FANTASIA OBSCURA: Karloff Tries His Scary Best in This Lacklustre Lovecraft 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, we just have to accept our mistakes, and not let them keep us from doing better next time…
Die Monster Die (aka Monster of Terror) (1966)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: Daniel Haller
We all make mistakes.
It can be an actor taking on a role that never should have been tried. It can be a director helming a project that was doomed from the start.
And, it can be a smart-aleck nostalgic film columnist who said something without realizing it was not entirely true, about Lovecraft adaptations by American International…
A while ago, we looked at The Dunwich Horror, where it was declared in the piece that that was the only time American International tried to adapt any works by H. P. Lovecraft. Which, it turns out, is inaccurate.
Writer Greg Cox pointed out to us that we missed The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. Now, admittedly, the film claims in its publicity materials to be based on Edgar Alan Poe’s poem of that title, but looking closer at the credits, you find that Charles Beaumont’s script also draws from Lovecraft’s The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. And to be honest, the fact that Price’s character is called “Charles Dexter Ward” probably should have been a red flag…
After we thanked Greg for that, we had to go back and make sure that there was nothing else Lovcraftian out there. Having seen how A-I’s handling of literature adaptations was as solid as a Shoggoth, it made sense to be careful and look to see if there were any other films that tried this.
And boy, did we find one…
We open as a train comes to a stop in a town in England, called Arkham (but of course). Getting off the train is Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams), an American who came out to visit the Whitley place, something that draws cold reactions and scorn from the locals he runs into.
With no help from the village folks, Reinhart stars hoofing it out to the place. As he closes in on his destination, he finds a piece of dead land surrounding a large hole in the ground; since he’s nowhere near Horsell Common, he’s able to pause long enough to get a good look at the dying vegetation before he continues on.
He finally gets to the house, despite the ‘No Trespassing’ signs and bear traps, where he meets the laird of the house, the wheelchair-bound Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff), pushed by his manservant Merwyn (Terence de Marney). Nahum is incredulous that the signs and bear traps didn’t deter him, but Reinhart insists he was invited by Nahun’s daughter, Susan (Susan Farmer), who shows up and verifies that she asked him to come. Ends up Susan and Reinhart were both at university together in the States, where they were close to each other, though why she never told her parents she met a guy she invited to come over before this, we’re never told.
Susan soon introduces him to her mother, Letitia (Freda Jackson). Despite Letitia being bedridden thanks to an extreme light allergy, she talks to the American visitor, asking him to get her daughter as far away from this house as possible. We get some explanation as to why thanks to some clumsy cross-cutting between that scene and what we see Nahum and Merwyn do in the basement:
The creepy dread and crappy cross-cutting continue apace, with Susan on the fence about splitting even after she gets weirded out by the weird watcher through the windows:
Despite this, she sticks around long enough for her and Reinhart to do some breaking-and-entering investigating around the place, figuring out what Daddy has in the basement. They find in the greenhouse plants that have mutated, producing fruits that are gigantic and vines that are sentient, thanks to thing in the basement.
Soon, they see what the thing has done to some of the fauna, and by extension what it’s doing to the inhabitants of the house…
Speaking of mutations, the script by Jerry Sohl takes more than a few liberties with the source material, Lovecraft’s ”The Colour Out of Space”. The adaptation of the original story from 1927, set in New England on a farm, contains a number of divergences as per above, but the one thing the script lacks is the sense of mystery and suggestion of things beyond our ken that Lovecraft wove. What we end up with in the film doesn’t have the same ability to awe or haunt us as the story did; we see the end card, and are ready to think about something else without a second thought to what we’d watched.
September 1927 edition of Amazing Stories, where “The Colour Out of Space” first appeared
Likewise, the rest of the company was just as disposable as the script. We mentioned earlier Haller’s crazy cross-cutting between scenes, which distracts from the narrative too much. By the time he stops doing that, it’s kind of late to get things back on track by then. He doesn’t get a good handle on capturing the Lovecraftian aspects of such tales until he does The Dunwhich Horror four years later, long after this adaptation.
Interestingly, this was only the first try at adapting the story for film. We would get further tries at adapting the story in 1987’s The Curse and 2019’s Color Out of Space. And if one takes into account Stephen King’s acknowledgement that his novel The Tommyknockers was influenced by the story, one can count the 1993 TV miniseries adaptation of King’s novel as an additional try, making this one of Lovecraft’s most adapted tales.
All of the above managed to avoid the mistakes made the first time. Adding to the film’s issues is a cast that never seemed to take the story seriously. Only Karloff, professional that he was, seemed to have made an effort to actually take the material somewhere; it’s almost as if he were spliced into a different, worse movie in order to try and save this film.
Considering the trajectory of Karloff’s career as the Sixties were progressing, it’s easy to imagine that he could have been forgiven had he given as little to the effort here as everyone else had. Which it seems obvious in hindsight was not something he would have done.
In fact, he gives as good if not better a performance later that year for a voice acting gig that first aired on CBS:
Proving that Karloff was more than a professional who was not prone to making mistakes; in fact, he was man for all seasons…
NEXT TIME: When Dylan and the Band sang “Everybody must get stoned,” I’m not sure they had this in mind…
