The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Young, hot Wilbur Whateley (young, hot Dean Stockwell – not necessarily something you get to write every day) comes to the Arkham University Library to borrow the Necronomicon. He’s got Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee), one of the student assistants of the place, charmed/hypnotized right quick, but head librarian Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) is particularly protective of that tome. Supposedly, it provides a way to ensure the return of the Old Ones, a superior race that ruled Earth long before mankind, and though Armitage doesn’t exactly believe in these things, he does think the book could be rather dangerous.

While Wilbur isn’t getting the book, he does manage to convince Nancy to drive him to his home in Dunwich, where he can better drug, hypnotize and talk her into becoming a sacrifice to the Old Ones. Or just the new mother of the inhuman race.

Lovecraft’s tales have always been seen as particularly difficult to adapt, but I’ve always thought that especially The Dunwich Horror, with its often decidedly pulpy tenor, would be one of the easier stories to adapt.

AIP must have thought the same, and most of the changes made by the script – by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky – to Daniel Haller’s adaptation do make rather a lot of sense: sexing things up a little and putting proceedings firmly into the late 60s/early 70s are logical and sound decisions, at least.

However, the film then proceeds to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly. The acting is generally pretty bad, with Ed Begley (senior, that is) lacking the gravitas and conviction to make a proper counterpoint to Stockwell’s Whateley. Dee lacks any ability to project anything at all (or if she does, chooses not to show any of it), which, given that the script already has very little for her to do, turns Nancy into a complete absence where a person needed to be. Whereas Stockwell so overplays the camp of his role as written, he’s never believable as any kind of horror film villain.

Haller was a brilliant production designer and art director who was able to work wonders on a budget, but his directorial efforts all feel pedestrian, slow and lack any visual imagination, all things this film would have desperately needed to convince an audience to take any of this seriously. Instead of style, from time to time Vaseline or gauze is applied to a camera, and hippies dance, or the screen goes purple for some monster vision. Which simply isn’t enough.

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

aka Monster of Terror

A letter calls American absolvent of SCIENCE CLASS (the film does indeed only ever call whatever he studied “science”, as if it were a 50s monster movie) Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) to the home of his girlfriend Susan Whitley (Suzan Farmer) in the UK. The locals from the nearby village dance the usual gothic horror dance about the house, either not speaking to the stranger seeking it at all or making insinuations towards something terrible connected to it. Once Reinhart does manage to get where he is going, said home turns out to be a lavish estate, yet one surrounded by an area of scorched vegetation and decay.

Susan’s father Nahum (Boris Karloff) knows nothing of any boyfriends coming to visit, for Reinhart’s visit seems to have been cooked up by Nahum’s ailing wife Letitia (Freda Jackson), who is mysteriously always hidden behind bed curtains that look like mourning veils, and by Susan. Letitia wants dearly to get her daughter away from the house, away from the decay of her surroundings as well as from a father who has become increasingly obsessed with occult studies and experiments on plants as well as on something hidden away in the house’s basement. Nahum’s keeping with the family tradition there, for his grandfather was doing the very same thing, becoming increasingly deranged in the process.

Despite being more of the mopey kind of American, Reinhart’s love for Susan – who has somehow managed not to notice how creepy and weird her household is – drives him to poke around in things clearly not meant for poking.

Seen as an adaption of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s finest works, “The Colour Out of Space”, the AIP/Anglo-Amalgamated co-production of Die, Monster, Die! – a film clearly not afraid of punctuation – is pretty dreadful, its attempts to reform the tale into something better fitting the mold of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations losing much of what makes the story so special. I do understand the difficulty of coming up with a way of representing a living colour we do not have any words for in our human languages cinematically, but the monster the film eventually uses is plain ridiculous, and ripping the tale out of the world of an American rural farmer family and pressing it into service of another tale of Karloff doing experiments is the least creative thing anyone could have done with it. Coming from a script written by Jerry Sohl, who really could do better and knew better, it’s particularly disappointing.

When I’m trying to ignore how much this misses the point of HPL and look at the film as just another AIP gothic, though one set in then contemporary times, keeping at least this part of the Lovecraftian method, I can find some enjoyment in the thing. Haller’s not a terrible dynamic director, but his experience as a production designer – particularly for Corman’s Poe adaptations – is seen in most every shot in the first two thirds of the film. Haller is very adept at suggesting the appropriate mood of wrongness and decay through all kinds of neat little details in the sets, and uses the foggy and wet locations to great effect too, creating a wonderful and focussed mood of all the good d-words.

Well, it is too bad that it is Nick Adams wandering through these places, looking a bit like a rodent with very weird hair, and only ever distracting from that with a performance that’s wooden even for the romantic lead in an AIP gothic. The – British – rest of the cast is fine, of course, the elderly and ill Karloff doing the best with the weak dialogue he is given and managing to inject a degree of dignity and pathos into the proceedings by the sheer power of his personality; he’s certainly, as was so often the case, miles above the script there.


But for the first two thirds of the film, the good atmosphere and Karloff do outweigh the bad, suggesting this to be a bit of an underrated little film, not a top notch AIP gothic, but fine enough. Alas, there’s a final act that seems hell-bent on sabotaging everything good that came before, the little plot there is breaking down under the sudden need to get some monsters in, which, in the end, leads us to a climax in which Karloff mutates into a guy wrapped in what looks rather a lot like aluminium foil and chases the rest of the cast through the house, with and without an axe, while Haller suddenly seems to lose all ability to make things look creepy. It’s terrible. So terrible indeed that it overshadows all the decent and better bits that came before, turning Die, Monster, Die! into the kind of film that’s best treated by turning it off once it gets into its third act and making up one’s own ending.