DATE-RAPE AT THE DEVIL'S HOP YARD
The Dunwich Horror, 1969
‘WHEN a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Deans Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country…’ So begins ‘The Dunwich Horror’, a short story by HP Lovecraft which was first published in Weird Tales magazine in April 1929. The passage goes on to describe a barren land which induces in the spectator a growing sense of unease and seems to evidence the ‘decay of centuries’, before ending on the vaguely ominous note: ‘Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.’ This 500-word introduction to the tale was Lovecraft’s homage to the evocative opening of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (‘During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year…’), another story of age-old evil festering in the forgotten out-of-the-way by New England’s more famous literary son, Edgar Allan Poe.
Rhode Island semi-recluse Howard Phillips Lovecraft had been submitting his fiction to Weird Tales since 1923 but for some years beforehand, he had unconsciously begun to ‘group’ some of his work into a cosmic schema - a mythology of his own making like the Middle Earth construct of JRR Tolkein, but of a much darker cast. Lovecraft’s mythology would ultimately take the form of a variation on the Christian conceit of heaven and hell, and the eternal struggle between good and evil, in which a race of titanic ‘Old Ones’ lurk on the edge of time and space waiting for the stars to be ‘right’ again so that they can reclaim the Earth from which they were expelled aeons before. And Lovecraft’s Great Satan was the Cyclopean, star-spawned abomination Cthulhu, a multi-tentacled molluscular monstrosity slumbering through the millennia at his corpse-house in R’lyeh, in the unreachable depths of the South Pacific Ocean.
Even the brief summary above is enough to indicate the difficulty that filmmakers would encounter - in the days before CGI - when they contemplated bringing Lovecraft’s stories to the screen, but it was not enough to deter the wily Roger Corman when he cast around for a new cinematic vein to tap as the series of Gothic thrillers that he had produced and directed for American International Pictures (AIP) from the writings of Poe began to wane.
Corman’s first three ‘Poes’ - House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum and The Premature Burial - had all been commercially successful beyond AIP’s wildest dreams, but both Tales of Terror and The Raven had shown signs of weariness on the parts of both Corman and regular screenwriter Richard Matheson with what had already become a formula, and not only through the overuse of familiar props and stock-shots. As a way out of his self-made predicament, Corman turned to the commonly accepted next-in-line when it came to American masters of supernatural fiction: HP Lovecraft. And the story that he proposed for filming was ‘The Dunwich Horror’.
‘It’s really happening, isn’t it..?’
--Dr Corey (Lloyd Bochner), The Dunwich Horror
‘The Dunwich Horror’ is a tale of miscegenation, but that of albino inbred Lavinia Whateley with an eldritch being from another dimension. The story unfolds as a mystery in part: what black magic enables Lavinia’s son Wilbur to attain (giant) adulthood within a decade, and what is secreted in the Whateley’s barn that appears to require a drip-feed of live cattle to sustain it? For what purpose does Wilbur seek to obtain a complete copy of the fabled grimoire Necronomicon, and what arcane ritual is to be performed among the standing-stones of the Devil’s Hop Yard on Sentinel Hill, whose repercussions, according to legend, could bring about the end of humankind? Lovecraft (as anonymous narrator) spreads the clues to these questions in a lengthy preamble that recounts the history of the Whateleys, but he reverts to the present tense halfway through the ten chapters of a 17,000+-word tale after university professor Henry Armitage takes up the chase in the modern day. At this point, Wilbur is mauled to death by a dog and the gigantic, invisible Dunwich ‘horror’ is released from confinement in the barn to wreak havoc in the area before being vanquished by Armitage through incantation and an occult powder.
Despite the obvious problems in trying to adapt this nightmare fantasy for the screen, Corman first suggested it to AIP’s James Nicholson in 1963 - his accountant’s sensibility no doubt attracted by the fact that the monster in it was invisible. The story was initially thought too troublesome, but unwilling to be deflected from the notion of using Lovecraft as a substitute for Poe, Corman turned instead to a script by Charles Beaumont based on Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which was written in the same year but lay unpublished in its original form until 1943. This more straightforward narrative - at least in terms of its theme - also dealt (in subplot) with cross-breeding with extra-dimensional beings, but its main focus was the familiar trope of a man possessed by the spirit of a malevolent ancestor. With Vincent Price as the obligatory star, the resultant film concentrated effort on the possession aspect, but Beaumont’s screenplay still managed to squeeze in references to Cthulhu and the Necronomicon and the climax found space for a glimpse of one of Lovecraft’s ‘Old Ones’ beneath an ancient trap-door in Ward’s castle dungeon. Unwilling to relinquish its hold on its lucrative Poe franchise, AIP insisted that the film be sold as a ‘Poe’ and an 1839 poem by the writer was incongruously grafted onto the finished item; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward became in release Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace.
By way of compensation, AIP green-lit a genuine Lovecraft in the wake - albeit under catchpenny titles in both the US and the UK. ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927, and written immediately after ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’) was Lovecraft in science fiction mode, his tale of the impact of a strange meteor on the inhabitants of an isolated Massachusetts farmhouse inadvertently predicting the effects of atomic radiation which would become so much a feature of the sci-fi films of the 1950s. Shot under the working title of The House at the End of the World (which had also been employed in pre-production for The Tomb of Ligeia) but released as Die Monster Die! in America and Monster of Terror in Britain, the film was a first directorial effort for 29-year-old Danny Haller, Corman’s regular art director, whom AIP had been encouraging to get behind the lens for some time. Corman himself was unwilling to be typecast in Gothic horror and while he had been instrumental in bringing Lovecraft to AIP, he had no interest in helming more from the writer’s pen and had switched his attention to prepping The Wild Angels; Haller was nominated in his stead to fly to England and direct the feature under the auspices of AIP-UK.
Jerry Sohl’s screenplay made a credible pass at the story, but the English settings and familiar cast of rhubarbing villagers completely undermined the atmosphere of the piece. Minor contract player Nick Adams, who was better known in the US than here, was an anachronism as the bluff ‘hero’ and although the railway station at which he arrived to rekindle his relationship with Suzan Farmer, Usher-style, was emblazoned with the Lovecraftian moniker ‘Arkham’, the Surrey village of Shere was no substitute for a New England commune of hereditary degenerates - any more than Hammer ‘standing set’ Oakley Court was for the farmhouse of protagonist Nahum Whitley. Wheelchair-bound Karloff brought his venerable dignity to the role of Whitley, but neither he nor Adams were a good fit for a tale where ambience was far more important than actors. Haller could make none of it come alive, and its umbilical link to Corman’s ‘Poes’ was still too much in evidence; only the finale, when Karloff wheels aside to let a stunt double take his place as he is consumed by the ‘colour’ and runs amok with an axe had any sense of drive - even if HP Lovecraft was nowhere to be discerned by then. In the UK, Monster of Terror was released on a double-bill with The Haunted Palace, neither of them doing proper justice to their sources.
Following in Corman’s footsteps, Haller’s next two for AIP were ‘biker’ movies, but they allowed him to hone his directorial talents and by 1969, he was ready for another stab at Lovecraft. Other companies had picked up the gauntlet in the meantime - Seven Arts financed The Shuttered Room in 1967 (from a revision of Lovecraft by his literary executor August Derleth), but the script did its level best to divorce the proceedings from any connection to its author, while Tigon’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968, and also with Karloff) did not even have the grace to credit ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ (1933). It was to be left to AIP to produce a film that while purists remained unhappy at its failure (in their eyes) to truly capture the essence of Lovecraft’s ‘mythos’ tales, came closer than any before, and most since, to render as viable the concept of a pantheon of amorphous devil-gods on the periphery of perception, waiting in hellish anticipation to exterminate mankind.
‘..Then they placed the girl’s virginal body upon the altar, naked to the elements, and their black robes blending into the night, they gathered round, to observe, and relish, her nakedness…’
--Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), The Dunwich Horror
By 1968, the counter-cultural ‘hippie’ movement which had mobilised against the Vietnam War and overseen 1967’s ‘Summer of Love’ had been declared dead by social activist Jerry Rubin and others, and a funeral had even been held a few months before in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where the movement had started in 1965. But the hippie ideal was not so precipitously consigned to the grave and its legacy lived on for some time; the Woodstock festival, attended by some half-million music fans all chanting ‘make love, not war’, and in many ways emblematic of the entire counter-culture ethos, took place at Bethel, New York, in August 1969, a debris of joint-butts and used condoms standing testament to the ongoing appeal of the pacifist message. Darker clouds were gathering, however. The Who’s Roger Daltrey had his tea spiked with LSD at Woodstock, but of more serious import in the same month, film director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate and three of their friends were slaughtered in their rented Hollywood hills home by followers of cult guru Charles Manson, while a December concert by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont speedway in northern California - billed as ‘Woodstock West’ - resulted in the murder in front of the stage of a gun-toting spectator by the very Hell’s Angels whom the band had hired to keep the audience in check. After a period in which coordinated popular dissent had appeared to be triumphing over state oppression and an unpopular war, the age-old battle between good and evil was beginning again in earnest. Against this new and disturbing backdrop, Danny Haller had set to work on The Dunwich Horror.
Haller was now something of a hippie himself (as were many of his Hollywood contemporaries) and it was no accident that he chose to shoot the film on California’s Mendocino coast - ‘hippie central’ as he has categorised it in interview - the same location that Elia Kazan picked for East of Eden over a decade earlier. What the numerous drafts of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ - only three, those of Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky, were ultimately credited - had taken from Lovecraft was the attempted conjuration of a demon by a wizard in unsuspected guise, but Haller overlaid on this formulaic precept a distinctly hippie sensibility - an incense-burning, drug-attuned, free love advocating, psychedelic mantra that deferred to current preoccupations with esoteric religions and positively reeked of zeitgeist.
In the transfer of media, all the salient elements of Lovecraft’s tale were delivered intact. A prologue sees heavily pregnant Lavinia Whateley taken from her bed to give birth elsewhere... Years later, Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) tries to inveigle a copy of the Necronomicon from a college library. Dr Henry Armitage (Ed Begley) refuses to loan out the book, but Wilbur exerts a mesmeric influence over student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) and invites her to his family home in Dunwich for the weekend; drugging the girl, Wilbur impregnates her during a ritual at a cliff-top altar called the ‘Devil’s Hop Yard’. A friend of Nancy’s comes looking for her, but she is killed by something unseen that the Whateleys have secreted in a locked attic room. Armitage follows suit and with the help of the town medico (Lloyd Bochner), he pieces together the alarming truth that Wilbur means to use Nancy in a magic rite designed to ‘open’ a dimensional door to a hideous cosmic being. Wilbur, meanwhile, has now stolen the Necronomicon and is making his way with Nancy to the Devil’s Hop Yard. At the same time, the Thing in the Whateley attic has broken free of its bonds and is cutting a swathe through the countryside, a wave of destruction in its invisible wake; a party of townsfolk are also killed during a concerted attempt to deflect the horror from its preordained course. As Wilbur chants from the book over Nancy’s prostrate form, Armitage and Dr Cory reach the altar. A battle of incantations ensues - Armitage’s ultimately proving the more powerful - and Wilbur falls from the cliff to his death. The marauding Dunwich horror becomes briefly visible, then it vanishes back to the realm from which it came. ‘Wilbur’s twin took after the father,’ Armitage explains. ‘And the father?’ a recovered Nancy enquires. ‘Not of this Earth.’ Unbeknown to the three, Nancy herself is already pregnant with Whateley offspring…
AIP’s choice to play Wilbur Whateley was Peter Fonda (son of Henry), but Fonda had decided on a different road after the stunning box-office success of Easy Rider (1969) and 33-year-old former child-star Dean Stockwell stepped into the breach. Stockwell had played a similar drop-out the previous year in Psych-Out, and he brought a cool charm and Method mannerisms to the role, aided by a natural afro and dark, expressive eyes. He was ably supported by an eclectic cast including Academy Award-winner Ed Begley (Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962), Sam Jaffe (as Wilbur’s grandfather), Fifties’ teen queen Sandra Dee, the ex-wife of singer Bobby Darin, and Lloyd Bochner, a familiar face from any number of Sixties’ Hollywood films and TV series, such as The Night Walker and The Man (and Girl) From UNCLE.
The film opens with a pre-credits sequence in which Lavinia Whateley is thrashing about on a bed, birth-pangs indicating that her time of delivery is imminent. Old Whateley (Sam Jaffe) raises her up and helps her from the room, under the gaze of a pair of albino midwives. The sequence originally went on to show Lavinia and Whateley making their way to the Devil’s Hop Yard, where she gives birth on its altar as her husband chants from the Necronomicon. It would appear from production stills at the time that the sequence was filmed twice, once with the credited Joanna Moore Jordan as Lavinia, and again with an uncredited (and unknown) younger actress in the role - perhaps because Jordan could not be suitably ‘aged’ to convince of the 20-year time-lapse between this prologue and the rest of the film. In the event, nether version was used and the decision was taken to jettison the live footage and depict the birth with an animated title-sequence instead. (Snatches of the live version can be seen as Wilbur reads from the Necronomicon in the library). This had the advantage of blurring the facts of Wilbur’s back story, but it also allowed AIP house composer Les Baxter to create one of his finest scores in accompaniment (which is saying something!) - a liturgic synthesis of organ grandeur and tubular bells, percussively persuasive of primal rite.
With so many fingers in the Lovecraft pie over the years (Mario Bava was at one time suggested to direct and Ray Russell to script), the dialogue is pared almost to précis: Wilbur’s initial exchange with Armitage about the history of the Whateley family is curt to the point of robotic - ‘You’ve read my paper on Oliver Whateley?’/‘He was a great man’/‘They hanged him’/‘They were fools’/’Who’s to say..?’ - but this tends to create a surreal sense of detachment, as though two worlds are suddenly coming together, neither of which truly comprehends the other. Preliminaries dispensed with, Nancy is soon in Wilbur’s clutches and subject to erotic hallucinations engineered by his black magic, and Stockwell takes every opportunity to finger his occult rings and flutter his eyelids in a necromantic Morse-code of involuntary blinking. A speedy excursion to the Devil’s Hop Yard and his virginal charge is squirming orgasmically on the ancient altar as Wilbur posts himself between her legs, sweet-talking the tripped-out girl with a litany about a race of ‘Old Ones’ who will ‘reign again, and rule where they once walked’. When a friend (Donna Baccala) comes in search of Nancy, she makes the Pandora mistake of unlatching the attic door in the Whateley house - and a flurry of solarised imagery hits the screen and presents a near-subliminal montage of a monster like nothing before seen onscreen, as the multi-appendaged miasma strips the girl naked and (presumably) devours her. At this point, the film itself trips over from hash-coated soft-porn to full-on Lovecraftian insanity.
‘Stop! - You can’t kill Wilbur Whateley! He didn’t do this.. But he may be the only man who can save us from what did…’
--Dr Armitage (Ed Begley), The Dunwich Horror
With two of his students in absentia, Armitage seeks out Dr Cory, who relates to him the events of Wilbur’s birth, and a sepia-toned flashback defers to HPL in unapologetic terms: ‘You needn’t think that the only folks are the folks hereabouts,’ Old Whateley berates the attendant townspeople. ‘Someday, you folks’ll hear a child of Lavinia’s calling his father’s name from the top of Sentinel Hill… And then you’ll know. And you’ll wish to God you didn’t!’ The writers having defaulted to source at last, Lovecraft is well served by the remainder. Wilbur steals the Necronomicon but instead of being killed by a dog, as in the story, he spears a security guard and heads off with the book to his rendezvous with Nancy at the Devil’s Hop Yard. The Dunwich ‘horror’ breaks free, bringing murder and mayhem to the surrounding district as it, too, makes for the altar on the Hill.
When The Dunwich Horror opened at London’s New Victoria cinema in July 1970 on a double-bill with The Oblong Box, it contained a scene in which Armstrong and Cory then enter the library, find the dead guard and the Necronomicon gone, and realise what Wilbur is up to. This scene was missing by the time the film went into release - ‘I’ve got to get to the library,’ Armitage urges Cory in extant prints, but the next time that they are seen together, they are en route to join the townsfolk. ‘You saw what Wilbur did to get the book; he’s going to let the Old Ones through,’ Armitage says in reprise - but they no longer see ‘what Wilbur did’ and the scene has not reappeared since. (The film’s first TV screening on London Weekend in 1975 also deprived it of some of Nancy’s writhing on the altar, but it was uniquely preceded by a warning to viewers of a ‘nervous disposition’ - something unheard of since the days of Quatermass on the BBC!)
The Dunwich Horror was no Gothic nightmare of creepy castles and cobwebbed crypts; for much of its running time, it wallows instead in sun, sea and the realm of the senses - expanded consciousness, in the flora and fauna-laden land of the hippie dream. The film’s Wilbur Whateley is a nature-boy, roaming the fields, lying with Nancy in the long grass. But just as The Beatles had diverted into Hindu mysticism, so Wilbur rejects nature in favour of nurture and turns to the esoteric teachings of his ancestors to show him the way to enlightenment. While some counter-culturalists steeped themselves in the philosophies of the pseudonymous Lobsang Rampa, others chose to explore the arcane writings of Aleister Crowley; John Lennon took a path of peaceful protest to try to persuade others to his cause, but Charles Manson opted for murder and revolution as the means to overthrow the capitalist Establishment. The writers of the film did what they could to make a decent fist out of a difficult story - but it was Haller, whether by accident or design, who turned their efforts into a timely polemic on a resurgent malice that laid in wait, agitating and impatient, beneath the illusory veil of flower-power civility.
A major influence on Haller’s approach to the film was undoubtedly The Trip, a muse on LSD which his mentor Roger Corman had made two years before, after turning his back on Poe. Corman visualised his protagonist’s experiences in dropping acid through a profusion of psychedelic effects; as Lovecraft’s monstrous Old Ones were already being likened by critics to the sort of visions which might result from a bad acid trip, psychedelia was the obvious way to go. For Nancy’s opiate-inspired dream in the Whateley house, Haller co-opted members of Mendocino’s artistic community to portray the painted acolytes who orgiastically represent the secret backwoods cults that worship Lovecraft’s devil-gods, and a fish-eye lens and jarring cross-cuts were deployed to convey their abandoned affray. Nudity was a new departure for American horror films, and more bare flesh was exposed to camera than made it to the screen - but AIP’s eager leak of publicity in relation to wholesome girl-next-door Dee revealing all in her altar-scene with Stockwell was not matched by the eventual reality: a body-double stood in for her at the critical juncture and Dee’s participation was confined to ecstatic facial expressions.
(More nudity went fleetingly into the attack on Nancy’s girlfriend, though psychedelic flash-frames all-but obviate the intrusion. Nevertheless, all shots of bare breasts - plus some of Dee’s orgasmic close-ups - were removed from American prints to reduce the film’s MPAA rating from ‘R’ [‘Restricted’] to ‘M’ [‘Mature’]; the British release print was originally some two minutes longer and retained the offending footage under the BBFC’s new, higher 18-age-restricted ‘X’ certificate.)
Given the nature of the effects, a great deal of the film was put together on the editing bench. When it comes to the Dunwich horror’s trek to the Devil’s Hop Yard, Haller visualised it through a raft of post-production tricks, optical filters and mechanical aids (a helicopter even helps out with the illusion of the horror’s invisible trajectory through the woods), and flashing lights alternate with solarised footage and negative shots as a wind-storm heralds its progress. The idea for much of this sensory assault originated with the pilot episode of the TV sci-fi series The Outer Limits (1963), in which the titular ‘Galaxy Being’ trod a similar epilepsy-inducing path, but Les Baxter’s symphonic synthesis of drumbeats and electronic motifs add immeasurably to the overall impact.
The Armitage of the story relies upon a magical powder-spray to dissipate the horror; the film opts for the less-risible device of an invocation, in the manner of the Duc de Richleau in The Devil Rides Out. This results in Wilbur’s fiery demise, and the Dunwich horror finally shows itself before vanishing into the ether. Even this brief, climactic sighting, partially veiled in primary hues, is too much of a reveal of the masked actor involved, but the filmmakers had clearly felt the need to give the audience its money’s worth. Nancy’s delicate condition at the close simply reflected a current fashion in horror films to leave things open-ended, rather than prospecting a repeat of same.
Seconded in UK release to Gordon Hessler’s The Oblong Box, the eleventh and weakest of the ‘Poe’ series, The Dunwich Horror was never likely to be considered more than a curiosity in passing. Critical response was mostly directed at its co-feature, so appreciation had to be gleaned from fan magazines like US import Cinefantastique: ‘..Better than average horror cinema... fine special effects and photography.’ Lovecraft, in consequence, did not follow Poe to become the seed of a new horror franchise for AIP into the 1970s; no ‘sequel’ had been planned, and none came about. Poe was returned to with fast-decreasing success until Vincent Price was finally able to extricate himself from a restrictive contract and the series ended, without Price, on the debacle of Murders in the Rue Morgue (1973). The ‘words of power’ uttered by Dr Armitage at the climax of The Dunwich Horror put the ‘Old Ones’ resolutely back in their cosmic box - at least for a while.
‘That.. will be quite enough of that!’
--Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), From Beyond
By the 1980s, Stuart Gordon had become screen spokesperson for all things Lovecraft, but his films had more to do with the direction that the horror film was taking during the decade than they did with the ‘Cthulhu mythos’. Gordon’s gore-fest Re-Animator (1985), with its naked writhings and overt sexual innuendo, would have appalled an introspective writer for whom the pleasures of the flesh provided only a brief distraction from more cerebral pursuits (Lovecraft was married in 1924 but the liaison lasted less than two years), but the same director’s From Beyond (1986) did at least manage to capture some of the chaotic madness of Lovecraft’s cosmic thesis. In terms of integrity to its subject if not its source, Gordon was beaten to the mark of authorial intent by Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993), a compendium of three adaptations, the first of which - ‘The Drowned’, directed by Christopher Gans - was pure Lovecraft in all but storyline, its climactic depiction of Cthulhu offering a satisfying glimpse of the possibilities still inherent in the tales. But John Carpenter played fast-and-loose with Lovecraft in the rabid In the Mouth of Madness (1994), as he had with the preoccupations of Nigel Kneale for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and the result was more parody than patronage. Other attempts to distil the essence of HPL have come and gone, but only the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s independently-produced The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) has been near to capturing the true spirit of Lovecraft’s dystopian fictions. Filmed in the sharp, monochromatic style of a 1940s’ Universal B-movie, and with a cast of unknowns, the HPLHS production - climax aside - was the Lovecraft of the page, but its strict adherence to source ensured that, like the work from which it was adapted, its appeal was to aficionados only. The narrow focus of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s fantasies precluded him from becoming a ‘master of the macabre’ in the universally-recognised manner of Edgar Allan Poe. He has his devoted fans, but a wider acceptance of his worth was never within his grasp. The same goes for the various screen adaptations of his tales. Lovecraft was, and is, an acquired taste - but it was one which commercial need and a conjunction of circumstances enabled AIP and Danny Haller to serendipitously acquire at a tipping-point in the history of the horror film.
Reviews of The Dunwich Horror from the smart-ass school of seen-it-all-before Blogcraft incline to the sneery and dismissive, but criticism of the film by any who did not see it at the time of its release and who cannot find it in themselves to view it in context is fundamentally vacuous. It was very much a film of its time, like Easy Rider or Vanishing Point or Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise. The turn of the so-called ‘swinging Sixties’ into the downbeat, drug-addled ‘satanic Seventies’ was the event that gave it charge. There was a mood abroad - of the end of an era, a change to things, and it was not for the better. The hypnotic appeal for a gullible Nancy of Wilbur’s spaced-out hippie deflected attention from the fact that dark forces still lurked in the background, biding their time - the same forces that Fonda’s Wyatt had sensed in Easy Rider (‘A Man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.’), to which Barry Newman’s Kowalski had nihilistically resigned in Vanishing Point, and which the Winslow of William Finley discovered to be reigning supreme again by the time of Phantom of the Paradise. The Dunwich Horror was a metaphor for the transformation of the naïve philosophy of ‘peace and love’ into the hard reality of rock star drug-deaths, oil crises, hyper-inflation, Middle-East conflict and Watergate. Lovecraft was in there alright, but the fantastic fiction that he had sequestered from Dunsanian dreams and the refuse of war was commandeered to reflect the growing disenchantment of an entire generation over its apparent inability to prevent the world from once more descending inexorably into chaos.
Footnote: I saw the film in its opening week with future ‘ambience auteur’ Brian Eno, who worked for me as a paste-up artist at the time. Eno, who shared a house with Bryan Ferry, Phil Manzanera and others of the later ‘Roxies’, was as impressed as I was both with Haller’s take on the tale and Les Baxter’s majestic score, with its riffs on The Beatles’ Abbey Road. It might seem passé now, but if it could garner kudos from a man who went on to produce music with Bowie, U2 and everyone else who is anyone, there was indeed something more to The Dunwich Horror than can be conjected by viewing it from the jaded perspective of a myriad of similar movies since.
