WHAT'S LOVECRAFT GOT TO WITH IT?

When H. P. Lovecraft died, impoverished, in 1937, he wasn’t a famous writer. The scores of deeply messed-up horror stories he had published in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines during the ‘teens, ‘20s and ‘30s had won him a dedicated but small readership, some of whom had also become his friends by correspondence. After his passing, these devotees kept his work alive, but it was decades before he became widely known—the first movie versions of his stories didn’t appear until the ‘60s.

Most of these earlier movies—Die Monster Die! (1965), The Dunwich Horror (1970)—were pretty terrible, too, though often entertainingly so, and a short version of Pickman’s Model for the ‘70s TV anthology Night Gallery was respectable. 1985’s Re-Animator, from Lovecraft’s avowed 1922 potboiler Herbert West—Re-Animator, was a wildly funny sicko comedy, but it can’t really be said to capture the typical Lovecraft atmosphere, and neither have most other attempts.

It’s intriguing to speculate what a great director of the silent or early sound era, a Murnau or a Paul Leni or a James Whale or Tod Browning or Edgar Ulmer or Karl Freund, might have done with Lovecraft’s stuff. A few years ago, a group of maniacs calling themselves the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society set to work to find out—they produced a short, visually beautiful faux-silent adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most accomplished tales, 1928’s The Call of Cthulu.

Now they’ve followed it up with a feature-length effort, out this past week on DVD, from 1931’s The Whisperer in Darkness. Shot in black-and-white, this one is a “talkie”—appropriately, since the yarn’s climactic effect hinges on the sound of a voice.

The story concerns the correspondence between Albert Wilmarth, a college professor, and Henry Akeley, an elderly, unwell man living in the wilds of Vermont, who claims that the local folklore about the Mi-Go, a race of sentient fungus monsters said to haunt the local forests, isn’t so farfetched. Wilmarth finally makes the journey to Akeley’s farm, and confronts the truth about the Mi-Go and their human allies.

The original Whisperer is vintage Lovecraft; this film is less successful than the Society’s Cthulu—despite the ‘30s-style trappings, it’s mostly unconvincing as a period-era movie, and it greatly expands upon the plot with (deliberately) campy embellishments, dissipating its macabre effect. I fear Lovecraft would have been appalled by the liberties taken with his material.

But then, why should he be luckier than any other author? Taken on its own terms, this Whisperer is still a highly enjoyable curio, full of startlingly images and bizarre humor, and empathetic performances by Matt Foyer and Barry Lynch as Wilmarth and Akeley. It isn’t really Lovecraft, but it’s cool.