1965's Die, Monster, Die! Is a Masterful Exercise in Lovecraftian Horror
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I’m not terribly familiar with the weird, warped world of fright master H.P. Lovecraft. I haven’t read any of the cult horror writer’s novels or short stories and I haven’t seen many adaptations of his work. I am, however, deeply curious about him and the world he has created in his fiction.
Lovecraft has been the subject of many a Wiki-surfing excursion, in part because I am terribly fond of the phrase Lovecraftian monster and Lovecraftian horror and use both fairly extensively in my writing, most recently on a clickbait parody on beloved celebrities who were actually shape-shifting monsters.
If you look up Lovecraft on Wikipedia, as I habitually do, there is a wonderful picture of the author looking gaunt, haunted and desperately unhappy, almost as if he’s not really a human being at all but rather a monster who briefly wore the skin of a human being and didn’t enjoy the sensation a bit.
He looks, in other words, exactly like the sort of man who would write the things Lovecraft did. Lovecraft seems to have led an appropriately Lovecraftian existence, full of dread, horror, madness and monsters of various stripes. Wikipedia lists “Lovecraftian horror” as the first of the writer’s genres, along with “weird fiction”, “horror fiction”, “science fiction”, “gothic fiction” and fantasy. You know you are a distinctive writer when your last name becomes an adjective but then Lovecraft created something genuinely new, a world of ancient cosmic evil beyond human imagining, a sinister realm of evil old gods whose mere existence has the power to drive puny mortals mad.
I’ve seen Re-Animator, of course. I’m pleased to report that a whole bunch of H.P Lovecraft adaptations lurk in my not too distant future because after I finish writing up all of Batman Beyond for this column I will then segue into writing up Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon’s complete filmography for the same kind patron.
Gordon adapted Lovecraft's Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dagon for the big screen and Dreams in the Witch-House for television’s Masters of Horror. I’m also going to eventually write up Color Out of Space for The Travolta/Cage Project but first I’m going to cover the first adaptation of that particular Lovecraft short story, 1965’s Die, Monster, Die!
Die, Monster, Die! Was filmed under the title The House at the End of the World. That’s a moniker that suits the tone of the film better because we don’t even really get around to seeing any monsters until the film’s third act. Die, Monster, Die! is an unusually atmospheric fright flick that relies heavily upon suggestion and inference in lieu of spooky spectacle but it title suggests a less artful style of horror filmmaking.
Nick Adams, who picked up an Academy Award nomination for 1963’s Twilight of Honor before dying of a drug overdose in 1968 at 36, stars as American scientist Stephen Reinhart. Reinhart arrives in the seemingly idyllic English small town of Arkham to be reunited with his gorgeous Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer).
The American soon learns that the Witleys are no ordinary family and their estate is no ordinary home. When the foreigner asks about the Witley estate, the villagers become ostentatiously unfriendly. For reasons that will soon become apparent, they see the Witley home as a house of horrors to be avoided at all costs.
Director Daniel Haller began his career in the Roger Corman factory. He was an art director on A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors before graduating to being a production designer on Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations.
That’s the perfect background for a debut director of a visually audacious, quietly hypnotic horror movie that cultivates an air of dread long before we see anything in the way of monsters.
With absolutely no help from the terrified inhabitants of Arkham, our hero eventually makes it to the Witley estate but the reception there is just as chilly. Wheelchair-bound patriarch Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff) implores the young man to leave at once despite the wishes of his daughter and his mysterious wife Letitia (Freda Jackson).
Die, Monster, Die! is Lovecraftian horror, obviously. We all have that Lovecraft feeling but since Lovecraft was H.P Lovecraft, he had it in spades. But it’s also very much an English haunted house movie full of characters walking slowly and deliberately through a home full of evil, surprises and evil surprises.
For a very long time we do not actually see anything out of the usual, at the Witley estate or outside of it. But we hear ungodly, unearthly sounds that are unsettling and disturbing on a deep, visceral level in no small part because they exist in a world beyond words and understanding.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the sound design in Die, Monster, Die! It’s as essential to the film’s horror as anything we see. For two very deliberate acts we do not see anything particularly horrifying. A movie entitled Die, Monster, Die! takes a very long time introducing its monsters, let alone killing them.
That works in the film’s favor. It’s scary for what we don’t see much as for what we do. In the third act, however, the film finally lives up to its title and unleashes some appropriately creepy beasties.
First we see a collection of brilliantly designed little creatures that look like miniature versions of Cthulhu in an exhibit our hero accurately refers to as looking like hell’s zoo. Die, Monster, Die! turns into more of a conventional horror film in its third act, as Stephen and his girlfriend come face to face with the ominous effects of a meteorite that landed near the estate and soon revealed monstrous powers.
The very ground itself is evil in Die, Monster, Die! The estate where much of the action takes place has been transformed into a pit of perversion and destruction, mutation and despair, a sinister place where bad things happen and the living envy the dead.
Die, Monster, Die! runs a mere seventy-nine minutes. It was deliberately created to be half of a trashy double feature but it transcends its modest origins due to the understated craft of the cast and crew and the exhilarating new-oldness of Lovecraft’s aesthetic.
Haller’s cult exercise in Lovecraftian horror makes a little go a very long way in terms of duration and budget. It’s a tight, efficient and ultimately very spooky little fright flick that combines the old and the new to create something ancient in its evil yet radically novel all the same.
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