FANTASIA OBSCURA: Dean Stockwell is Sandra Dee’s Date from Hell in Lovecraft’s Weird Tale
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, bridging two worlds together beyond the barrier of reality is a lot tougher than it looks…
The Dunwich Horror (1970)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: Daniel Haller
With American International doing so many literary adaptations, bringing the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to the screen, it was probably inevitable that they would soon get around to doing H. P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is probably the most influential writer in horror to come out of the last century. His complex background of a “mythos” that all of his written works are set in, one where the “Old Ones” walked the Earth before we did, and we silly humans pursue forbidden knowledge to understand and maybe control the universe through these entities, not realizing that such acts are pure madness, made him a potent influence through the 20th century. The fact that his works were enrobed in pure xenophobia and read as racist AF in his characterizations of non-WASP males portends a diminished influence as the 21st century progresses.
None of which about the author you’re likely to garner from this picture derived from his work:
Based on a short story penned by Lovecraft in 1929, the film opens cold with a woman in the throes of labor, being watched by a member of her family (Sam Jaffe). This cuts quickly to a hideous animated credit sequence, which then cuts quickly to the rest of the film; you have to get used to the super-fast edits early for this one, otherwise you may as well give up now…
So when we do start for real, we’re at Miskatonic University, the pride of Arkham, MA, where Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley, in a role he completed just three months before his death) has just finished a lecture on the Necromonicon. At the end of his talk, he asks his student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) to carry it back to the library and put it back in its case, as if it were a copy of Weird Tales.
If you’re a Lovecraft student, watching them handle the Necronomicon here is like watching how military-grade weapons get handled at a gun show in South Carolina, you just know something bad’s going to happen soon…
Cue Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who pops up unexpectedly and starts giving the eyes to Nancy. While fellow student Elizabeth Hamilton (Donna Baccala) immediately gets a bad vibe off Wilbur, Nancy is more than gracious to give in to Wilbur’s request, to take the book for five minutes to give it a read. This at first annoys Dr. Armitage, but when he realizes that the man making off with the book is the grandson of someone studied by the scholar, Armitage invites Whatley to dinner with Nancy and Elizabeth.
At the end of the meal, Wilbur notes that he missed the last bus from Arkham to Dunwich, and Nancy offers to drive him home. They make it to Wilbur’s creepy house, where he invites her in for some tea before she heads back. She accepts, he drugs her tea, she drinks it, and from there the weekend’s off to a great start…
…for Wilbur, in any event…
Nancy’s so far under, than when Armitage and Elizabeth find her, she assures her rescuers that yes, she’s spending the weekend in Dunwich of her own free will. Something we can tell is just not the case, as there are very few people who would willingly lie on a cursed altar like the one her host leads her to:
Armitage and Elizabeth, meanwhile, try getting to the bottom of the mystery of the Dunwich Whatleys. They start asking around the town, including the town physician Dr. Corey (Lloyd Bochner) and his nurse Cora (Talia Shire, in the second role of her career and still using her maiden name, Talia Coppola). Both offer warnings about the family as well as some background and clues.
Among the bits of information we get is a story Doctor Cory tells Armitage about Wilbur’s grandfather (Jaffe’s character0), who called for a physician at the time his grandson was born:
The doctor relates that he helped deliver Wilbur, but was told by the family that his twin brother died at birth, which they disposed of. The birth of the twins drove Wilbur’s mother Lavinia (Joanne Moore Jordan) insane, as Armitage notes when he visits her with Cory at the asylum.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, goes back to the Whatley place, sneaks past Grandpa Whatley, and finds a locked room that she should not have opened the door to…
It’s here that we are introduced to Yog-Sothoth, one of the Old Ones in Lovecraft’s mythology, in what ends up being one of two scenes Haller clearly shows us the main threat to our world. (Not counting Wilbur, who we’ll deal with shortly.) For most of the film, we don’t look directly on the horror, but we see what it does, with wind blowing water before it, bright flashes of colors blotting out the scene, much of the time the camera taking Yog-Sothoth’s POV as it brings mayhem about. The creature in fact is less scary when we do see it than when it’s just suggested out of our sight.
It’s actually very effective, and one of the tricks Haller uses that works. While this feature is not his first directing gig, this feels like he took every trick he used as art director for everything from A Bucket of Blood and Master of the World through Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and threw it in along with every kitchen sink found in R’lyeh on screen. Whether it was artistic temperament or a fear that this would be his last time as a director and he’d never have another chance (an founded fear, as he directed a lot of TV episodes in the ’70s and ’80s), the result of all the numerous cuts and filters is a film that’s way too busy for its own good, distracting and aggravating the viewer.
This is in stark contrast to Stockwell’s Whatley, who seems even more out of phase with normal rhythms than Nancy does after she gets drugged. The casual viewer will wonder how someone so laid back could be an evil mastermind cultist if he seems to care so little for his plan. People watching the film who are familiar with some of Stockwell’s other work, even if they only remember Quantum Leap, will be especially surprised at how distant he seems on screen; whether it’s the actor’s choice or the director’s is hard to discern from casual viewing.
The rest of the cast manages pretty well to work with what they have. Sandra Dee’s drugged out Nancy is the only person trying for lower wattage than Stockwell’s Whatley, but at least she has a good excuse, being drugged the whole time while in a small Massachusetts town.
[Insert your preferred recreational use in Massachusetts joke here…]
If there’s any really weak parts that make this otherwise watchable film hard to take, it’s the script. There are better written pastiches of Lovecraft’s work than this adaptation; hell, there are better written modules for the Call of Cthulhu RPG than this script. Like other A-I adaptations, this takes a lot of liberties with the source material, and if anything is even less in the spirit of the original writer’s oeuvre. And with some terrible turns in character decision making and some flat dialog, it’s not hard to see why this would be the only effort A-I made to adapt Lovecraft.
Which considering how deep Lovecraft’s created universe is, was likely to be inevitable if they were only going to do this half-considered adaptation. The fact that passing references to the Old Ones in such works as Cast a Deadly Spell and The Cabin in the Woods better capture the feel for Lovecraft and his work than this directly derived version of his story shows how much of the writer’s spirit permeated our culture.
Then again, it’s not like Shakespeare was being abused here. As Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Frank Belknap Long in 1931 about the Yog-Sothoth, “The fact is, I have never approached serious literature yet.”
NEXT TIME: Trying to get into orbit with a stiff upper lip, wot not…
