning this film, Lovecraft’s following was still a closely-guarded cult within the wider cult of Weird Tales/fantastic fiction devotees, his reputation kept alive largely via the expensive, small-press editions produced by August Derleth’s Arkham House. (In fact, insofar as I can tell, one of the earliest Lovecraft paperbacks put out by a mainstream publisher was a 1963 UK Panther edition of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, presumably intended to coincide with ‘The Haunted Palace’!)

If juggling the names of Poe and Lovecraft seems a cinch in the 21st century, it was a considerably more daring proposition in the early ‘60s, when the former was a celebrated pioneer of American letters whilst the latter remained an obscure purveyor of pulp magazine schlock. It is hardly surprising therefore that AIP wanted to hedge their bets by making sure Poe’s name remained front and center in the film’s marketing, even if one suspects that the initials of the film’s release title are less than accidental. (The name ‘The Haunted Palace’, by the way, is taken from the poem recited by Roderick Usher in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, which Vincent Price’s post-dubbed voiceover dutifully gives us a few stanzas of here.)

In spite of its faux-Poe makeover though, ‘The Haunted Palace’ has still always seemed like a bit of an outsider within the early AIP gothic cycle. True, there had been other entries that diverged from the central axis of Price / Corman / Poe, but for one reason or another, these are generally considered disappointments, and kept at arm’s length by fans and critics from the rest of the series. (‘The Premature Burial’ lacked Price, and emerged as forgettable and dreary; ‘The Comedy of Terrors’ dropped both Corman and Poe, but the combination of Jacques Tourneur’s heavy-handed direction and Peter Lorre’s ill-health render it one of the most grimly dispiriting ‘comedies’ ever put before an audience; as for ‘The Terror’… well, what can you say about ‘The Terror’ that hasn’t been said before?)

As the remaining key/successful entries in the series easily pair up into critic-friendly couples (The Fall of the House of Usher and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ are the genre-defining classics, ‘Tales of Terror’ and ‘The Raven’ are the ensemble comedies, ‘Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The Tomb of Ligeia’ are the weird, quasi-psychedelic British ones), ‘The Haunted Palace’ eventually stands alone as the one overlooked outlier in the series that is actually *really good* (assuming of course that you like this kind of movie in the first place).

III.

I’m unversed on the whys and wherefores of how Roger Corman was introduced to Lovecraft’s writing, but I think there’s a fair chance that the connection might have been established via scriptwriter Charles Beaumont, who took the reins of the “Poe” series here from his fellow Twilight Zone alumnus Richard Matheson, having previously subbed for Matheson on ‘The Premature Burial’. Whilst not really a ‘horror guy’ as such, Beaumont’s background as a short story / pulp magazine writer may well have given him an awareness of Lovecraft, if not, apparently, a great deal of sympathy for what the Old Man of Providence was trying to achieve, if his work here is anything to go by.

Mindful above all of commercial expectations, Beaumont’s script for ‘The Haunted Palace’ carefully sifts Lovecraft’s long and complex story for elements that correspond most easily with the tried & tested gothic horror formula, then builds around what remains with a dedication to genre convention that, despite the comparatively weird subject matter, results in a film that often feels more like an exultant celebration of the established gothic tradition than the beginning of an exciting new ‘Lovecraftian’ style of filmmaking.

Predictably, Lovecraft’s beloved Arkham is here recast from the bustling Edwardian market town envisaged by its creator to an especially huddled and backward village community that doesn’t seem to have made any concessions to modernity since the days of the pilgrim fathers, dominated by the shadow of the titular ‘palace’ that looms vast and decrepit from the cliffs above the village. (The beautiful matte paintings and sprawling interior sets look more like a ‘castle’ to me, but who am I to quibble?)

Naturally, Arkham’s villagers are a cowed, suspicious bunch, ready to form a torch-wielding mob at the drop of a hat, as they promptly demonstrate during the ‘flashback’ opening sequence, which sees them stomping across the blasted heathland to the castle to put a stop to the godless depredations of warlock Joseph Curwen (Price, obvs) and his mistress Hester Tillinghast (actress Cathie Merchant, exuding a great blue-skinned gothic temptress vibe), who are midway through ‘offering’ a hypnotised local virgin to the unspeakable whatever-it-is that dwells in a well beneath their basement.

You can probably guess more or less what transpires when Curwen answers the door to the pitch-fork-happy mob, so let’s just say that, if the idea of a witches or warlocks cursing the descendants of their persecutors as flames lick around their ankles is more or less as old as the hills in horror films and literature, for our purposes here we might assume that it was repurposed from AIP’s successful Italian pick-up of a few years earlier, Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’.(1)

Likewise, the notion of a hapless aristocrat becoming possessed by the spirit of his malevolent ancestor had already been thoroughly explored by Corman in ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’, and those familiar either with Lovecraft’s story or gothic horror movies in general won’t be surprised to learn that that is exactly what recurs here, when, “one hundred and ten years later”, one Charles Dexter Ward (guess who) rocks up in Arkham to reclaim his ancestral home. (By necessity, Lovecraft’s eager young scholar has been remolded into a middle-aged gentleman of genteel manners, and naturally enough he is accompanied on the journey from distant Boston by his devoted wife Ann (Debra Paget).)

Completing the roll-call of gothic cliché, the notion that everyone in the village looks identical to their ancestors from the preceding century is taken here to what many viewers may find a laughable extreme. Not only does everyone look the same after the film reverts from the ‘past’ to the ‘present’, they still all hang around in the same tavern (which doesn’t seem to have been redecorated), talk about the same stuff, seem to recall exactly what their forefathers got up to with perfect clarity, and might as well even be wearing the same costumes, give or take a few ruffled sleeves and tri-corn hats. It must have been an uneventful nineteenth century in Arkham, to say the least.

Though patently ridiculous, I personally find that this blurring of past and present adds greatly to the film’s overall atmosphere of disjointed, fairy tale-like unreality, implying a kind of entropic ‘timelessness’ that recalls that conjured rather more deliberately by such films as Bava’s masterful ‘Lisa & The Devil’ (1972).

One shot is particular, in which two actors (professional western heavy & b-movie scripter Leo Gordon and everyone’s favourite perpetual loser Elisha Cook Jr, no less) can briefly be seen together staring through the exact same window that their ‘ancestors’ stared through a century earlier, their faces carrying looks of forlorn hopelessness, conveys a crushing sense of a meaningless cycle of cruelties being repeated through time immemorial as the Dark Gods look on impassive that certainly beats what little the script itself has to offer on such topics.

IV.

Another thing that inadvertently lends a European flavor to ‘The Haunted Palace’ is the fact that, whereas Richard Matheson’s plotting tended to be tight as a drum (always your solid, all-American logic from that cat), Beaumont here seems happy to leave a few loose ends flapping in breeze, accidentally evoking the spirit of some of our favourite irrational/non-linear/lazy [delete as applicable] euro-horrors.

For a start, there’s a whole deformed village offspring/mutant-child-in-the-attic angle that is tacked onto the story but never really developed or concluded in any meaningful fashion, then there’s Curwen’s ‘crossing names off the list’ campaign of vengeance against the villagers, which kind of fizzles out half-way through, and we’ve also got random oddities like the third resurrected sorcerer (played by Milton Parsons) who turns up to assist Price and Lon Chaney Jr in their rites. After being briefly introduced, he basically spends the remainder of the movie standing around doing absolutely nothing, the rationale for his existence perhaps having been excised from an earlier draft, or somesuch. (2)

Actually, Beaumont’s writing is a tad, shall we say, unpolished, all round here, and the stretches of delectable dialogue that Matheson enjoyed crafting for Price in the earlier Poe movies are also notable by their absence. Given the slightly different tone adopted by ‘The Haunted Palace’, that’s perhaps not necessarily such a bad thing, and Beaumont does at least manage to throw in a few slightly more clipped (almost ‘hard-boiled’?) horror movie zingers amid the reheated cliché. (I’m particularly fond of one villager’s declaration that “It isn’t a house, it’s a madman’s palace, as old as sin!”, and the moment when the steadfast Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell) advises Ward and his wife to flee Arkham, “..just as you would a madman with a knife..”, right as the scene cuts to a particularly baleful exterior of the lightning-illuminated palace.)

V.

Also missing from ‘The Haunted Palace’ is the psychoanalytical take on the material that Corman made a point of exploring in his previous gothic films – a surprising omission, given the director’s oft-stated dedication to this approach. Admittedly, ‘..Palace’ does at least follow the pattern set by Corman’s ruthlessly Freudian riff on ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’ - in both films, our ancestor-possessed protagonist exhibits a somewhat conflicted attitude toward family and gender, and meets his comeuppance whilst fiddling with large mechanisms in the basement. But here, these elements feel more like mere accidental hangovers from the earlier film than an attempt to grapple with anything more profound.

If pushed, you could perhaps make the case that ‘The Haunted Palace’ simply widens the scope of the ‘building-as-mind-map’ concept utilised in the earlier films, effectively extending the metaphor to embrace the entire village and its history-haunted occupants - but to my mind, this would just seem like over-stretching a reading that the film itself never really makes much effort to encourage.

In fact, in spite of the myriad gifts Lovecraft’s fiction offers to armchair psychologists, it is difficult to really read any valid sub-text into ‘The Haunted Palace’, beyond the bits and pieces that remain as residue from its literary and cinematic sources. If there is any “return of the repressed” stuff going on here, I would contend, it is transpiring purely on the ambient level common to all horror films, outside of the filmmakers’ conscious intent.

For viewers who like to take a more ‘thematic’ approach to their horror, this lack of ‘depth’ might make ‘The Haunted Palace’ feel a bit flat, but personally, it is actually one of the things I like best about the film, in a strange sort of way. I mean, you can delve deeper if you must, but as far as Beaumont and Corman (and more to the point, AIP) are concerned, this is a straight-up, two-fisted tale of occult evil, resurrected sorcerers and Dark Gods, executed with the utmost seriousness, and caring little for the nods, winks and grand gestures that helped the earlier Poe films win over the critics.

VI.

So dour and puritanical in fact is the film’s overriding atmosphere, it’s possible that its relative failure to make an impression on the public might be down to the fact that audiences simply didn’t know what to make of it, given that the three AIP/Price gothics immediately preceding it had all been framed more or less as arch, self-aware comedies.

Maybe I’m just over-thinking here, but my impression when I watch ‘The Haunted Palace’ side by side with Corman’s other gothics is that this one is a sneaky low-ball, bypassing critical favour and aimed straight at the kids in the cheap seats who actually just *like* all this horror shit. Though far from a satisfactory adaptation of Lovecraft, it nonetheless captures the ghoulish, pulpy atmosphere of pre-war ‘Weird Tales’ fiction better than any other ‘60s American horror film I can think of.

Cementing the film’s sombre tone, director of photography Floyd Crosby employs considerably more muted colour palette than the one he utilised for the earlier Poe films. Bright, heraldic reds and yellows are right out, and a sickly landscape of green, blue and grey instead predominates, interspersed with especially voluminous shadows and featureless New England puritan costmary.

Equally fitting is score by Ronald Stein, which is a corker. More ominous and old-fashioned than Les Baxter’s somewhat kitsch-inclined contributions to the earlier movies, there are certainly no theremins in evidence here; in fact the main theme is a stomping great thing, like a pacier, slightly more nuanced version of James Bernard’s hammer-blow Hammer scores. As is often the case with AIP movies, this single piece is repeated incessantly through the film’s run-time, but, with an indelible central melody that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a big budget adventure movie or historical epic, the repetition rarely grates.

VII.

 Clearly conscious of the slightly different direction taken by ‘The Haunted Palace’, Vincent Price here tones down the more excessive aspects of his usual screen persona, and actually does so to great effect, delivering a dual performance as the tormented Ward and the stone-cold Curwen that for me rank amongst his all-time best.

If his comparatively low-key antics may not initially stick in the memory quite as strongly as his extraordinary characterisations in ‘..Usher’ or ‘Pit..’, on repeat viewing I think Price’s work here stands up extremely well, revealing a great deal of subtlety (well, whatever counts as ‘subtlety’ in Vincent Price world, anyway), and providing some great, understated line-readings that go a long way toward elevating the uneven material into something more powerful. In particular, he is chillingly convincing once Curwen is fully in control, projecting a feeling of icy, venomous evil that often seems like a dry run for his celebrated turn in ‘Witchfinder General’ a few years later.

Opposite Price, Debra Paget’s porcelain beauty and forthright composure make her a rather good gothic heroine, even if, as per genre tradition, her character is given very little to do (but hey, at least she doesn’t spend most of the picture consigned to bed on the pre-text of some vaguely defined womanly maladies, so that’s something).

Happily, the dynamic between Paget and Price actually works quite well too. They are believable in the film’s first act as a married couple who actually respect and care for each other, and, once Ward’s possession by Curwen begins to put a spanner in the works, the scene in which he visits Ann’s bed chamber in full-on evil mode to “exercise his husbandly prerogatives” is cringey and menacing in precisely the way it should be, with Price doing his ‘thing’ beautifully as Paget delivering a surprisingly affecting portrayal of a woman who has witnessed her life partner transformed into an unrecognisible villain of some dreadful, inhuman variety.

Whilst talking actors, we should also throw in a word for ‘The Haunted Palace’s second Jr-affixed hard-luck case, Lon Chaney Jr, who is third-billed here as Curwen’s oatmeal-faced servant Simon Orne. Though not exactly blazing with thespian fire, Lon does a dignified and professional job, staying in the background and not making a fuss, as he had learned to on innumerable Westerns and ‘40s b-horrors. If he never shows a hint of the depth of feeling he brought to Jack Hill’s Spider Baby at around the same time, well, neither is he the lumbering, drunken embarrassment he personified in 1964’s ‘Witchcraft’, so again, that’s something. A Likeable, comforting presence, the only thing that undermines Chaney’s performance here is that he just seems too *nice* to be an evil, undead warlock.

VIII.

Forgot about all that though. As I’m sure most fans of this film will readily acknowledge, the real star of ‘The Haunted Palace’ is Daniel Haller’s extraordinary production design.

If you’ve read anything about the AIP Poe pictures, you’ll probably be familiar with the way in which the crew maintained the ‘flats’ used for the sets of the films, slightly expanding and redressing them as the budget of each installment allowed, thus creating the impression that production values and interior sets were gradually becoming grander as the series progressed. As the last of the cycle made on U.S. soil, ‘The Haunted Palace’ presumably represents the apex of this approach, and, however hackneyed you may find the film’s constituent parts, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that the results are pretty damn magnificent. Expertly rebuilding and redressing the materials they’d assembled over the past few years, Haller and his collaborators here set a new benchmark for visual splendor in ‘60s gothic horror cinema; a benchmark that, to be honest, few ever stepped up to challenge as the appeal of these studio-bound fantasias declined sharply in the second half of the decade.

By the standards of low/mid budget 1960s filmmaking, the scale and detail of Curwen’s subterranean altar chamber is astonishing. From the vast wooden gantries leading down to the main hall, walls atmospherically lit by dozens of flaming torches (which, surprisingly, do not end up contributing to the obligatory closing inferno) to the towering, apparently ceiling-less cavern that houses the altar itself - its sheer size implying that it was designed to house the manifestation of some Cthulhu-like monstrosity - the gradual reveal of this centerpiece during the opening flashback is one of those wonderful “good grief, they actually BUILT this?” moments that horror films all too rarely manage to deliver; a jaw-dropper on par with the vertiginous grandeur of the iconic lab set in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.

The eight foot high gouts of flame that Price ignites in the braziers surrounding the altar, the grotesquely elaborate wooden winding mechanism, reminiscent of medieval torture devices (and probably repurposed from the ones used in ‘Pit..’, more than likely) that opens to grated door to the glowing pit below, the angular, S&M-tinged frame to which sacrificial virgins are bound… what can you say? It’s certainly one of my favourite cinematic representations of this perennially blood-curdling pulp fiction spectacle.

IX.

Happily, this attention to detail is carried across to most other aspects of the film’s visual identity too. The matte paintings that introduce us to the geography of the village and the exterior of the palace – always one of my favourite aspects of these ‘60s gothics – are particularly lovely examples of the form, each looking as if it could have been pulled straight from the pages of some much-loved Victorian storybook, and the fog-shrouded village sets remain equally evocative, even as their theatrical painted backdrops and wobbly fence-posts are rather unflatteringly revealed via the miracle of blu-ray.(3)

Meanwhile, the extensive graveyard set that forms the conduit between village and castle is also wonderfully realised; the slow pan across the blasted heathland carelessly dotted with headstones, harking back of course to the opening of ‘..Usher’, must have had Tim Burton shuddering with envy every time he revisited ‘The Haunted Palace’ (which, I would humbly suggest, may have been frequently).

And thankfully, it’s not just the sets in ‘The Haunted Palace’ that are right on the money either. Intelligent casting ensures that even the film’s minor characters are vividly and memorably portrayed, from the gurning villagers (old pros Cook and Gordon are joined by several other agreeably gnarled faces) to the aforementioned Cathie Merchant as Curwen’s mistress; even the young blonde girl shanghaied by Curwen and co in the opening flashback makes a strong impression with her unnerving look of dead-eyed, sinister acceptance.(4)

The only major misstep with the film’s production design in fact is the extremely questionable realisation of the creature in the pit during the finale. I’m not sure at what stage of the film’s production the decision was taken to feature a visible ‘monster’, but apparently the old “the house is the monster” line that Corman used to sell ‘..House of Usher’ to his paymasters just wasn’t going to cut it this time around, and, from all appearances, I’m guessing the filmmakers weren’t given much time in which to ponder the problem of how to film the indescribable before the curtain fell and the finished effects shots were needed.

As such, there’s no way to sugar-coat the fact that what they came up with can best be described as a mutilated ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ Aurora model kit shot through a fish-tank, accompanied by ‘roars’ that sound like they just put some reverb on the MGM lion. As far as on-screen representations of cthulhoid monstrosities go, it’s not a good start.

That ‘The Haunted Palace’ manages to stumble through such a disaster without completely annihilating the audience’s good feeling is, in a sense, the best possible testament to the atmosphere and dramatic exuberance the film manages to accumulate prior to its final reel. Even whilst I sometimes wish there was a special edition of the film in which those ‘special effects’ shots were prefaced by footage of an apologetic Roger Corman saying “well, the word was, we had to have a monster, and we only had about fifty bucks to split between this and the catering, so… y’know..”, it’s still remarkable that, when I re-watch ‘The Haunted Palace’ in the right frame of mind, I’m just about able to suspend disbelief and go with it.

X.

Whilst ‘The Haunted Palace’ is undoubtedly a travesty of Lovecraft’s work in many ways, I can’t deny that I still get a huge kick out of the elements of his mythology that do remain within it. As diluted and ill-served as the source text may be, the film is still full weird and incongruous notions, creeping around the corners of the film’s rigidly formulaic structure in a manner that, for me at least, is hugely entertaining.

Having sat through what feels like a thousand exposition-heavy dinner table conversations in gothic horror movies, it’s difficult to express how much I love the equivalent scene here, in which, rather than directing us toward family curses, tainted bloodlines or some other over-familiar hokum, nominal voice-of-scientific-reason Dr Willet instead starts banging on about the “..the Elder Gods, the dark ones from beyond who had once ruled the world, and will one day rule again..”, name-checking Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth before directing Ward and his wife toward a certain forbidden tome that was once said to reside in the palace (I like the slight New York twang Frank Maxwell gives to the word ‘Necronomicon’) - all of course framed in conventional “..you know the kind of thing these primitive people believe..” terms, even though Arkham’s villagers display no knowledge of or interest in such obscure notions.

Whilst the old “doing the Lovecraft bit” speech may seem quaintly familiar to horror fans these days, such ravings must have left yr average 1960s audience slightly taken aback. Simply by throwing this stuff in as background for Curwen’s sorcery, Corman and Beaumont suddenly change the game completely, breaking free from the comparatively cozy Christian cosmology and human-shaped ambassadors from the beyond that had dominated horror movies up to this point, and no doubt planting the seed of all manner of vast and horrifying possibilities within the minds of more imaginative young viewers, just as HPL originally intended.

Though the mellifluous Latin incantations Vincent Price uses to summon his pet whatever-it-is during the film’s finale may be a far cry from the guttural, alien tongues favoured by Lovecraft’s cultists, Curwen nonetheless delivers a particularly chilling line during his obligatory ‘villain diatribe’, wherein, after chiding his opponents for their failure to ‘understand’ his work, he says of himself and his fellow warlocks, “..as a matter of fact, we don’t really understand ourselves… we just obey..”.

Beautifully delivered by Price with a cracked half-chuckle, this gets about as close as this or any other movie adaptation has to a genuinely Lovecraftian moment of cosmic horror – the vain-glorious sorcerer sheepishly admitting that it is not his own will he is realising; that he is in fact just as much of a ‘victim’ as the hypnotised women he strings up on his altar, blindly propagating the unknowable, inhuman agenda of the ancient entity he has blundered his way into serving, and just a likely to be gobbled up alongside them when the time comes.

XI.

It is also interesting that, mirroring the ‘pick & mix’ approach taken by the Poe films, Corman and Beaumont actually manage to incorporate a few elements into ‘The Haunted Palace’ that were taken from Lovecraft stories other than ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ – further suggesting that this project arose from a wider appreciation of the author’s work, rather than a “hey, this is a cool story, let's do it” one-off.

For one thing, mythos nerds will have been yelling at me since this review’s opening paragraphs for failing to clarify that the events of ‘..Charles Dexter Ward’ actually take place in Lovecraft’s real life home of Providence, Rhode Island, rather his fictitious Arkham, as featured here. For another, the “village cursed by half-breed/mutant off-spring” sub-plot appended to ‘The Haunted Palace’ is one that plays a prominent role in several other Lovecraft stories (most famously of course in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’), but is entirely absent from ‘..Charles Dexter Ward’, whilst the dread Necronomicon – allotted much importance in Beaumont’s screenplay – is only mentioned in passing in the story, slotted in amid references to numerous other forbidden tomes, both real and invented.(5)

Curious too is the way that ‘The Haunted Palace’ seems to some extent to have ‘set the blue-print’ for Lovecraftian cinema, as can be seen from the way that several ideas and images from the film frequently reoccur in subsequent adaptations, despite the fact that they have only the most tenuous connection to Lovecraft’s fiction.

In particular, the image of a screaming heroine trussed up for sacrifice on an altar above a pit from which some unspeakable creature clamour is one that I don’t think ever actually occurs in Lovecraft, but, given its self-explanatory appeal as a cool scene for a movie, such scenarios have popped up again in both AIP’s version of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1970) and Stuart Gordon’s ‘Dagon’ (2001), amongst others.

Similarly difficult to account for is the longevity of the old “deformed, cannibalistic relative locked in the attic” meme, which appears for what I think may be the first time in ‘The Haunted Palace’. This went on to recur in both David Greene’s ‘The Shuttered Room’ (1967) and Gordon’s ‘Castle Freak’ (1995), in addition to dozens of other, unconnected horror films, in which it is often identified as a ‘Lovecraftian’ element, despite the fact that, as far as I recall, this idea never features at all in any of Lovecraft’s core stories.(6)

XII.

One last item I’d like to discuss before we (FINALLY) get to the end of this review is something that occurred to me whilst rewatching ‘The Haunted Palace’ for the first time in a few years – namely, the possibility of it having exerted an influence on another much-loved key text in the “Lovecraftian-but-not-Lovecraft” canon mentioned earlier, Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ (1981).

Now, I’m not saying I have anything concrete to go on here, but the casual similarities between the two films are such that I can’t help but speculate that ‘The Haunted Palace’ may have been lurking in the background when Fulci and his collaborators knocked out their initial outline for ‘The Beyond’. I’m not sure whether any of the numerous writers who have lavished attention on Fulci’s film over the years have picked up on this before, but think about it. Opening flashback in which a grimoire-toting necromancer is violently punished by torch-wielding villagers? His clueless descendants inheriting the deserted property and umming and ahhing over whether to sell or renovate it? Sinister encounters with blind/eyeless people? The implication of a ‘gate to other dimensions’ or somesuch lurking in the basement?

As I say, none of this would stand up in court, and none of these were exactly novel elements for a horror film in 1981, but the similarities are sufficiently numerous to make it worth mulling over I think, especially in view of ‘The Beyond’s oft-remarked Lovecraftian overtones.

Ok, now that we’ve got that over with – concluding paragraph!

It is an odd paradox that, despite its novel subject matter, ‘The Haunted Palace’ is actually the AIP gothic horror film that adheres most strictly and straight-facedly to the conventions of the genre. There are no innovations, sub-texts or big ideas to upset the apple cart here, and to my mind the film is all the better for it. Taken on its own terms, it is a nigh-on transcendent testament to the power of ‘60s gothic, a towering heap of fan service to those of us who love the peculiar architecture of this particular misbegotten corner of filmmaking. And of course, this formal context only serves to make it all the more enjoyable when weird incursions of pulpy, Lovecraftian strangeness begin to make themselves felt, like a glowing green icing on the cake.

To more, shall we say.. rational?.. viewers, ‘The Haunted Palace’ will seem a superfluous and unremarkable addition to the Corman/Poe cycle – a “more of the same” hotch-potch of undercooked ideas and clichés. But for those of us with the right temperament, we who revel in the texture, the atmosphere and the mad, misfiring notions of horror films that seem to have been left to warp for too long in some mildewed basement, it is a pure joy - one of the most immersive and richly satisfying experiences that early ‘60s horror has to offer.

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(1) Opening-witch-curse-flashback also popped up in 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’ (aka ‘Horror Hotel’), and reoccurred a year after ‘The Haunted Place’ in The Long Hair of Death, if anyone’s keeping score. As Mondo 70 recently reminded me, it also pops up in Chano Urueta’s great ‘El Baron del Terror’ (aka ‘The Brainiac’, 1962), which gives us examples from three continents. Anyone want to point me in the direction of an Asian witch-burning/curse movie circa 1959-63, for a full house..?

(2) Seriously, this guy walks in, apparently out of nowhere, says “hi, how you doing?” (I paraphrase), then quietly hangs out in the background until the conclusion, at which point he inexplicably disappears! Scripting issues aside, I’m frankly amazed that Corman didn’t see the opportunity to save an actor’s fee here.

(3) To clarify, I should point out that the screen-shots used in this review are definitely NOT taken from any of the recent blu-ray presentations of this film. They are actually from the Studio Canal DVD included in a UK Corman box set from a few years back, if you must know, and I’ve artificially brightened a few shots because it looked pretty goddamned dark.

(4)The oracle of IMDB reveals to me that the sacrificial victim was portrayed by one Darlene Lucht, whose other notable screen credits included ‘Muscle Beach Party’ (1965) and ‘Five Bloody Graves’ (1969). You go girl, etc.

(5) Purely based on the text of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, one would probably have sidelined the Necronomicon (mentioned twice) in favour of the works of one ‘Borellus’ (most likely 17th century French scholar and alleged alchemist Pierre Borel), whose speculations about resurrecting the dead using “..essential Saltes of humane Dust” seem to have provided Lovecraft with the inspiration for the story, and whose name is mentioned over a dozen times in the text.

(6)Ok, so I’ll cop that “deformed, cannibalistic relative locked in the attic” is admittedly the basis of the August Derleth “collaboration” upon which ‘The Shuttered Room’ is based, and the idea is at least vaguely implied in both ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Lurking Fear’… but I still find it interesting that this has come to be seen as a “Lovecraftian” reference point in horror cinema, despite the fact that Lovecraft never actually set pen to paper to fully describe it in the first place.