The Dunwich Horror (1970) and Other Attempts to Film Lovecraft

I still maintain that 1970's The Dunwich Horror stands as possibly the best attempt to date to commit HP Lovecraft to film.  I recently rewatched it as my sort of tribute to the late Dean Stockwell, who stars in the film.  It represented the culmination of a cycle of Lovecraft adaptations that appeared during the late sixties, mainly produced or co-produced by AIP, who were rapidly running out of Edgar Allan Poe stories to adapt.  Indeed, one of the first of these, The Haunted Palace (1963) was actually presented as part of the Roger Corman Poe series.  But, despite the Poe title and the presence of Vincent Price, it was actually a loose adaptation of Lovecraft's 'The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward'.  There were also no less than three UK made Lovecraft adaptations, with only The Shuttered Room (1967) pretending to be set in the US.  The others, 1965's Die, Monster, Die!, based on 'The Colour Out of Space' and featuring a cast headlined by Boris Karloff, and Curse of the Crimson Altar (1969) - while not officially a Lovecraft adaptation, it does bear a very close resemblance to 'The Dreams in the Witch House' - are both relocated to contemporary rural England.  So what, in my opinion, makes The Dunwich Horror stand out from these previous adaptations?

For one thing, it is a much 'purer' adaptation than any of the others.  To be sure, it makes many deviations from the source material - the characteristion of Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) and the addition of a female lead character/romantic interest in the form of Sandra Dee, for instance - but it fully embraces the core concepts of Lovecraft's 'Cthulu Mythos', which underpins the majority of his work.  Previous films had tended to soft peddle this angle, with Haunted Palace and Crimson Altar substituting more generic evil forces the makers doubtless felt audiences would more readily understand, Die, Monster, Die! focused on the science fiction monster elements, while Shuttered Room ditched the supernatural elements of its source entirely.  But in The Dunwich Horror, Ed Begley Sr's Dr Armitage is quite clear that the Whateley family are part of a cult worshiping ancient entities long since banished from the earth, to other dimensions, but still seeking a re-entry to the human realm.  Various of the Lovecraftian deities are name-checked and the Necronomicon (that dread text of evil) is central to the plot, with Wilbur seeking to possess Armitage's copy in order to invoke his masters.  

Some of the film's digressions from the source material, however, a quite fascinating and, in many ways, serve to enhance its theme of shadowy ancient forces attempting to overtake modernity.  Most notably, the film, not surprisingly, given its date of production, encompasses a fair amount of psychedelic imagery and effects.  These are manifested most prominently in the dreams experienced by Dee's character after she is drugged by Whateley and ends up sleeping at the Whateley house and in the effects employed to represent Wilbur's demonic brother, once he escapes from his locked room. (Actually, this is impressive on another count, as the producers resisted the temptation to simply have Stockwell in 'evil' make up or a man in a suit to represent their monster, what we get instead is a truly other worldly looking creation.  It also contrasts sharply with The Shuttered Room, which replaces its monstrous twin with a standard 'mad sister in the attic').  Not only does the psychedelia bring the story firmly into the then present day, but it also aligns the whole Cthulu cult with the hippie and drug sub-culture of the era.  This, in turn, gives a new sub-text to the fact that the forces of darkness are here opposed by Dr Armitage and Dr Cory (Lloyd Bochner), a pair of old men, effectively representing the deep social conservatism of author HP Lovecraft.  Old men trying to put the genie of youth and revolution back in the bottle, perhaps.

While they apparently succeed in foiling Wilbur's plans to sacrifice Dee as part of his attempt to open up a portal by which the Old Ones can return, a brief coda implies that their attempts were futile, as it is revealed to the audience that Dee is now carrying a child, having been impregnated by Wilbur, or his demonic brother.  This is another deviation from the original, with its implications of sex, something absent from the Lovecraftian canon, (although Freudians might point to all the oozing substances and flailing tentacles of the original texts as sexual proxies).  Here, the impregnation of Dee as she lies on the altar stone in the Devil's Hop Yard is heavily implied as Wilbur spreads her legs apart, then props the open Necronomicon between them - indicating that some sort of supernatural impregnation by its ancient sorceries was actually his plan all along.  But alongside all this modern psychedelic and sexual imagery, the film also succeeds in creating the sort of stifling atmosphere of the typical Lovecraft story - the feeling that dark forces are inevitably and inexorably closing in.  Despite being filmed in sunny California rather than dank and damp New England, the movie succeeds in depicting the sort of isolated community described by Lovecraft, where ancient superstitions and lifestyles have survived into the modern world, (the thirties in the story, the late sixties in the film).  All of these elements contrast effectively the modernistic touches, which hint at some kind of wild and frightening world that lies outside of the villagers experience.  Moreover, while Wilbur certainly isn't as weird as his literary equivalent - who is revealed to be himself monstrous, with tentacles protruding from his abdomen - his seduction of Dee necessitating his transformation into a somewhat more human and personable character, as played by Stockwell, complete with Runic tattoos all over his body, he is still pretty creepy.

So, a properly 'Lovecraftian' film, which remains true to its roots, providing a stark contrast with previous adaptations that sought to reinterpret their source material via other horror tropes or even other genres.  The most radical reinterpretation being The Shuttered Room, (the only one of these adaptations without an AIP connection), which discards not just its Lovecaftian elements, but also its supernatural elements altogether, substituting instead a cross between a Gothic melodrama and a Straw Dogs- style story of small town hicks menacing outsiders.  The latter element, featuring Oliver Reed (in a role reminiscent of his character in Hammer's The Damned (1963), as the psychopathic - not to mention lecherous -leader of the local thugs, is the best handled part of the film, but the whole thing feels a long way from Lovecraft, failing even to make Dunwich (here transformed int an isolated island) into a convincing locale.  (Interestingly, there was a contemporary novelisation of the script which actually reinstates some of the supernatural elements).   To be fair, the source story was actually only peripherally a Lovecraft story, being presented by author August Derleth as a posthumous 'collaboration' based on notes left by Lovecraft.  That said, it certainly had Lovecraftian themes, attempting to unify two strands of the 'Cthulu Mythos'  - that of the Dunwich Whateleys and that of the Innsmouth 'spawn of Dagon'.  The film, however, ignores both of these strands, instead turning it into a standard horror thriller.

Former art director Daniel Haller, (who had also directed Die, Monster, Die!), directs The Dunwich Horror with a sure visual sense, effectively contrasting the sunlit white stone edifices of the Miskatonic University in Arkham with the rundown, more Autumnal looking town of Dunwich, emphasising the idea that they are not just separated by geography, but also by culture and even time.  He moves the film along at a decent pace, rarely allowing things to flag as it simultaneously follows the twin plotlines of Wilbur preparing his plans and Armitage unraveling the tangled history of the Whateleys.  At the same time, Haller's direction, while stylish, has a certain pulp asthetic to it, particularly in his use of colour.  Which is fitting as, despite Lovecraft's literary pretensions, his stories were mainly published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, with their garishly colourful covers.  It also features a stand out animated title sequence that neatly encompasses many of the film's themes and a highly effective Les Baxter score.  Obviously, there have been many subseqient Lovecraft adaptations, but none that I've liked as much as The Dunwich Horror.  Many have more fidelity to the source material, but most are low budget and scrappily made, mistaking poor lighting for atmosphere.  The only one I've really enjoyed was Re-Animator, but that was based on an atypical, non-Mythos, Lovecraft story.  Ultimately, none achieved the trick of being both respectful to their source material while also successfully reinterpreting it for their own era, as, I believe, The Dunwich Horror does.