• Directed by Daniel Haller
• Written by Curtis Lee Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • Sandra Dee
  • Dean Stockwell
  • Ed Begley
  • Lloyd Bochner
  • Sam Jaffe
• Produced by Jack Bohrer and Roger Corman
• Executive produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson

There is a right way and a wrong way to pronounce the place-name “Dunwich.” The right way slurs the “w” entirely, giving us a pronunciation of “Dunnich” or “Dunnidge.” And I’m telling you this because you’d never know it from the movie, in which even lifelong residents of the hidden Massachusetts town render it as “Dun-Witch.”

Of course, that’s not the only violence done to H.P. Lovecraft’s tale, though most of the rest is a little more justifiable (in its impulse to change the original, if not in the ultimate result). The short story “The Dunwich Horror” demonstrates the paradox common in Lovecraft’s storytelling: He was a man who loved a shocker ending, with a final detail which suddenly completed the picture. However, he was also a man who loved to explain things at great length. Thus, this story falls into that large fraction of his output in which the reader is given ample evidence to guess the ending far in advance, and be waiting impatiently for the final page when the protagonist or narrator will finally catch up. And thus attempts to somehow “gussy up” the plot (not to mention adding things like personality to the characters) are understandable. In this case, though, the movie had no chance to wow audiences with the shocker ending, preserved from the short story, because said shocker was the center of the marketing campaign, rendered in big unmissable letters on every movie poster:

A few years ago in Dunwich a half-witted girl bore illegitimate twins. One of them was almost human!

In other news, Rosebud is a sled.

Hey! That is NOT the way you handle a Special Collections volume!

So, now that the “shocker” ending is telegraphed more obviously than anything Lovecraft himself ever wrote, let’s look at the rest of the movie preceding it.

Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) is a mid-twenties man who has made the trip from Dunwich to Arkham, to take a perusal of the Necronomicon on display (!) at the library of the University of Arkham (!!). Nancy (Sandra Dee) is a student, assisting visiting lecturer Prof. Armitage (Ed Begley), whose lectures revolve around said book. (Not that Nancy or any of the other audience members ever exhibit any wisdom which would come from exposure to the book.) When Nancy returns the Necronomicon to its case, she meets Wilbur, their eyes meet, and she runs screaming into the night babbling loathsome inanities. Wait, no, that’s what would have happened if she had met Lovecraft’s version of Wilbur. This version is a fellow that could be described by Nancy as having “great eyes,” though suited in the fashion hodgepodge of the period, he certainly looks as if he could be the scion of inhuman forces. Anyway, Wilbur gets himself a quick peek at the book, then gets to meet Prof. Armitage, who had previously written a paper on Wilbur’s great-grandfather who had been burned as a witch. Unfortunately, after their evening of speaking in veiled hints and forboding tones at the local student dive, Wilbur finds that he’s missed the last bus back to Dunwich, and Nancy volunteers to drive him the 40 miles. Because of his great eyes, you understand.

“Gosh, this is the most beautiful matte painting I’ve ever strolled through.”

That’s pretty much the last action that Nancy takes in this movie. Not that she dies soon or anything; she’s simply written as one of the most passive characters ever to grace a screen, even given the horrendous standards for passive females in cinema. She reaches Wilbur’s home with his grandfather (Sam Jaffe), and while she’s in the powder room Wilbur sabotages her car. So she stays. She has a bizarre dream of being menaced by mostly-naked neopagans, and takes all in stride on waiting. In the morning Wilbur suggests a walk. So they walk. And since it’s Saturday, he suggests she stay the weekend. So she stays. You’d like to think that there’s maybe a character arc here in which she takes command of her own life, but there isn’t. She’s the Poseable Barbie of the Old Ones.

Worried about her absence and having last seen her with Wilbur, Prof. Armitage and Nancy’s best friend Elizabeth (Donna Baccala) drive out the next morning. Yup, there’s Nancy, content to wander the hills for the weekend with Wilbur. There’s the grandfather, who seems unhappy about Nancy’s presence but is cowed by Wilbur. Armitage and Elizabeth are so unsettled by this that Armitage decides to start investigating Wilbur, beginning with… the doctor who signed his birth certificate. While I applaud the decision to be thorough, it seems a bizarre place to start, unless, of course, the Screenplay Gods are manipulating the character shamelessly.

“Shub-Niggurath! The black goat in the wood with a thousand young! BA-AA-AH! BAA-AAA-AAA-AAH!”

Anyway, Dr. Cory (Lloyd Bochner) does tell Armitage some of the weirdness surrounding Wilbur’s birth twenty-five years ago, much of which we’ve already seen as a prologue and in snippets: That Wilbur’s mother, Lavinia (Joanna Moore Jordan), became pregnant by an unknown father, and that Dr. Cory was summoned to the farmhouse only after the birth had taken place, and was told that Lavinia had actually born twins, though one was stillborn and had already been buried. (Is there any reason that Cory would have been told about the stillborn twin? Not unless the motive was to make sure that the plot was SPELLED OUT for anyone who had somehow ventured into the theatre without seeing the movie posters.) And Lavinia is now completely insane, inhabiting a rubber room at the hospital, hissing things like, “Let them in, kill them all!”

We thankfully cut away before Armitage takes it upon himself to question Wilbur’s kindergarten teacher next, and instead go back to Wilbur leading Nancy all over the countryside. Of especial note is the completely unbelievable clifftop shrine, with stone steps and an altar and grotesque statues and everything, which the superstitious locals have somehow never gotten around to destroying. Here, Wilbur regales Nancy with tales of orgiastic rites to dark gods, while Nancy decides to have a liedown on the stone altar. You know, just to find out how it feels. There is, here and in other such scenes, the slightest hint that Nancy is at least marginally virginal, and that Wilbur is able to draw her into this world of bizarre breeding by appealing to her repressed sexuality. But any such subtext is kept almost completely hidden. The same with the fact that Wilbur is drugging the tea that he constantly offers to Nancy; nothing really ever comes of it, because after all, who in groovy 1970 would make a movie with a clear message that sex and drugs could lead to demonic invocation?

“Nice bachelor pad — groovy, in an eldritch way.”

There’s some backing and forthing to the farmhouse, with Elizabeth exploring on her own and accidentally opening the upstairs door which you really shouldn’t open because something extra-hideous lives there. And when Grandpa chooses that time to die, Wilbur takes it upon himself to bury him in the town cemetery with elaborate rituals, until stopped by the locals. (Where is Nancy, you ask? Standing around in the background, naturally.) Really, all of the so-called action is a lead-up to the climax of the story, which is really two intercut sequences:

1) The thing in the farmhouse (do you really need to be told that it’s Wilbur’s less-human twin brother?) gets out and goes on a rampage across the countryside, drawing a posse of locals after it. Most of the time, we only get scenes in Creature-O-Vision, and a glimpse of tentacle, which is wise because when we finally see the creature it looks more like a bad freakshow fake.

2) Wilbur and Nancy back at the altar, performing the World’s Longest And Most Boring Invocation. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this scene and the grandfather’s abortive funeral, it’s that rituals which don’t encompass anything of inherent interest (like sacrifice, say, or explosions) are both silly and dull. There’s only so much chanting, barking like a dog, and passing of knife blades through candle smoke that an audience should be expected to endure. I mean, Nancy seems to like it, what with her writhing on the altar dressed only in a barely-concealing black shift, but there’s no accounting for the tastes of virginal New England co-eds in 1970.

Sandra Dee didn’t appear in another theatrical feature for over a decade. That’s her career you see going up in smoke.

The ending? Both nonsensical and anticlimactic, revolving around the commonly-held fact that the most complicated black rituals can be utterly ruined by the smallest details, in this case Prof. Armitage shouting the wrong words at the wrong time.

So let’s see: Slow pacing, production design which mixes the oil-and-water of archaic and late-sixties fashions, a score by Les Baxter that is just SO wrong, and laughable special effects. I would tell you that, if you’ve always been hungry for the slightest peek at one of Gidget’s nipples, this is the movie for you, but from the angle of the camera in that scene, I’d wager that it’s a body double. So I’ve got nothing for you.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11
• breasts: 11
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Dean Stockwell (Wilbur) played “Colonel Grat” in the Enterprise episode “Detained”
  • Jason Wingreen (”Sheriff Harrison”) played “Dr. Linke” in the original episode “The Empath”
  • Michael Haynes (”Guard”) was Malcolm McDowell’s uncredited stunt double in Generations