Retro Cosmic

...The Whisperer in Darkness (2011)

HP Lovecraft’s 1931 novella The Whisperer in Darkness begins with the great contradiction of adapting the author to cinema: “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.” (298) The sentence means something specific to the plot, but also has greater meaning when analyzing Lovecraft’s works. His verbose and elliptical prose always implies something more than what a movie can show us. The more lurid and terrifying beings are those “who are not to be named”, and in keeping with that, not to be seen either. Filmmakers adapting weird fiction always need to make a decision--to show the monster or not, relying on mood instead. Low budget horror producer of the 1940s Val Lewton would have been great for adapting Lovecraft, in that his antagonists would often be right out of frame, leaving the audience to identify with reaction shots to the monsters. In 2011, The HP Lovecraft Historical Society released a feature length adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness. Decisions were made on revealing the cosmic creatures, all while framing it in a film noir toned structure that takes advantage of those seductive retro aesthetics.

Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) is a scholar at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts who has been receiving strange correspondence from Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), a man living in rural Vermont. Akeley describes weird creatures creeping around his property, leaving large, unrecognizable prints in the dirt. His incredulous colleagues at the university dare Wilmarth to head to Vermont and bring back some kind of concrete evidence. He eventually arrives to find Akeley frail and sickly, ready to tell him a wild story of The Old Ones, the dreaded Mi-Go and Yuggoth, the planet where they come from. Akeley describes how, using alien technology, “I’ll cross incalculable gulfs of space, bending time to allow for temporal journeys.” In disbelief, Wilmarth later realizes that Akeley was a cosmic crab monster in disguise the whole time, and overhears a plan of world domination. With the help of a young neighbor named Hannah (Autumn Wendel), he finds a gathering of Mi-Go atop a mountain, summoning a portal to another world. After a wild, CGI heavy climax involving a bi-plane, we find out that Wilmarth has succumbed to the space creatures, having left his body, existing in a sublime, temporal space.     

In keeping with the monthly theme, The Whisperer in Darkness feigns the look of past cinematic eras. Sean Branney and Andrew Leman had previously adapted Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu (2005) in a style entirely of the silent era, which may have been more appropriate to cover here, but I’ve always been more charmed with Whisperer as a story. Much like La Antena (2007) which I covered last week, The Whisperer in Darkness owes a great stylistic debt to Fritz Lang, who defined both German silent cinema and film noir of the 1940s and 50s. It also has similarities to the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s, but these partially descended from Lang and friends as well. The movie compels viewers to imagine just how wonderful it would have been if there was an adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella during the author’s lifetime. The Whisperer in Darkness and La Antena both heavily rely on digital elements to create their retro styles, which is a departure from the retro cinema homages I covered earlier in the year, like Guy Maddin’s Tales from The Gimli Hospital (1988) and Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), and E Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1989). The Whisperer in Darkness is in black and white, but the camera moves like a modern film. It is easy enough to settle into the mood of the picture, but at the same time, the rain that falls throughout is mostly computer generated. Many of the night exteriors, for example outside Akeley’s house, are highly digital, looking as if they are arranged in Lightroom or After Effects.

At first presented as shadowy crab claws, we eventually see the creatures close up, in their digital glory. As mentioned above, this is the contradiction of adapting Lovecraft--it is virtually impossible to live up to what readers imagine. In the original novella, Lovecraft describes them: “They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with very short antaenne, where a head would normally be.” (299) The movie takes some aspects of this description, but what my mind’s eye sees is far more visceral and terrifying. Perhaps what is more interesting is the scene in which Wilmarth and his colleagues examine photographs of a dead monster carcass and its footprints. At first, we don’t see the creature at all. Henry Akeley’s son George (Joe Sofranko) explains, “They’re made of a different type of matter, their molecules vibrate at a different rate than ours,” therefore making them unphotographable. But then one of the professors takes out an embellished 1930s optometry set--or something like that--and is able to to reveal the carcass through a certain combination of lenses. It is a scene that shows us the power of science in a world compromised by cosmic intrusion. It also brings to mind the trick effects of early cinema. Many of these retro-cinematic homages dabble in these sorts of once-new-fangled technologies, which is fitting since movies were once one of these very things. Both La Antena and Brand Upon the Brain! rely on mad scientist tropes showing technology that looks cool, but gives no logical explanation of how it actually works in order to produce astounding results, like the theft of voices or fountain-of-youth-like injections. The optical lenses are just one example of this in The Whisperer in Darkness. We also get analog fetishism in the form of wax cylinder recordings, which in the context of today do have a ghostly quality. Most importantly, we see The Mi-Go technology that allows for people’s consciousness to be kept in cylindrical tanks, as well as holographic devices that allow for these entrapped humans to communicate. The audience is given no explanation of how it works, but we don’t need one. The devices do their job of suggesting a civilization far more advanced than ours, in the 1930s or the present day. 

The Whisperer in Darkness is a fun Lovecraft adaptation that is somewhat of a departure from the retro-cinematic movies I have covered on this substack before. It mixes the noirish style and commitment to that era with techniques of modern cinema, from ultra smooth camera work to a loud, bombastic, action score. The common thread connecting it to movies like Sunset Boulevard (1950), Veronika Voss (1982), Singapore Sling (1990), and Brand Upon the Brain! is the underlying gothic framework. Lovecraft is known for defining cosmic horror and The Weird, but his stories always have a strain of New England Gothic within them as well. Branney and Leman successfully convey this in their adaptation, which combines unknowable cosmic qualities with the gloomy, sensual, earthly qualities of The Gothic. 

Perhaps the best comparison to The Whisperer in Darkness is something else entirely--the 1956 and 1978 versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They are adapted from a novel by Jack Finney, which may well have been influenced by Lovecraft’s earlier novella. Essentially, The Whisperer in Darkness is a body snatching story before the best known one of those existed. The climax of the movie even resembles Walter Wanger’s version from the fifties, in that our desperate protagonists end up fighting creatures from another world in that most primitive of places--a cave.