Week Two: "If You See a Faded Sign by the Side of the Road That Says, "Fifteen Miles to the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVECRAAAAAAAAAFT!", Day 9 (Oct 5)
Adapted from "
The Shuttered Room," written by August Derleth, taken from notes left by Lovecraft
The posthumous life of Lovecraft is nothing if not terribly interesting, as the legacy he had created for his small little literary universe began to take a life of its own when writers got their hands on his works and felt the inspiration needed to take them to places that the man himself could have scarcely imagined them. Chief among them was his longtime correspondent and eventual publisher August Derleth, whose affection for his works would be instrumental in getting Lovecraft into the hands of more than a few curio seekers and paved the way for generations of writers to play with the worlds, people and entities that had been created. And with the access that Derleth was able to gain with the volumes of notes and literature that Lovecraft had left at the time of his death, he even took it upon himself to act as a kind of executor of a kind of literary estate, funneling fragments into his own words to produce new works that would have at least had their footing for something a bit more official than most. Though Derleth was never the writer that Lovecraft was, often mashing up the various elements of separate mythos to unsatisfying results, it was nevertheless an important duty that helped pave the way for new writers to make something of their own, cosmic horrors based on those works and those that were directly inspired.
The earlier days of the history of Lovecraft on film are somewhat less inspiring, if only because the premise of the stories that were adapted often shifted into unrelated matters, as was the case here as well as others. Even when movies did well to adapt a good chunk of the tale that inspired them, they stood to be buried inside of more well-known stories from far more ubiquitous writers, as was the case for
The Haunted Palace plastering Poe's name and poem all over
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The irony of Lovecraft having Poe preempting him even on the screen was not lost. Yet good things were to come by the time the 70s rolled around, as young filmmakers would have access to the kind of technology that could start capturing the imagination of those works far better and far more faithfully, and often in different portions of the globe at that. Once the 80s reached their midpoint and Lovecraft had become well-known enough to have his name precede the titles of direct adaptations of his works, to go along with the films that were heavily inspired by his writings, it became an unlikely second life that has endured to this day.
With that all said, it's not of much consequence that this film in particular feels about as Lovecraftian as a soup cracker does. Already off on an odd foot from being adapted by one of the posthumous collaborations that Derleth had written, the writers of the film itself threw out just about everything related to the Whateley legacy beyond a vague tragic family history in the little town of Dunwich and decided to dedicate long, long stretches of the story to a kind of prototype template for the rural/urban culture clash shockers that would soon become quite in style for folks shooting in England, making this if ever so slightly a kind of predecessor for something like
Straw Dogs. This isn't a necessarily bad thing for a horror film to focus on instead if it's not confident in its ability to adapt more directly from a work that would have otherwise been well outside the budget of what the filmmakers had to work with, but it does require that the scares and shocks here can make up for misusing the source material for much beyond the title and a name or two. Eventual TV directing legend David Greene does well in terms of the off-kilter approach to the visual makeup of the film, going for expressive camera angles and good use of POV camerawork to create the makings of a strong atmosphere, but the script simply allows for no chills or terror to take root with its barren concepts. How dull can this film get? There are scenes where we follow characters as they do chores from beginning to end, hoping that there is some kind of horror lurking in the corners, only to discover that none are to be had at all, wasting everyone's time in the process, leaving the visual makeup of the film and a curiously jazzy score little to do but sit on top of a whole lot of nothing.
Truly, an incestuously-driven Oliver Reed deserves better than this? Sympathies for the characters are hard to come by when the situation itself feels so utterly pointless that our main couple could have vacationed anywhere else and would have contributed about as much over there as they did here, making emotional connections nigh-impossible. Even the reveal of just what lies in the titular room lands with a wet fart for how inconsequential it was to have that information relayed to us in the first place. One can't even feel frustrated with the results here as the inert-by-design trappings make one feel much of anything at all, lacking the necessary menace and mystery to have any kind of pull whatsoever and creating a handsome bowl of very thin gruel in its place. This is a long, long 100 minutes as a result, and while the pieces are in place for something more startling, the results do little more than cause one to stare blankly instead into space.
9/38
