Book-To-Movie: H.P. Lovecraft’s 'The Dunwich Horror’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In this post we have our Book to Movie review which we normally have on the fourth weekend of the month but I had to postpone it as I said last time. In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. In the previous Book-To-Movie we reviewed H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Outsider”, and its 1995 movie adaptation. We talked about how this short story was one of his lesser known works and that the movie was missing the cosmic horror element so definitive of Lovecraft’s stories. 

In this month’s Book-To-Movie we have just the opposite: a story that is one of Lovecraft’s most well-known ones (at least among Lovecraft fans) and a movie adaptation that catches the cosmic horror. The story is the novella, “The Dunwich Horror”, and the movie the 1970 American International Pictures (AIP) version. This movie actually does more than convey the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s stories: it captures the weirdness of his “weird” fiction, a subgenre of speculative fiction that broke the conventions of the more recognizable monsters of gothic horror such as vampires and werewolves. Instead, weird fiction involved monsters that had almost no similarity to any creature on Earth. 

Because of weird fiction's radical break from convention, it should be no surprise that Lovecraft’s novella was made into a movie and released in the countercultural era of the 1960s and early '70s. During that time, pop culture changed to nearly an unrecognizable degree. Psychedelic art and rock are two of the biggest examples of this. There was no psychedelic art or rock music  (let alone rock in general) in Lovecraft’s time of the 1920s and ‘30s, of course. However, his stories were similar to the movement because of their monsters from other dimensions, monsters that were so unlike anything on Earth that they were claimed by his characters to be indescribable. But there's an ironic side to this comparison. While the psychedelic era was a time of radical social change, Lovecraft was way far from that type of thinking. He was a racist and a xenophobe which his stories clearly reflected. Even so, the movie did a good job staying faithful to the book while dropping the overt racism and adding psychedelic effects. 

‘The Dunwich Horror’: The Novella

In Lovecraft's "Dunwich Horror", a young man by the name of Wilbur Whateley attempts to obtain the Necronomicon, an ancient spell book of the dead. His intent is to use it to perform a ritual that will open a doorway to another dimension letting in an evil race of creatures that will take over the earth. This novella is well written on the imaginative and prose levels. However, like so many of Lovecraft's stories, it depends too much on narration and the telling rather than showing of the story. Yet there are some great descriptive scenes in it. The tension builds up well, and the emotions of the characters in their reactions to the terror are conveyed really good. 

That terror includes Wilbur. His eccentricity and peculiarity are portrayed well even if only told through narration rather than shown through action and behavioural traits. Yet his strangeness goes not only to the level of his ambitions, including his desperate search for the Necronomicon, but also to that of his physical make. He’s described as monstrous. He grows unusually tall and matures at fast rates beginning at birth. But he is also described as "black", even though he is probably a white guy who’s simply darker than most of his family, especially his albino mother. But because he is described in this way while being portrayed as a villain, it’s an overt expression of Lovecraft's own racist beliefs. 

‘The Dunwich Horror’: The Movie

As I mentioned earlier, AIP's adaptation of "The Dunwich Horror", does a great job sticking to the main plot of Lovecraft's story. Most of the deviations are relatively minor and the larger ones were necessary for a changing audience in a rapidly changing time. But the movie's 1970 release was perfect because it was in this countercultural era when a popular interest grew not only in psychedelic art but also in the occult. Besides the political and social justice movements of the time, there was also a religious rebellion where many young people took up religions outside of traditional Judeo-Christianity. Many took up pagan and Eastern spiritual beliefs. Some even went to the extreme of joining brainwashing cults and Satanism. This interest and concern was being reflected in the movies as well as other media of that time, and that included the movie adaptation of "The Dunwich Horror". 

Directed by Daniel Haller, many of the movie’s major changes in the story were in the character of Wilbur Whateley (played by Dean Stockwell). Wilbur in the movie looks like any ordinary white guy of that time with the exception of his weird behaviour. Like in the book, he is obsessed with searching for the Necronomicon and the other characters think him very peculiar. Unlike in the book, he has no monstrous appearance but he is definitely occultic and villainous. That said, his absence of dark features is an omission of the overt racism seen in Lovecraft’s novella. But perhaps not a total omission: all the characters in the movie are played by white actors. The 1960s and ‘70s were giving better representation to people of colour in film and television but that was only the beginning of that long-needed change. 

In the book there are two monsters. In this movie the only monster is one that appears towards the end but it’s just as ugly and "indescribable" as the one in the novella. The psychedelia especially shows up when the monster does. It's done really good with the infrared strobe lighting which enhances the terror and absurd nature of the monster. This freakout, as they would've called it during that time, was the perfect way to portray the otherworldly horror that Lovecraft's stories spoke of, a horror that can't be put into words because it comes from a universe that's laws differ too much from our own. 

Besides the possible covert racism reflected in the casting, the other problem I had with this movie was the acting: it was very poor. Some of it was done almost to the point of camp. However, the New England accents were done well by many of the actors. Other than these problems, the movie was really good, never mind that it’s B-rated psychotronic cinema.

 

While AIP's cinematic version of Lovecraft's "The Dunwich horror" stays faithful to the plot, it makes changes fitting for its time. The overt racism is omitted, though racism that’s more under the table may still be there as reflected in the all-white cast. Yet we can't say for sure since we don't know the producers’ intentions. Although the acting was bad, the movie is a stunningly good visual interpretation of the novella. The psychedelia of that era is seen in the strobe-lighting effects of the monster which gives the audience a “bad trip”, as it was put during that time when referring to the bad effects of drug abuse. But it’s a bad trip that works good for a horror movie such as this. No other era, perhaps not even today's, could show or interpret Lovecraft's work in such an unearthly way. To do that today, a director may have to get a little nostalgic with their technique. 

There won't be a blog post next Saturday because this Wednesday is an Insecure Writer's Group blog hop post. [link] So, be here then! Also, I'm still looking for guest bloggers so if anyone is interested, please let me know. I just ask that the topic is related to speculative fiction. Have you read Lovecraft's novella, "The Dunwich Horror", or seen it's 1970 movie adaptation? Have you seen any other movie adaptations of the novella such as the 2008 version? (Which, by the way, Dean Stockwell also played in, according to the Internet Movie Database!) If so, please let us know how you liked them. I’m always looking for other Lovecraftian horror movies to check out!

Until next time . . .