“I know enough about strange things not to laugh.”
The Dunwich Horror is not the first film ever adapted from HP Lovecraft’s work. It is indeed about the fifth or sixth, depending on how you count. It’s not even the first to be released under its original title, although most people can forget about it The Closed Room (1967). Still, I feel – based on absolutely zero evidence – that this is the earliest that many fans are familiar with.
This claim – again, backed up by no factual data – may have just as much to do with the fact that The Dunwich Horror is one of the first Lovecraft films to feel “modern” in its depictions of sex and occultism, meaning that, more than previous films in the canon, it feels like it could be playing on a double-bill with Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’s later forays into the old lord’s work, with their copious rubber monsters and equally copious nudity.
The first HP Lovecraft adaptation to hit the big screen was Roger Corman’s The ghost palace back in 1963. Ostensibly part of Corman’s “Poe cycle”, the film merely borrowed its title from Poe, and was instead a fairly straightforward adaptation of Lovecraft’s posthumously published novel The Charles Dexter Ward case. Daniel Haller, who would later direct The Dunwich Horrorworked as art director on that film, as he did on virtually all of the “Poe cycle” pictures.
For those who have seen those awesome Technicolor goths, I don’t need to tell you that Daniel Haller was a bravura art director who was able to squeeze some truly unforgettable sets out of relatively meager budgets. In case you doing if you want to know more about it, look in the booklet that comes with the new Blu-ray from Arrow Video contains a lengthy essay about Haller and his background as an art director.
Haller made his directorial debut in 1965, directing the second or third (again, depending on how you count) H.P. Lovecraft’s cinematic adaptation ever to hit screens, the dramatically titled Die, monster, die!, a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space.” There, his background as an art director was already apparent, and the film is quite similar to the “Poe cycle” films that came before it.
In 1970, however, things were changing, and The Dunwich Horror brought something that was missing from the “Poe cycle” movies. Namely: hippies. It wasn’t the first time sexuality had found its way into Lovecraftian cinema. Even as far back as The ghost palacethe hapless female lead is offered as a “partner” to one of the Old Ones, while 1968’s The curse of the crimson altar brought in BDSM imagery and a distinctly swinging 1960s vibe.
The Dunwich Horror however, felt modern in a way those movies didn’t, while also staying more true to the original story than it did Crimson altar and adding New Age-esque dream sequences and psychedelic effects to represent Wilbur’s invisible twin brother – who, when we doing finally see him, looks a bit like a Beholder made of feather snakes. Normally I want to show the monster as much as possible, but in this case the negative effects of the camera might have been a good decision.
Dean Stockwell’s smirking, corduroy-clad Wilbur Whately couldn’t feel more early ’70s if you paid him, while his love interest and female lead is played by none other than Gidget herself, Sandra Dee. They portray the (relative) youth, while older character actors such as Sam Jaffe and Ed Begley (in one of his last film roles) complete the cast.
Although all this helps to modern “hipness” of The Dunwich HorrorHaller’s background as an art director is still evident, and nowhere more so than in the Whately house itself, which on the outside resembles the Sawyer clan from Texas Chainsaw Massacre decorated for Halloween, and on the inside like Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum.
Unlike some other films of the time, The Dunwich Horror is relatively well known (and well preserved) over the years, so there have been plenty of previous occasions to watch it even before that Blu-ray release. And most of those prints are pretty well maintained, so while it’s never looked as good as it does now, the restoration isn’t as triumphant as some of the others that have been done before.
Movie quality isn’t the only thing an Arrow Blu-ray brings out, of course. The Dunwich Horror also offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Les Baxter’s otherworldly score, which gets its own on-disc featurette, not to mention new commentary tracks, interviews, and so on. The disc also features a reversible cover, featuring new artwork by Luke Preece, as well as Reynold Brown’s original poster art. And if anything is really responsible for this movie’s longevity in the public consciousness, it might be that poster featuring a chimerical beast that the movie’s meager effects could never replicate.
In addition to his work as a Monster Ambassador here at Signal Horizon, Orrin Gray is the author of several books about monsters, ghosts, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters, and a byline movie writer on Unwinnable and others. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best horror of the year and he is the author of two collections of essays on vintage horror film.
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