Dove Street South
Thu 30 Jul · 20:00 · £5
Headfirst Editor's Pick 'You know when you fall for a guy, but he's like, totally a warlock? In a Necronomicon-y wants to sacrifice you kinda way? Spoiler alert: it never ends well (but does make for a cracking flick). The Dunwich Horror is the Everest of Lovecraft adaptations: arcane low-budget evil with a mega dose of kill-all-hippies downer psychedelia. Cthulu compels you! To the Cube!' - The devil's spawn is about to open the gates of hell. Riding high on his successful adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, the infamous 'King Of Exploitation', producer Roger Corman , took on that other titan of literary terror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft , in The Dunwich Horror , a tense, atmospheric, slow-burn, low-budget B-feature that melds acerbic Lovecraftian horror with a generous dose of late-60s hallucinatory freak-out psychedelia into a groovy occult trip. Made at the apex of the love generation and transplanted from Lovecraft Country (New England) to hip and cool Californ-I-A, The Dunwich Horror is exquisitely divisive. It is either considered a pioneering minor cult classic, underrated and flawed but still one of the more successful Lovecraft 'weird fiction' adaptations committed to film, or a piece of distinctively cheesy high camp oozing the gaudy style of an early-1960s Hammer Horror film with a splash of the simmering unease of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (the prior year's horror sensation). + Bar Sounds Before and after the film, lose yourself in the sounds of the dark arts: DJs conjure otherworldly, esoteric, immersive horror atmospheres. - The charismatic and soft-spoken, but deeply unsettling Wilbur Whateley (a dandyish, poodle-haired and improbably pornstached Dean Stockwell *, channelling Aleister Crowley) travels from the degenerate coastal backwater of Dunwich to the library of the prestigious Miskatonic University in Arkham in a quest to access the esoteric knowledge contained within the Necronomicon , a rare occult grimoire of great antiquity (a creation t