At this point at Scare U, we've covered a fair number of Lovecraftian films: The Thing, The Void, In the Mouth of Madness, The Mist, maybe even Evil Dead 2, which borrows its engine from Lovecraft. But I don't believe that we've ever really defined our terms. I believe firmly in the power of a common vocabulary, especially in such a prestigious and esteemed educational institution as Scare U.
So what is Lovecraftian or cosmic horror?
It is a subgenre of horror fiction and horror film that emphasizes the horror of things that are unknowable and incomprehensible. And it emphasizes themes of cosmic dread and forbidden knowledge and its pursuit. Madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific exploration. And you know, as I was thinking about cosmic horror, I was thinking that, as a child, one understands one’s house or town, maybe even conceptually things like one’s state and country, but we have no real understanding of the scale of the planet we inhabit, let alone the galaxy or the universe. We see a globe. We can bridge an ocean with the palm of our hand. We feel like we can comprehend our relationship to other planets around us. But there comes a point at which we look up into the void on a dark night and we realize our own individual universal smallness and our sort of collective insignificance and that our whole vast earth could fit inside our sun over a million times.
I was thinking that when I was in fourth grade, I had one of my favorite teachers of all time, Mrs. Forconi. And she was really big on unique teaching opportunities and kind of experiential learning. She loved Broadway so much that she let me stage a scaled down production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera in her classroom. And she also let my friend D.J. James and me create and present a lecture to the rest of the class on astronomy because I developed by that point kind of twin interests in astronomy and microbiology. And D.J. was another little smarty pants. We would kind of disappear into a big storage closet off of the classroom and make our own film strips to project and write our outlines to present. And as we were working our way through this lecture on astronomy, we had this realization that astronomical structures and behaviors mimic microbiological structures and behaviors, atomic structures and behaviors. And in those tiny bodies, even tinier bodies revolve around a big central nucleus, just like planets revolve around the sun.
And if, on our planet, we're conscious and individual, what's happening on the surface of an electron? And let me tell you, that kind of thinking can really do your head in. Thinking about macro versus micro, and what are we? And when we're 10 years old and thinking about specks of subatomic dust, it's a real mind fuck. And existential dread is personal and it's difficult to communicate, because it's a very abstract emotion. And I think cosmic horror, which traffics in that kind of dread, is also visually complex. It's unnameable, it's unknowable, it's elusive even in its descriptions. It takes intangible concepts that require imagination on the part of the reader who encounters Lovecraft. Or rather it forces imagination to fulfill the promise of the prose.
And I think the same is true of the visual interpreter of this kind of material and the capabilities of realizing it in anything resembling concrete terms and the budget to feed those capabilities. I think the goal in making a Lovecraftian horror film is a kind of balance. With Lovecraft, if something is hard to think about, then it's hard to put into words. And if it's hard to express verbally, then it's nearly impossible to show. Fabulous creatures tinged with a hint of sci-fi with a story that conjures the internal emotions and abstract themes of like a Bergman film. It's Buñuel with slime from the intersection of time and space.
So what does a filmmaker do when technology or money are in short supply? The filmmaker leans on the imagination of the viewer. Tell, don't show, or show the impact of the horror without showing the horror itself.
The history of translating Lovecraft into visual media, I think, is a checkered one. Sometimes the visuals work, but the writing fails. More often than not, the writing checks out, but the lack of resources laughably befouls the execution. And more often still, the interpretation in genre films by the performers fails both the writing and the production values.
So cosmic horror is hard to make. It's hard to make now in 2023. And it's rare that a film interpretation succeeds. But like most things, we have to ask of it, what is its intention? What is it aiming to do? I would suggest that films like The Thing and The Void are successful in telling provocative stories, interpreting them visually and presenting them with competent actors giving compelling performances. I would suggest that Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space from 2019, which starred Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson, is probably thus far the ne plus ultra of Lovecraft interpretations. But prior to the development of real, cutting edge special effects, and I mean believable digital effects, the most successful adaptations of Lovecraft's writing tended to be smaller, more self-contained stories like The Unnameable, for instance, from 1988, or Reanimator and its sequel.
But let's say it's 1969 and you're Roger Corman, you've already sort of assayed Lovecraft in The Haunted Palace, which objectively feels more like one of your Poe films than Lovecraft. And you've got this modern idea for how to present a Lovecraft story on film. And you've got two wooden nickels and Sandra Dee, whose contract with Universal has just ended, and she wants to make a grown-up movie. But this ain't Universal, and even if it were, their Monster Days are well behind them. This is AlP, American International Pictures. Samuel Z. Arkoff. She-creatures, screaming skulls, teenage werewolves, and later Frankensteins. Black Sundays, voodoo women, colossal men, and a lot of youthful flesh. And Poe adaptations. When this film was made, there was no possibility that the result was gonna be anything like Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space.
So what do you do? You bolster Sandra Dee by casting an Oscar winner like Ed Begley or three ‘now or future’ Oscar nominees like Dean Stockwell, Sam Jaffe (who I loved as the crooked bookman in Bedknobs and Broomsticks when I was a kid) and Talia Shire. And you surround them with a cast of recognizable supporting faces and you throw in Barboura Morris from A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, The Trip, and The Haunted Palace. And the significance of casting Sandra Dee—you know Grease. You’ve heard Stockard Channing sing, “Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity.” Iin a B-horror picture that suggests her virginity has been taken by the something from outer space, that probably can't be overstated. And you open up your movie with a title sequence that does a lot of heavy lifting, that sets the tone for a big Lovecrafty story that shows tiny human figures running around on enormous godlike or demon-like figures in a shifting, duotone, posterized, animated sequence underscored by a fabulous theme by Les Baxter that sounds a little like “Dark Shadows” and that's gonna vary and get weirder throughout your movie.
The production design is fabulous in a totally psychedelic way, as is the cinematography, the editing, the lion's share of special effects. Whateley’s bazonkers, bananas, Victorian mansion is kind of fruitcake level nutty. There's obviously something going on here related to psychedelics and hippies and the burgeoning in America, at least, in the occult and practical witchcraft. And between the corduroy and the pinky rings and the cherry red sunbeam tiger, it's an incredibly stylish film, a film that is filled with things that we ostensiblv cannot understand. What is the magical Jonathan Adler table sculpture-cum-incendiary device? What are the strange sounds that Sandra Dee hears from behind closed doors? And of course, why does Wilbur's kitchen, which should basically be a black magic laboratory, have vials of psychoactive, trance-inducing powders hidden in special boxes instead of in the spice rack?
But I think The Dunwich Horror takes advantage of expository dialogue and the evocation of things that it cannot show us. It is a psychedelic folk horror spectacle. It's weird, as it should be, given it is inspired by a literary genre called “weird fiction.” It takes its time. It disorients you and it destabilizes you, and it takes its assets and its shortcomings, and it makes something unlike anything that came before it that would influence a hell of a lot that came after it. Does it succeed, then, on its own terms?
Listen to our episode on The Dunwich Horror here.
Bradford Louryk