From there, Professor Wilmarth learns more than he wanted to know about the phenomenon, and the audience learns the secrets of the place as the professor does, the story opening up to Lovecraft’s usual cosmic dimensions. Noyes (Daniel Kaemon), who lets him off several miles from the Akeley farmhouse, explaining that the rain has washed out the bridge to the old place, and Wilmarth will have to go it by foot. So, Wilmarth goes off to Vermont to investigate, where he’s picked up at the train depot by a mysterious character named P.F. Then the farmer’s son, George Akeley (Joe Sofranko) visits the professor, imploring him to help them with the “hill creatures” and even offering photographic proof of their existence.
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He has also been receiving a series of letters from a Vermont farmer named Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), who claims he has seen the creatures all around his house.
He has just uncovered a manuscript called “Tales of the Old Ones” that includes references to “a hidden race of monstrous beings” said “to lurk somewhere in the remoter hills” of Vermont.
They keep a straight face throughout the movie, doing it as poker-faced as they can (but obviously enjoying themselves in process).Īnyway, things begin with our meeting the main character, Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer), a professor in the English Department of Miskatonic University, Arkam, Massachusetts, a man who specializes in folklore. The motto of the HPLHS is “Ludo Fore Putavimus” (“We thought it would be fun”), perhaps parodying Charles Foster Kane’s famous line in “Citizen Kane” when he says, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” It also indicates they probably don’t take much of this stuff too seriously, even though they never play any of the film for laughs.
Judging by “The Whisperer in Darkness,” I’d say they came closer to succeeding than most anyone else, although the film may not appeal to every modern horror-movie or sci-fi buff. The filmmakers at the HPLHS have tried to be as true to Lovecraft as they could in their films, attempting to replicate the tone and feeling as well as the dialogue, costumes, and settings of the original stories. Needless to say, movies need solid imagery, so filmmakers have often resorted to making up a lot of the visuals that Lovecraft merely implied, and suddenly, when audiences actually saw these things on screen, the pictorial representations didn’t always match their imagination. As a result, readers conjured up in their minds horrific landscapes, creatures, monsters, and gods that Lovecraft never actually described in much detail on the page. While I admit it’s been over fifty years since I last read a Lovecraft tale (I was quite a fan in high school), I remember the stories being more atmospheric than they were action oriented, more subjective than objective Lovecraft intimated, suggested, insinuated more than he showed. Many filmmakers have tried and many have failed. Now, here’s the thing: Lovecraft has long been a favorite horror, fantasy, and science-fiction writer among followers of the genre, but his stories haven’t always translated well into movies.
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