Although well-known in horror circles since their original publication, it took a long time for anyone to even take a crack at putting H.P. Lovecraft’s distinctly bizarre terrors on screen, and when they did, it was often subsumed by the aesthetics of more established horror—Roger Corman’s adaptation of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, The Haunted Palace, even slapped Edgar Allan Poe’s oh-so-marketable name on the poster! Daniel Haller started out as the art director on Corman’s Poe series for AIP, and then went on to direct previous site subject Die, Monster, Die!, an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that hues closely to the Gothic haunted house sensibilities of the Poe films. A few years later, Haller returned for another whack at a Lovecraft adaptation, one based on his 1928 novella “The Dunwich Horror”, and this time there may have been a more concerted effort to capture the particular supernatural atmosphere of a Lovecraft story, not simply plastering his ideas on top of typical witchcraft shenanigans and pagan robes—this is one of the first times the word “Necronomicon” was spoken in a movie (the actual first time was in…The Haunted Palace.) Even so, there’s a feeling in Haller’s Dunwich Horror of being something trapped between several competing styles—Lovecraft, some fleeting remnants of Corman’s Poe films, and a streak of late sixties psychedelia—producing a shambling, patchwork abomination not unlike the ones you find in The Dunwich Horror.
The original story tackles the broad Gothic fascination with decaying family dynasties and pushes it in new directions with Lovecraft’s own obsessions with “degeneracy” and questions of lineage (try to guess where those obsessions ended up taking him!) Not unlike the similarly-named Witleys from Haller’s Die, Monster, Die!, the Whateleys are a family beset by rumours of dark arts and rituals, as well as ones about their young son, Wilbur, whose mother was locked up in an asylum after his birth. Who is his father? That’s one of the questions hanging over the rest of the small New England town of Dunwich, who otherwise want nothing to do with him, nor with his decrepit grandfather, who may be the one driving the family’s tendency towards occult doings. In the movie, Old Man Whateley is the kind of guy who, in a flashback, walks into a general store to ask for someone to help in his daughter’s complicated pregnancy while decked out in his finest wizard robes, and also carrying a staff. Not entirely subtle, grandpa!
The novella spends much verbiage detailing Wilbur’s sped-up childhood—as in he ages rapidly, which is one of the reasons the people of Dunwich are slightly dubious about where he came from—while the movie begins with him as an adult (played by character actor Dean Stockwell).) He travels to Miskatonic University in Arkham (both recurring locations in Lovecraft’s work) to convince researcher Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley in his final film role) to let him take a look-see at his one-of-a-kind copy of the Necronomicon, which Armitage refuses, and then double-refuses when he finds out that Wilbur is a Whateley. Although denied his reading time, Wilbur manages to convince a Miskatonic student named Nancy (Sandra Dee) to drive him home to his big spooky house—which carries over much of the motifs and weird purplish lighting of the house from Die, Monster, Die!—and then does everything he can to force her to stay over, including sabotaging her car, giving her tea laced with black magic roofies, and using some vague hypnotic powers? This is all part of some grand plan he has, which his own grandfather (Sam Jaffe) opposes. During family conversations about evil this-and-that, the movie cuts to a locked door on the upper floor that’s holding in something that’s constantly trying to get out. Normal stuff in every household.
The first thing you might notice in this movie is the overbearing music by Corman regular Les Baxter—a half-dozen different variations of its main theme blaring at all times, alongside some spooky theremin—and the second thing you might notice is how cartoonish the performances are. Nothing here by halves! Stockwell’s Wilbur is a low-watt creep, his every word dripping with hidden intention that marks him immediately as the most suspicious person in every room. There’s a point where he’s explaining the lynching of one of his ancestors by the people of Dunwich to Nancy, and he tries to make it sound like his family is being persecuted for their non-conforming spiritual beliefs—which is something you might have believed based on a later scene where the townies try to prevent him from sullying their Christian cemetery with his heathen kinfolk like small-minded bumpkins; but he’s also quick to start ranting about “the Old Ones” in a way that might look a little iffy to most. Old Man Whateley might be the most over-the-top, both visually and in Jaffe’s performance , and the scene where he is unceremoniously knocked down the stairs to his death got a good chortle out of me. This overheated atmosphere might just be an attempt to match Haller’s overly enthusiastic stylization, which pairs the Gothic cliches of the Whateley’s estate, complete with altar situated over an ominous cliff, with jump cuts, idiosyncratic angles, and the most important trick of all, posterization! The visuals choices makes it seem like Haller just discovered psychedelic imagery for the first time, and really wants to share it with the rest of us—by the end of the movie, the constant, colourful flashing of the posterization effects might be enough to justify an epilepsy warning at the front of this movie.
That’s just one of the most immediate ways The Dunwich Horror shows itself to be product of its time, trailing after the Summer of Love and jonesing to appropriate those post-hippie vibes into a movie that also carries on the old-timey creeps of those early sixties Poe movies. One dream sequence shows Nancy surrounded by a semi-nude, mud-caked orgy among some giggling Flower Children/Cartoon Pagans, an image that probably could have been taken right out of Woodstock footage. With that dream orgy, you also see the movie’s other very-of-its-time lurid fascination: the implied and also entirely on-screen sexiness that is Absolutely Not in Lovecraft’s text (that guy’s whole shtick often seems to revolve around an abject terror of all things sex-related.) So you have the scenes of dark rituals that consistently feature women on slabs writhing and moaning suggestively, or you have Wilbur just asking Nancy about her sex life during casual conversation. The first time we get to see the titular monster, about halfway through the movie, he has been accidentally released by Nancy’s friend (Donna Bacala), and the subsequent first person POV attack sequence features the quick disappearance of her clothes during the rave of colour changes, giving it all the appearance of a sexual assault. Obviously, this is not the creatively perverse combination of Lovecraftian horror and sex you’d see in Stuart Gordon’s adaptations a decade-and-a-half later, but just some base late sixties/early seventies sleaze that isn’t even explicit enough to be genuinely disturbing.
So, because Wilbur might as well be wearing a sandwich board saying “Ask Me About My Evil Plans!”, Armitage starts doing some deeper investigation into the Whateleys, teaming up with the Dunwich doctor (Lloyd Bochner) who helped deliver Wilbur, and who reveals that Wilbur had a twin brother who he was told had been stillborn, except that he never saw the body. Guess what? The brother is alive, is the one locked in that room, and is some giant Koosh ball made of rubber snakes that we never get to see in full, although we get several scenes from his POV as he propels himself (somehow, since he doesn’t have legs) around the backwoods of Dunwich. Wilbur and his spherical twin were the progeny of their human mother and one of those Old Ones, the interdimensional entities that Lovecraft loved to write about, summoned by their grandfather, with the goal to eventually bridge dimensions to allow the Old Ones to run wild over humanity. By the finale, Wilbur has stolen the Necronomicon—after a drag-out slugfest with a security guard who really unleashes some excessive force before being impaled on a convenient pike—and will use it and Nancy to finally bring that plan to fruition.
Honestly, the monster stuff in the movie is kind of a rip-off, the poster promising a realization of Weird Fiction that it is simply incapable of delivering. In the novella, Wilbur eventually turns into a distorted chimerical creature, but remains just a moustached guy in robes here, and his brother (whose relationship to Wilbur is the original story’s classic pulp fiction zinger, telling us that the twin “took more after the father”) is barely seen at all even during his own brief reign of terror. The final showdown between Wilbur and Armitage is both confusing and anticlimactic, with Armitage simply interrupting Wilbur’s magic words with his own magic words until Wilbur is struck by lightning (and then a dummy falls off a cliff, a classic bit) and his brother appears briefly and then disappears in a void of even more psychedelic colours. Considering that the final conflict with the monstrous brother in the novella is relayed to readers second-hand by people looking through a telescope, the filmmakers really took it upon themselves to find an even less involving way to conclude their horror tale—oh, but don’t worry, there’s a silly cliche ending stinger to make it all better!
While there are surface nods to the cosmic dread that Lovecraft trafficked in, bringing in recurring concepts of otherworldly monstrosities driving people mad and constantly threatening to invade our world, this is a movie that bites off more than it can chew when it comes to actually pulling those things off in a cinematic way. Hopelessly bound to its historical context, the occult trappings here do not instill the sense of our world abutting some inexplicable other gradually leaking in, but ultimately feels like the same old Satanism that would become a favourite source of horror as the seventies wore on (Haller admitted that this movie came about partly to ride the coattails of Rosemary’s Baby), with the rest of the details sketched in with the decade’s other popular varieties of kitsch. We were still fairly far off from a movie really capturing pure Lovecraftian vibes, or at the very least doing so with adaptations of the original works.
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