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AIP continued its mini-revival of Lovecraft with this adaptation of "The Colour Out of Space" (1927), in which the fictional Arkham has been moved from New England to Old England. An American named Stephen Rinehart (Adams) is invited by his girlfriend Susan (Farmer) to the Witley estate where she lives with her father Nahum Witley (Karloff). The townspeople exhibit such a melodramatic case of fear and loathing at any mention of the sinister old Witley place, that they seem like refugees from a Monty Python skit. For lack of a cab, Rinehart is forced to walk to the estate across the "blasted heath", a stretch of countryside which looks as though it were used for nuclear weapons testing.
And, in a sense, that's just how it has been used: Many years ago a radioactive meteorite crashed on the Witley land, corrupting every life form with which it came in contact. Old Nahum Witley has tried to believe that this disaster was a blessing, but now he is becoming convinced that it is a form of magickal vengeance visited upon him by his black magickian ancestor Corbin Witley. The makers of this film were apparently not satisfied with the science fiction plotline of Lovecraft's original tale, and wanted to work some supernatural elements into the story. In this movie, we are never certain whether the impact of the poisonous meteorite is a chance disaster born of an uncaring, existential universe, or the result of a curse engineered by a crazy old sorcerer.
For their pseudo-Cthulhu Mythos film, the makers have provided a pseudo-Necronomicon. In the Witley library, Rinehart discovers an old grimoire with the title Cult of the Outer Ones engraved in gold on the cover, which appears to be made of brown calfskin. As he opens it, we see that the text itself is written in a kind of medieval-looking typeface similar to what some calligraphers and printers refer to as "cloister text" or "Old English text" with illuminated capitals at the paragraph headings. The text itself reads:
Compare this to a similar quote from the Necronomicon from Lovecraft's story, "The Festival" (1923):
Perhaps Daniel Haller was simply playing with Necro-toys before Uncle Roger Corman let him crack the "real" book five years later when he directed The Dunwich Horror.
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1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.