The Dunwich Horror (1970) – Review

Despite having a gargantuan influence over the horror genre as a whole, one of the main reasons filmmakers have found it tough to adapt the works of H.P. Lovecraft to the screen, is that the New England native often came up with such indescribable horrors, it’s practically impossible to realise them. Some versions has given it the old college try; Stuart Gordon’s multiple attempts have provided us with arguably some of the best, Richard Stanley’s Color Out Of Space is probably the most accomplished of the last 20 years and John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness gave us some accurate reality bending despite not actually being based directly on the author’s works. However, while the majority of these movies had the benefit of modern (for their time) special effects to help them realise the unrealisable, we need to spare a thought for the poor souls who tried to tackle Lovecraft before the advent of effects that could handle it. Remarkably, for the most part, 1970’s The Dunwich Horror does a fairly good job of realising the esoteric terrors that tumbled from the brain of a very, antisocial man.

At the Miskatonic University in Arkham, Dr. Henry Armitage is wrapping up a lecture on the history of a rare and infamous book known as the Necronomicon. Said to be packed cover to cover with spells, incantations and various other stats concerning inhuman life that once dwelled on Earth and that now languishes in other dimensions, you’d think that the tome would be placed under far more intense security. However, it’s soon coveted by a young man named Wilbur Whateley, who seems to be unhealthily eager to study it and isn’t afraid to turn his hypnotic gaze upon virtuous student Nancy Wagner to get his way. But while he’s ultimately thwarted by Armitage who is aware of the Whateley family’s sordid past, Wilbur still manages to convinve/hypnotise/seduce Nancy into agreeing to drive him back to his hometown of Dunwich.
Here we discover just how odd young Wilbur truly is. With his father’s identity a mystery and his mother currently gibbering away inside an asylum, it seemed that a tremendous amount of unearthly fuckery occurred around both Wilbur’s conception and birth, and while rumours of a stillborn twin regularly circle around town, anyone bearing the Whateley name is violently treated like a pariah. However, this hasn’t stopped Wilbur from seemingly trying to recreate the ceremony held at his own birth, and due to a lot of drugging and yet more hypnotism, he seems to want to summon the Old Ones from their place from beyond and he’s planning to use Nancy to do it.
Meanwhile, Armitage has arrived from Arkham with suspicions about what’s about to go down and with help from a local doctor, aims to put a stop to all this pagan perfidiousness – however, locked in a room within the crumbling Whateley mansion is a phantasmagoric wildcard that could spread doom to all of Dunwich.

While it’s easy to dump on a film that hasn’t got the visual chutzpah to do proper justice to some of the more bizarre elements to emerge from Lovecraft’s intense imagination, I really have to take a step back and applaud the makers of The Dunwich Horror for bring able to do so much without many of the visual gimmicks more modern filmmakers had to toy with. After all, it’s not like director Daniel Haller has the excessive gore and sex Stuart Gordon got to splatter everywhere in Re-Animator; or an off-the-chain Nic Cage switching accents at will to really carry the insanity of Color Out Of Space – and it certainly hasn’t got that purple-pink light that movies now tend to use when suggesting that some reality-melting, Lovecraftian fuckery is occuring. However, without all that – and on a Roger Corman budget no less – The Dunwich Horror is able to deliver a highly satisfactory take on the story thanks to a dedication to the source material and a whole shitload of psychedelic lighting.
The first thing that helps is a tone that sits somewhere around the kind of creeping, deliberate, atmosphere you’d get from a Hammer film. There’s all the  wonderfully hammy performances and luscious sets you’d expect to see in something like The Devil Rides Out, but at the same time, the lore of Lovecraft is also adhered to surprisingly closely, much like the respect paid to the dark arts seen in Jacques Tourneur’s Night Of The Demon, and while the Great Old Ones are not technically Satan, the fact that Haller uses tricks from other Satanic Panic flicks means that he’s able to pass off chants of “Yog-Sothoth” without the uninitiated having to have a clue about what it really means. But aside from the frequent mentioning of one of H.P. recurring cosmic entities, elsewhere, the movie touches base with other Lovecraftian mainstays, such as the appearance of Miskatonic University and the fact that the Necronomicon is in full view under glass (and labled, no less) rather than being in a concrete bunker under armed guard. Another feather in the movie’s tentacled cap is the fact that Dean Stockwell is apparently fully willing to turn the weirdness up to 11 as the preening villain, Wilbur Whateley.

Glaring at literally everyone as if they’re shit he’s just scraped off his shoe, the fact that his true father is a multidimensional being locked out of this universe means that the actor is able to play the guy as a gargantuan oddball. While some of it works better than others (him insisting on holding a pagan funeral in a Christian graveyard is the perfect level of Lovecraftian arrogance), there’s something simultaneously amusing and genuinely creepy about how much his overacting merges with his strangely unsettling perm and mustache combo. OK, some of the hand gestures delivered by Stockwell feels a little too close to Mork from Ork saying Nanu-Nanu for comfort, but through him the movie manages to evoke the other-worldly feeling that something we don’t quite understand really wants to mess us up.
Obviously, the special effects of 1970 isn’t going to do justice to the creature lurking behind that locked door that turns out to be Wilbur’s twin brother; but thanks to some subtlety and some inspired editing, it mostly comes off with only minor shlock. Seemingly a giant floating head with snakes for hair who has a talent for invisibility, Haller manages to disguse any short comings with quick editing, some nifty psychedelic POV shots, and some cool moments where it’s unseen presence effect the surface of a lake and the plants around it. OK, so it’s final reveal is a bit of a mess (it’s like the sun from the Teletubies took some real bad acid), but the movie manages to keep everything moving in the right direction enough to give us the first, real, quality Lovecraft adaptation. Praise Yog-Sothoth!

Despite some unavoidable turns into old-school hokiness, The Dunwich Horror ends up being a somewhat miraculous find thanks to the fact that it accurately manages to get an idea of Lovecraft’s beguiling universe on screen. Non-reader of the author’s work may wonder what the fuss is about as flashy colours strobe and nonsense words are uttered with reverence, but those in the know will no doubt be enchanted.
Dunwich deal.
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