If you asked me what was the best H.P. Lovecraft film ever made, I would immediately reply The Call of Cthulhu (2005).
It’s not like there’s any real competition.
It was an intriguing oddity, made by a fan group called the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which tried very hard to look like a film that had been made in the year Lovecraft wrote the original story.
Six years later, they followed it up with their version of a story Lovecraft wrote in the Thirties.
While The Call of Cthulhu had been a silent film, shot in a high contrast, Expressionist style, they chose instead to make The Whisperer in Darkness with sound, with a softer black and white look reminiscent of one of the classic adventure films of the Thirties like King Kong, or perhaps like the old Universal Horror films.
Folklorist Professor Albert Wilmarth may delve deeply into the stories and legends he’s collected over the years at Miskatonic University, but that doesn’t mean he believes any of them.
If there is any truth to them, he thinks it is entirely mundane, based on things science understands and can explain.
He’s ignored the stories of the locals finding bits of giant crustacean-like claws and legs after a flood in Vermont, but finds himself increasingly drawn into the story as an old man named Henry Akeley sends him a collection of photographs and other evidence of the strange things happening on his farm.
And while the dead creatures don’t seem to show on the photographs, they suddenly become visible when you look through a 3-D viewer.
Henry invites him to his farm, and Wilmarth finds him in a poor health, only able to speak to him in a whisper. However, he quickly becomes aware that something strange and unearthly is at work on the farm…
Part of the fun is that the alien technologies look deliberately retro — and come complete with a pair of Jacob’s ladders, straight out of a classic Thirties mad scientist lab. The alien’s themselves are moderately successful — they are CGI, but the HPLHS crew deliberately tried to make them look like they were old school stop motion creatures. For the most part, they’re fairly successful, and the black and white film helps enormously.
While The Call of Cthulhu was almost a slavish adaptation of the original, they chose a much freer approach here, adding a very Thirties-style adventure film climax as Wilmarth takes on the Mi-Go and tries to stop their hideous plans. Curiously, they also added an opening featuring Charles Fort, a famous real-life author who collected all kinds of strange and unbelievable newspaper stories in his books. Mind you, he fits in very well with some of Lovecraft’s themes, but it still seems an odd addition.
This is a far more accomplished film than their first effort. It’s about an hour longer, and, while it isn’t as complex as The Call of Cthulhu, its more straightforward story construction asked a lot more of their cast. The Call of Cthulhu‘s multilayered story meant that the characters only appeared in their own parts of the story, which allowed them to use an old, DIY film trick: with separate storylines with separate casts, you can be reasonably certain that someone will actually show up when you are shooting for the day.
But you can’t do that when your star is in nearly every scene.
Whisperer in Darkness is one of the creepiest and most horrible of Lovecraft’s stories, and they catch that sense of existential dread remarkably well. Nowhere is this more true than at the very end of the film, when Wilmarth finally tells us the conclusion of his tale.
It definitely leaves you shuddering.
It’s amazing that a group of fans could create a film like this. I suppose it helped that they had a much bigger budget for this one (thanks to the success of their first film), but it is also impressive that their amateur cast (and, in particular, their star, Matt Foyer, who plays an important part in both films) gives reasonably good performances.
While it isn’t as good as the first one, The Whisperer in Darkness is an eerie and effective film, a dark love letter to a great horror writer, and an entertaining horror adventure film with a great retro feel. One wishes there were more movies like this.
But sadly, the HPLHS hasn’t made another film since. And it seems unlikely that they ever will.
Oh, well. You can’t have everything.
rivets on the poster 
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