The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Young, hot Wilbur Whateley (young, hot Dean Stockwell – not necessarily something you get to write every day) comes to the Arkham University Library to borrow the Necronomicon. He’s got Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee), one of the student assistants of the place, charmed/hypnotized right quick, but head librarian Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) is particularly protective of that tome. Supposedly, it provides a way to ensure the return of the Old Ones, a superior race that ruled Earth long before mankind, and though Armitage doesn’t exactly believe in these things, he does think the book could be rather dangerous.

While Wilbur isn’t getting the book, he does manage to convince Nancy to drive him to his home in Dunwich, where he can better drug, hypnotize and talk her into becoming a sacrifice to the Old Ones. Or just the new mother of the inhuman race.

Lovecraft’s tales have always been seen as particularly difficult to adapt, but I’ve always thought that especially The Dunwich Horror, with its often decidedly pulpy tenor, would be one of the easier stories to adapt.

AIP must have thought the same, and most of the changes made by the script – by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky – to Daniel Haller’s adaptation do make rather a lot of sense: sexing things up a little and putting proceedings firmly into the late 60s/early 70s are logical and sound decisions, at least.

However, the film then proceeds to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly. The acting is generally pretty bad, with Ed Begley (senior, that is) lacking the gravitas and conviction to make a proper counterpoint to Stockwell’s Whateley. Dee lacks any ability to project anything at all (or if she does, chooses not to show any of it), which, given that the script already has very little for her to do, turns Nancy into a complete absence where a person needed to be. Whereas Stockwell so overplays the camp of his role as written, he’s never believable as any kind of horror film villain.

Haller was a brilliant production designer and art director who was able to work wonders on a budget, but his directorial efforts all feel pedestrian, slow and lack any visual imagination, all things this film would have desperately needed to convince an audience to take any of this seriously. Instead of style, from time to time Vaseline or gauze is applied to a camera, and hippies dance, or the screen goes purple for some monster vision. Which simply isn’t enough.