‘Tis the Season: Lovecraft! The Dunwich Horror (1969)

Daniel Haller directed Die, Monster, Die!, the second feature adaptation of a Lovecratt work, with variable results. What came out was a fairly standard creature feature that in moments, proved there might be more to it. It didn’t exactly herald a rush to devlop more Lovecraft films. 

That said, four years later, Haller returned to direct after Mario Bava proved unavailable, with a script co-written by Curtis Hanson and starring Dean Stockwell, Sandra Dee, Ed Begley (his last role), and Sam Jaffa. It, too, is a mixed bag, but a more dynamic and exciting one (if still clunky at times0.

The film departs from HPL’s story in some telling, and perhaps, cecessary, ways. Wilbur Whately is portrayed by a young and handsome Stockwell, as opposed to being the “goatish” creature of the story. There’s less emphasis on his procuring the Necronomicon here than in Lovecraft’s tale and his brother doesn’t play quite the same role. Oh, and there’s sex and, if I”m being completely up front, date rape. 

Before diving into the movie itself, I want to remark that this last element is chilling and cringy, to say the least. Stockwell’s Wilbur doesn’t see Dee’s Nancy as much more than a vehicle to carry his child and/or serve as a sacrifice/portal for the return of Yog Sothoth, one of the Older Gods (though, technically, in Lovecraftian lore, I believe Yog is an “outer” god and not a prime mover per se).

My suspicion is that at the time, Nancy’s seduction wasn’t seen as a big deal, which makes Wilbur to these eyes in the present, even more of a monstrous predator. Stockwell plays him with all the charm of a serial killer, all blank stare and quiet, monotone delivery. That is, until his grandfather gets in his face. Even then, Wilbur’s pretty collected.

Sandra Dee’s Nancy may wind up being the most interesting character in the entire movie. She moves through the narrative like a somnambulist, very much owing to the sedatives her tea is spiked with, but at the same time, she doesn’t seem dismayed, much less fearful, despite visions of haunting rituals involving flashes of naked blue-skinned men and women. They seem to be pulling at her, but smartly, Haller doesn’t let the camera linger on any the more surreal or supernatural elements, more than a fraction of a second and the editing renders those moments all the more hallucinogenic. 

Her calm and poise is almost as disconcerting as Stockwell’s; she doesn’t seem any more interested in him than he is in her, but she is curious about him and his family. Indeed, even after he kills his grandfather (the ever game Sam Jaffe), she barely bats an eye. It’s an eerie performance, and this is all pre-roofie and sacfificial coitus. 

What renders her performance problematic is that it is likely owing to whatever manipulation Wilbur is employing to buttress the effect of hte drug but what stands out and makes it difficult to get a read completely, is that either Nancy’s agency has been so pacified by narcosis that she’s made amenable to whatever happens or that she wants to prove herself game for whatever Wilbur has in store. That’s how ambiguous some of Dee’s performance is.

Briefly, the two meet at Miskatonic University as Nancy is replacing the only remakining copy of the Necronomicon back in its glass display case. Wilbur appears and requests that he be able to review the book and Nancy, already under his spell, says sure, very much against her pal Elizabeth’s admonitions.It isn’t until Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) shows up that Wilbur acquiesces and returns the book to Nancy to put it back.

By that point, Wilbur has introduced himself to Dr. Armitage who is well aware of the Whateleys and their reputation in hte area. Wilbur and Nancy get to conversing and when Wilbur realizes that he’s missed his bus, she volunteers to drive him home. Dr. Armitage had tried to warn Nancy to not go with him, knowing of the Whateley reputation, but obviously, she wasn’t going to listen. 

In any case, as she stops at a gas statin and asks for a full tank, the attendant recognizes Wilbur, gives her a dollar’s worth and tells them to leave. Once at the Whateley estate (another sharp change from. the delapitdate house the degenerated family lived in in the story), Wilbur insists Nancy stay for tea and doses her with the sedative. 

By this point, Nancy has met Grandpa Whateley, whom we had seen at the beginning of the film working some kind of spell over a woman who would later prove to be Lavinia Whateley, Wilbur’s mother. (By the way, the opening animated credits are stellar, along with a great score Les Baxter.)

It’s here that we see just how offhand and casual Wilbur is about subverting Nancy’s agency; he ducks out to remove a fuel line from her engine, doses her with a sedative, and yet, through it all, it could just be another day’s work at the job.

The next day, Armitage and Elizabeth show up to check on Nancy and she’s adamant about staying the weekend with Wilbur. By this point, they do some research on the Whateleys - background checks on guys who coerce your friend or your student to stay with them are mandatory. 

Armitage finds out that Lavinia is still alive and Elizabeth takes a drive back to the mansion to convince Nancy to leave. However, Nancy has been having a lovely, drug-assisted picnic with Wilbur somewhere along the very obvious California coast maquerading as Western Massachusetts. Wilbur tells Nancy that he has something to show her, and takes her to a ritual space on a promontory overlooking the sea (there is no ocean in Western Massachusetts, for the record). It’s there that he asks her what she thinks about sex and Nancy says she thinks it’s great. You get right away how unlikely it is that she’s had sex, and not just because it’s Sandra Dee in the role.

She asks if what she’s sitting is an altar and Wilbur responds in the affirmative. As she reclines, he disrobes to reveal some pretty shoddy, occult(ish) tattoos and proceeds to take her. Another pause here, please.

This is at once, one of the strangest deflowerings I’ve ever seen. Haller has filmed the Wilbur/Nancy sequences with a dreamlike feel to them, but not through any camera tricks, just through the actors’ delivery. Nancy is less Stepford Wife sedated than just pliant in a way that seems to fit Stockwell’s detached calm. In many ways, this makes it all seem all the more surreal but also, all the more disturbing. 

There’s a tacit assumption that Nancy may not even mind what’s happening to her because her having been rendered so pliant begins to read as compliance. Stockholm Syndrome comes to mind, but the action plays out so anesthetized that we feel like we’re in a dream. 

But you know who isn’t? That’s right, Armitage and Elizabeth. Armitage goes to visit Lavinia in her facility and she is patently suffering from PTSD, hallucinations, and Cthulhu knows what. Turns out that Dr. Cory, the GP whose name was on Wilbur’s birth certificate hadn’t actually delivered Wilbur. Grandpa Whateley had begged him to come to the mansion to save Lavinia who had just given birth to Wilbur and to his - so it was said - stillborn twin. He was able to stabilizer her but she was never the same from that day on.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth has been chatting with Cora in the doctor’s office about Wilbur and his family. Cora, Talia Coppola, soon to be Shire, tells her of the disappearance of a girl who went to the estate and the rumors that surrounded the family. She sure wouldn’t go there.

After talking to Cora, Elizabeth returns to the Whateley’s, brushes past Old Man Whateley after pretty much clocking him (poor Jaffe! Just a goddamn punching bag for these kids!) and runs upstairs to enter a locked room form which issues a peculiar (and effective) cluster of gurgling sounds. The POV shifts to a stroboscopic scene of flashing colors, tentacles, hands, and other appendages pawing and clawing at Elizabeth’s increasingly naked body. The sequence is brief but edited so well that it takes a beat to realize that Elizabeth is being assaulted by some Lovecraftian demon. It’s jarring and horrific in a way you wouldn’t normally have seen in a movie at the time.

Wilbur and Nancy return and the final showdown between Wilbur and his grandfather ensues. Old Man Whateley’s demise barely registers with Nancy and we cut to Wilbure giving his grandfather a burial, performing some eldritch ritual (it’s Lovecraft, I’m professionally obligated to use that adjective at some point) until he’s interrupted by the townspeople upset that he’s attempting to bury his grandfather on hallowed Christian ground.

Now, not that I’m going to bat for a guy who’s roofied a woman and taken advantage of her, or that I’m in favor of randomly burying your granddad without proper municipal paperwork filled out, but that Christian chick was really nasty. “Your kind” this, “we’re Christians” that….Anyway, the Sherriff shows up to tell the crowd to disperse and no, the proper paperwork has to be filled out before any burial can take place.

The crowd just seems to disperse and Wilbur and Nancy just leave. I know there were two attendants at graveside, but what happens to Gramps’ body? 

Okay. So here’s the deal with the thing in the locked room: that’s Wilbur’s twin who may not necessarily be from this dimension. Before tossing Grampa down the stairs, Wilbur declared that he’d succeed in ushering in the return of the Old Ones where the olld man had failed. He returns to Miskatonic, has a killer fight with a security guard whom he dispatches with a lance, and makes off with the Necronomicon. It’s date night with Yog Sothoth and Nancy!

Armitage has gone back to see Lavinia after Cory tells him she’s dying and we see her final images from her POV in a posterized red-filtered sequence as Armitage and Cory hover over her. She chants something before she dies and Armitage puts it together that something’s going down but what. Another neat sound design element is how the sounds of a murder of crows is used to signal her flight from this earth (same thing happened when the old man died). 

Getting word that Wilbur had killed the night guard and made off with the Necronomicon, Armitage (and Cory) head out to get the sheriff. Wilbur’s twin, by the way, has made his way out into the world and is wreaking havoc all over the countryside. He arrives at the Christian lady’s house where she and her husband are about to dine. After saying grace, their dog freaks out, the husband grabs a rifle and goes out to see what’s wrong, fires off a couple of rounds and gets his ass back inside where Wilbur’s brother basically tears the house apart and we learn later, the couple, as well.

As with Lavinia, and with Elizabeth’s demise, the POV shifts to the first person subjective and is even more solarized and abstracted. Wilbur’s brother has heard his sibliing’s invocation and is enroute to join him and Nancy, but decides to take out Cora, too. She was on her way home, sees Wilbur’s brother, swerves and runs into a tree. She stumbles out of the car, concussed, and is dispatched shortly thereafter in a rosy to blood red with some white posterization.

By the time the townspeople have gotten to the dead couple’s place and off to the Wheateleys, now engorged in flames, Wilbur has Nancy on the altar and in a gesture I hope everyone agreed was a little funny, he takes the Necronomicon off her stomach and props the book open between her legs. In light of everything that’s happened, the counts as lifting the mood a little.

The townsfolk, and the sheriff and Drs. Armitage (PhD) and Cory (MD) fan out and ascend the slope to the altar. Before they can get there, Wilbur’s brother attacks them and makes his way to the altar where he seems to appear behind Wilbur. However, Dr. Armitage arrives and as in the story, cuts the ceremony short by employing a counter spell. Lightning catches Wilbur on fire and he plummets into the ocan’s inky depths, we see Wilbur’s brother manifest as a bouquet of demon heads and claws and other things I couldn’t quite make out. This was done pretty well as negatives prints set in a cloud in good compositing job.

Wilbur’s brother blows up, Armitage approaches Nancy on the altar and in one of the most ambiguous line readings, she says. “Oh, no.” Not “oh, no” as in “OH NO! WTF has happened!” But “oh, no” as in “we failed.” Armitage goes to comfort her, but you sense she doesn’t really care. As he and Nancy and Cory walk away from the altar toward the camera, a fetus is superimposed on Nancy’s body. 

I was surprised at how much this film got right, in terms of lore and tone and yet, how late 60s creaky so much of the story beats were. At an hour and a half, it kind of dragged because of this weird pacing. The first half hour was a kind of slog and it becomes obvious that there’s a fair amount of exposition throughout, though I’d be hard pressed to say that it wasn’t in most instances necessary.

There is also the strangeness of the distance between the audience and the characters. I was genuinely fascinated with this relationship between Wilbur and Nancy, since on the one hand, it is so unnerving at how he’s manipulating her but at how little she seems able to care; and that’s expressed in a way that infers she has more knowledge of what’s going on enough to introduce the idea that she might even be on board with bringing the Old Ones into the world.

There’s also the incredibly distressing fringing of every other woman in this film. Elizabeth, Cora, Lavinia, the self-righteous Christian lady.  They all become monster fodder. Well, except Lavinia; she was traumatized by intercourse with Wilbur’s dad, whom we learn is not from this dimension. There’s a line in there that Wilbur’s brother takes after his father.

There’s some strong sound design, as well. A bitchin’ soundtrack that utilizes electonics well, though sometimes a bit of intrusive, but sound effects for Wilbur’s brother and the chorus of birds when someone’s dying are really good. Unfortunately, there’s some really bothersome ADR and a few instances of dialog not synching. 

Is it a good movie, though? I think it is. Or good enough. It’s got those pacing issues and while I applaud the strangeness of the performances, the more disconcerting aspects of what happens to Nancy are more horrifying than anything else in the movie.

It’s hard to shake the casual misogyny of so many earlier films. I’ve lived long enough to see so much finally get called into question, but it does make for rewatching films I loved from the time an exercise in addressing just how systemic misogyny, homophobia, and racism were (and still are) in our culture. 

In a case like The Dunwich Horror, this may actually deepen the text and give us more to interrogate. Had it been a more artfully executed film, it might even lend it more levers of complexity. However, I think any additional ambiguity comes from Sandra Dee’s narcoleptic response to the terror of the situation and Stockwell’s oddly distant view of, well, everything.

There was another version made in the early 2000s with Stockwell as Armitage (and Jefffrey Coombs as Wilbur) that I haven’t seen and I’ve heard it’s pretty wretched, so I didn’t feel compelled to watch it this go-round (but I very likely will at some point; bad reviews are like catnip to me.)

I give Haller and his crew props for the massive improvement over his earlier effort in succeeding in capturing some of the more unnerving qualities of Lovecraft’s work. Again, HPL is a tough nut to film. So much is in the often purple-hued prose, and even when he’s at the top of his game, there’s much in his stories that is innately off-putting. The xenophobia, the racism, the lack of any kind of genuine affection between characters (mostly because everyone is driven by fear or compelled by dread by the time we meet them); none of this makes for what we would look for in a film. 

It goes without saying that situations in film adaptations are necessary because otherwise, there’d be no one to relate to. I don’t know that Lovecratt was ever someone I wanted to know. No, let me amend that; I most certainly wouldn’t have wanted to to know him. But like everyone else, at his best, he’s too good a writer to summarily dismiss.

This might account for why the best of the Lovecraftian movies are those that are influenced by him but not direct adaptations of his work. Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at Stuart Gordon’’s From Beyond and a little surprise I’m quite fond of from the HP Lovecraft Society.

Photos:

Stockwell seems to have been aware of Aleister Crowley and utilized one of his more famous portraits for a stock move in his ritual. That makes you wonder if Stockwell (or Haller or Hanson) based any of his performance on Crowley or some other characters.

Wilbur’s POV:

Wilburs brother going after a townie.

Wilbur’s brother going after Elizabeth

Still assaulting Elizabeth

Lavinia’s perspective