Even now, when time has dulled the impression and made me half question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are things in that letter of Akeley’s which I would not quote

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

2011

Directed Sean Branney

Written by Andrew Leman and Sean Branney (based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft)

plus "The Call of Cthulhu" (2005), written and directed by same

Spoilers: moderate

One of the rarest things in Lovecraft cinema is textual fidelity, and The Whisperer In Darkness, despite being in the top percentile on that count and produced by no less a stickler-sounding institution than the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (or not; their motto, "We thought it'd be fun"), still doesn't manage it.  But just as rare is the sensation of fidelity, or even the sensation that anybody gave enough of a damn to feint towards fidelity (we all love Stuart Gordon here, but he did not give such a damn), and in addition to being startlingly faithful for most of its runtime, The Whisperer In Darkness does the single biggest thing a Lovecraft movie could do to reproduce something akin to the vibes of reading "The Whisperer In Darkness": it is a period piece.  And that is the rarest thing in Lovecraft cinema.  You can identify, from time to time, movies that maintain reasonable faithfulness to Lovecraft's plots, but Lovecraft movies that actually set themselves in the early 20th century, when the gulf opened up by the first strides of modern science was at its very widest, and all manner of ancient and current horrors could be conceived to lurk in that newly-revealed darkness?  Those basically don't exist, the only ones I'm aware of being today's main subject; a direct antecedent to today's subject, a 2005 adaptation of "The Call of Chthulu"; a 2010 German film, Die Farbe, likely inspired by the 2005 film, which adapts "The Colour Out of Space" (yet which does it in Germany—because it's also a rare thing, rather less excusably, to even bother setting them in New England); and possibly another adaptation of "Colour" from 1988 that I've never seen and whose descriptions are not clarifying, called The Curse, which may (or may not) be set in the 1920s (in the Appalachian South).

The "Cthulhu" adaptation is important enough for our present purposes to briefly cover it, since it was also produced by the H.P.L.H.S., and, indeed, it shared a directorial/screenwriting team, though their roles were reversed for Whisperer because I guess that's just how hyper-indie filmmaking works sometimes.  And make no mistake, these text-accurate Lovecraft adaptations are just jumped-up fan-films, and not that jumped-up.  But as that's true of many movies these days, let's not hold that too much against them.

Both are experimental and off-beat enough to take them out of pure ritualism, and "Cthulhu" should win any competition for seriousness of intent, given that what "director" Andrew Leman and "writer" Sean Branney (I suspect we can ascribe dual functionality to both already) determined to do with "Cthulhu," published in 1928, was to give it the complexion it might've had if Lovecraft had had his story snapped up by Hollywood—in other words, they made a neo-silent out of it (declaring their format, cutely, "Mythoscope"), and they didn't do a miserable job of it, though all they might have ultimately proved was that Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu," regarded by most observers as unadaptable, was in fact unadaptable.  Lovecraft's story, at least, doesn't lend itself to narrative cinema, insofar as it's barely "a story" at all—not exactly unique in Lovecraft, of course*—the work's avowed goal being instead to relate the horrifying correlations between individually-inexplicable occurrences made by this guy who, mostly, just sits around in a room.  (Marshalling all its source material, "Cthulhu" barely scrapes past what the Academy alone would deem "a feature's length"—47 minutes.)  You could probably do something by stripping out the narrator-heir (Matt Foyer) and cohering a proper adventure-horror narrative out of the mysteries of Cthulhu and the crew of the Emma, but that wouldn't be, as such, "faithful."  (Not that it's always precisely faithful—for instance, the Emma arrives upon the Alert already a derelict, rather than capturing her against the opposition of its cultist crew.  As the film attempts throughout to triangulate a position between "racial sensitivity," "our extras corps, demographically, is entirely Lovecraft fans willing to work for sandwiches," and "we can't afford an action scene anyway," perhaps it's just as well: the break-up of what scans as Louisiana's mostly-or-all-white Cthulhu cult did occasion an action scene, and it was at roughly "Channel Awesome does a brawl" level.  Still, points for period effort for the spelling "Eskimeaux" during the Greenland detour.)

As for its pretense of being a "late silent film," there's much diligence, but fewer corresponding rewards: for every genuinely creative shot effected within the freakishly high-contrast, blooming black-and-white and fake "age" contrived by cinematographer (also editor) David Robertson, and not too dissimilar to any given indifferently-preserved 20s movie, there's another dozen canted angles thrown in just because.  Sometimes, inspired imagery is rendered less effective because it's silent: Foyer's maddened grand-nephew/framing device being wheeled backwards into the darkness of his asylum while he portends doom should be excellent, but we're going to slice it in two with an intertitle, because the rhythms we're all used to thinking in are talkie ones.  (That the cinematographer was also the editor makes sense considering the frequent Vorkapic-style old-timey montage, a reasonable-enough strategy for an oft-document-based motion picture; unfortunately, they're not especially good montages, even technically.)  There's also the matter of how exactly motion looks in "Cthulhu," and I do not know if it's Robertson's fault, or a result of how it was transferred to various media; but it is distinctly videoey (and this will afflict Whisperer too, just not so much as "Cthulhu").  Finally, the arrival upon R'lyeh actively betrays the garage-sized scale of "Cthulhu's" production: it doesn't unduly harm the sequence that the allegedly non-Euclidean space has bad compositing (it arguably helps during the dream-vision foreshadowing it), but it does hurt that a beat regarding impossible angles could've been more clearly-told, and probably shouldn't come off like a comic pratfall into unknown dimensions.  Mostly, it's design (Leman seems to have been in charge of this), an unimaginative attempt to realize the unimaginable, notably forgetting to always imagine it as a space not built for human-sized inhabitants.  Leman's stop-motion kaiju Cthulhu, on the other hand, works, both as "what you'd get in a 20s movie" and as "a being beyond comprehensible physical law," and the madness-inducing sight of it prompts by far Robertson's most effective "horror" cutting.  But it's a bit of a noble failure, all told.

The danger, or just the temptation, with films such as these is to overpraise them just for existing.  I was keenly aware of this after watching Whisperer In Darkness, which I liked a great deal but which I had to wonder if I would've liked as much it if it wasn't exactly the thing it is, i.e., a Lovecraft adaptation doing what I'm always asking Lovecraft adaptations to do.  I think "Cthulhu," which I can't say I've liked particularly much either time I've seen it, has the benefit of dispelling these worries.  It also must've had the benefit, for its makers (and Robertson and Foyer also returned as cinematographer/editor and star, respectively), of getting some experience under their belts.  Likewise, whether it's a true benefit or not, it seems to have disabused them of further pursuing the neo-silent route.  "Whisperer," published in 1931, is too late for that, if we're being pedantically strict, but either way, it is a sound film, and I think they "get" early sound better, while also not letting "1931" serve as an aesthetic cage for the means-whatever-they-say-it-means "Mythoscope" treatment.  (Though unfortunately it does not mean "Academy ratio," which is possibly a bigger problem than this small aside makes it seem.)  Still, other than the CGI, and the ease of the sound recording, I don't think there's anything here that positively couldn't be done in 1931, only that wouldn't be.  The montages are way better.

"Whisperer" is also, simply, a more reliable chassis for narrativization, since it is "a story" (a pretty Carpenteresque one, even, what with an alien invasion that's mostly a siege of an out-of-the-way farmhouse, though this happens even more off-screen than it does off-page in a tale being primarily told by letters of suspicious provenance, and I assume the production just couldn't afford canine actors).  Now, "Whisperer" is not terribly high in my own Lovecraft rankings—and must not rank too highly in others', since this seems to be its sole adaptation, possibly another reason they chose it—but it's a decently engaging yarn, even if my favorite parts (not that this is uncommon) are the descriptions of New England, and my next favorite part is Lovecraft pretending (?) to be scared of the discovery of Pluto.  It's also true that the plot requires an inexpressibly stupid protagonist to function, with Lovecraft (hopefully) realizing you've gotten many, many pages ahead of the idiot, Albert Wilmarth (Foyer again).  So: there's been tremendous flooding in backwoods Vermont, and amongst the debris there has been witnessed certain corpses that are neither human nor any known animal; Wilmarth, an English professor at Miskatonic,** gets sucked into the ongoing debate, on the rationalist side, arguing that such reports are simply the modern manifestation of folkloric currents going back to indigenous myths, and Wilmarth acquires sufficient notoriety as a cranky debunker that (in a clever invention of the movie) he debates these Fortean sightings with the actual Charles Fort (Leman).  However, a young man named George (Joe Sofranko) accosts Wilmarth, bearing actual evidence of the creatures acquired by his aging father, Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), and Wilmarth is intrigued by the possibility that he might be wrong; engaging in correspondence with the elder Akeley, he finds the latter to be of a higher grade than the usual credulous hillbilly; and at last, despite the pleading warnings of his colleague Ward (Matt Lagan) who clearly knows more than he's willing to explain, Wilmarth consents to visit Akeley in Vermont, bringing with him the correspondence, and the photographs, and the phonograph record and, by way of George, the big black stone with those Outer One hieroglyphs on it—basically all the proof that said Outer Ones exist.

It will undoubtedly surprise you less than it does Wilmarth that Akeley, whose last letter*** Wilmarth even recognizes as quite distinct, has been somehow suborned by the alien monstrosities who've been trying to kill him and with whom he now claims a friendly detente, though I think it would surprise you, if you've read "Whisperer," that this is barely halfway through the movie.  Whatever else, till now it's done a solid job of making amenable to an audiovisual adventure what, in Lovecraftian fashion, is basically blocks of essentially-epistolary/testamentary paragraphs describing his protagonist's increasingly-anxious impressions (whereas the very first images of the film are Wilmarth burgling a copy of Eli Davenport's folkloric manuscript, itself repositioned as a Necronomicon Lite), and while it actually tilts things even further against any particularly high evaluation of Wilmarth's intelligence, it's managed to make this part of its self-supporting structure rather than just a regurgitation of Lovecraft's dunce, largely though Foyer's performance.  This is better-acted all over than you'd think it'd be: the closest to a bum performance is Lynch, and not through any fault of his own, but rather that they've seen the need to make "Akeley" more persuasive in this aforementioned audiovisual medium, while compensating for somewhat less darkness and substantially less whispering with a manipulation of his "asthmatic" dialogue that I approve of in theory though in practice it's overcooked; meanwhile, primary antagonist duties fall upon the capable shoulders of Daniel Kaemon, whose evil Bostonian, Noyes, is pretty delightful.  And while maybe it's just that the gap between a neo-silent and modern acting is that much smaller than that regarding early sound, the majority of the cast comfortably feel "of the 1930s."

But Foyer is maybe a little bit great, somewhat literally eggheaded to start, and quietly arrogant and secure in his own rationality to the point of blatant dysfunction, in the way Lovecraftian protagonists so often are ("oh, those simple savages, believing in all sorts of gobbledygook! oh no, a shoggoth!" is possibly the pattern of a literal majority of Lovecraft stories), and hence eager to plumb mysteries right up until he's not, and he's good at the "after he's not" part, which is entirely an invention of the film: the weakness of "Whisperer," at least from a screenwriting standpoint, is that Wilmarth gets up to Vermont, discovers shocking facts about miners from outer space, and then, basically, nothing happens except his worldview's been shattered.  And if the movie version of this does require punching up—I'm agnostic, but I lean towards "if you want it to be 104 minutes, it obviously does"—then this is the creditable version of it: Whisperer goes further than I would prefer in conflating magic with science fiction, but this was present in "Whisperer" already (like it or lump it, it's present in most Cthulhu Mythos stories); likewise, while in "Whisperer" the Outer Ones are pursuing some fairly quotidian ends for a cosmic horror (which arguably makes it more properly "cosmic horror," basically nothing more actively villainous than having staked a claim millennia ago on Vermont, and willing to tolerate humanity unless we act the nusiance we're obviously going to become), Whisperer cuts to the chase that Lovecraft only implied, affording an action-oriented third act that is perhaps, in fact, too similar to Aliens (down to a child performance, from Autumn Wendel, that isn't the best child performance ever but is likely this production's single most miraculously-missed bullet, acting-wise), but what are you gonna do?  I approve of this, honestly—it's more generic, but it does give it some welcome kineticism—or I do right up until the very last two or three minutes, which go for bleak reversal, as is of course good and right, but they do so pretty Goddamn haphazardly, to the point of being slightly confusing.

Craftwise, it's almost a real movie, and even if that "almost" was a big reason to wonder if I could be overrating this Lovecraft fan-film, I'd say in the average instance, you wouldn't find anything to object to, except that aforementioned irritating video-ness.  Mostly, this is swell—maybe switching jobs helped the writer-directorial team, who knows, though I don't think it's too much to attribute it to Robertson getting better at recognizing, or having more freedom to find, more effective shots, and relationships between shots, with some strong lensing choices that makes these academic and domestic spaces feel altogether warped and wrong, on top of some noirish shadowplay that makes it fun to look at, too.  Leman's production design (and location management) are stronger than on "Cthulhu" and with lower ambitions, and while there's a marginally-noticeable aridity—these spaces are just slightly more full than is absolutely required to support the story with its props—this is the kind of thing you should cut a cheap movie slack on.  You do not, however, have to cut such slack for a movie that's decided it will be in a near-constant rainstorm for its second half yet is perhaps the world-champion of rain that's obviously a fucking sprinkler casting a single narrow plane of water near the camera (the augmentation with digital rain effects actually makes it worse!), which is a tremendous accomplishment considering that by virtue of black-and-white, a pronounced degree of abstraction is already baked in.  What did they even need?  Perhaps just a scant few thousand dollars more, for a few more hoses?  I wish, at the very least, that Robertson had paid attention to which direction the "rain" was diagonally falling (it's always a diagonal) so that we didn't have the horrible and heretofore-unknown-to-me problem of sprinkler-based continuity errors.

We also have the collision of a vanishing budget and a very action-oriented finale, which I find to be substantially less galling than "it's a couple hundred gallons of water, can't you lay your hands on that?" (and, fair's fair, Foyer's constantly-dewed glasses, which sure seem to be real glasses, and which he assiduously never wipes off, are pretty awesome both for reflecting Robertson's keylights and as a metaphor).  But, while the CGI is, yes, bad, and the film clearly breaches its capabilities (thankfully less often with the set extensions, some of which are actual models anyway, including a fun homage to It Came From Outer Space and/or It Conquered the World), at least the design is rad, and the clearest views we get of the Outer Ones, where we can discern their cyborg enhancements (following pretty inexorably from the text) and squiggle-faces—though not my own visualization of them—even sneaks up to the edge of good (and hence might be stop-motion animation).  The only element of VFX I fully refuse to forgive is the perceived need to put faces with the canisters, which is not well-accomplished, but more importantly, it's less horrifying.

Yet it's all good enough to hesitantly offer Whisperer an enormous compliment in its context: it's maybe not just for fans.  Fans will get more out of it (I mean, obviously, given what a big part of this fan's positive review was "I derived intellectual pleasure from seeing how they solved the adaptational problems it poses"), but it's nice enough to see what amounts to a good old-fashioned mid-century alien-invasion-and-body-snatcher movie pop up out of the 21st century, too—and whether we take it as a 1950s B-minus-movie, forced back to the rudiments of early sound, or as movie out of the 30s that actually popularized Lovecraft in his own lifetime, it can be pleasant to pretend that The Whisperer In Darkness really did beat everybody to punch.

Score, "The Call of Cthulhu": 5/10

Score, The Whisperer In Darkness: 7/10

*You could make a movie out of "The Shadow Out of Time" but I don't know if you should, and have no real idea how I'd go about it myself.  And anyway, Lovecraft is probably most valuable as a prose stylist, maybe still a controversial claim, but one that becomes more unassailable the more familiar you become with other writers working in his universe, for even some Lovecraft Circle members could fall into ugly mimickry.

**"MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY ARKHAM, MASS." sez the sign, just like I have no doubt it likewise does at Harvard, whose visitors also might need to be reminded what town and state they're in.

***At least in the story, with a typewritten signature, Jesus Christ.