Well, let’s kick off a month of celebrating Lovecraftian themes in anime with an oddity: so far as I could find, the only “anime” direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s own stories.
I put “anime” in scare quotes, as while this is a Toei production and thus certainly part of the output of the anime industry, it’s not exactly your traditional fare, being done primarily through claymation. It’s also a fairly short OVA, covering three Lovecraft stories in about 45 minutes.
When I first heard about it, my opinion was that the time crunch might kill it. The stories they picked were The Picture in the House, The Festival, and of course The Dunwich Horror, per the title (H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories). The first two are both very short stories, with a dramatic reading of The Picture in the House – all of Lovecraft’s wonderfully purple prose included – clocking in around the 20 minute mark. Adapted to screen, it could easily get done in 15. The Festival is about the same length. But even if each of those took only ten minutes, that would leave about a single normal episode worth of time for The Dunwich Horror, a story that in a rarity for Lovecraft’s work features quite a few characters and several discrete narrative chapters. It would be quite challenging to fit that in and do it justice.
But, seeing is believing.
The opening story is Picture in the House. It dispenses with the idea of having any sort of narrator (and thus does not adapt one of Lovecraft’s best monologues into Japanese), but rather opens with an excellently prepared environment and long, quiet shots with eerie music and some nice Foley work telling of how a certain person, traveling the backwoods by bicycle, is caught in the rain and seeks shelter in a house that at first appears to be abandoned. Within, the traveler discovers an odd old book with a rather disturbing plate illustration that it seems to want to open to.
As nice as the sets look, being obviously stylized for the claymation and thus a tad unreal but otherwise quite lovingly detailed, the characters, well…
It’s claymation.
As depicted, it turns out the house is not untenanted, but rather belongs to an older man of imposing physique but quiet and affable if uneducated manner. Oddly, they decide to not have the character who acts as the narrator in the original speak at all. At times, the old man’s words imply that he responded somehow, but the role remains silent and later on it’s even said that in this version the traveler remained silent the whole time.
On one hand, it’s odd, leaving it to a single performance. On the other hand, that performance is what ultimately has to deliver the scare in this one, so it’s not totally illogical, and having but this single voice of a man we steadily come to think of as more and more sinister does add to the feeling of isolation.
In any case, the “conversation” soon turns to the book that the traveler found. It’s an account of the Congo region, centuries old and about as accurate as you’d expect such an account from that era. The plate of interest, which has the old man charmed and fascinated, is a depiction of a cannibal butcher shop. He waxes poetic about his grisly interest, and recounts the enjoyment it brought him to gaze upon that plate before slaughtering sheep for market.
Though professing that he never did such a thing, the old man muses how it would be to feast on meat man wasn’t meant to taste. How meat makes blood and gives one fresh life, so how would it be, if one could live longer and longer if that meat were… more similar still.
And that’s when the conversation is interrupted by a drip. Not from the rainstorm outside, but from a stain spreading across the ceiling from the room above, the one the man came from after awakening. And not of water, but of something more viscous and red.
In the original story, this is where the narrator flees, his exit covered by a colossal lightning bolt striking the house, thus allowing him to tell the tale. Here, we’re played out by the old man’s increasingly maniacal laughter as the traveler seems to look down, resigned to whatever fate awaits him.
On to The Dunwich Horror.
We begin with some establishing shots that don’t establish a whole lot, and then find that the ambient dogs barking is related to a discovery that the main characters make, that the local dogs in this mysterious dusty library have mauled to death a being too human to quite be “something” yet too inhuman to really be “someone”
Normally, I leave source material at the door, but for this one… Lovecraft’s stories are in English, and in the Public Domain, and fairly short, so there’s not really any barrier to access. And I’m so intensely familiar with the source that I can’t help but look at it as an adaptation. Between the two, I’m going to abandon my usual policy. This to me answers how they intend to fit the Dunwich Horror into their shorter running time, as we’re starting more or less halfway through. Which changes the question to how they intend to build atmosphere or establish the facts of the case.
We are let in by narrator on some of the chronologically earlier facts. This thing is, or was, one Wilbur Whately, born to creepy albino Lavinia Whately and an unknown father and raised on his evil wizard grandfather’s cursed farm, where constantly buying cows never replenishes their number and everybody’s got odd sores and wounds.
Wilbur grew with unnatural rapidity in both size and intellect – though dogs always seemed to hate him, forcing him to carry a handgun for self defense – and the home improvements at the farm got the little town of Dunwich spooked. After grandpa’s death, Wilbur began to seek rare and forbidden books, even coming to visit the narrator, with whom he corresponded, at the library of Miskatonic University in nearby Arkham, in search of the Necronomicon. Narrator refused to lend out the rare and unspeakably valuable book, which didn’t set well with Wilbur since he unfortunately lived in a time before convenient cameras or scanners that would let him take the information home without the tome.
This leads to his attempted break-in and untimely death, which reveals what was lurking under his clothes this whole time. In all honesty, this isn’t a bad summation of the early bits of Dunwich Horror, omitting unfortunately only the bit that sets up the ending twist in the original. The problem is that it’s delivered in a fairly dispassionate and matter-of-fact narration.
After Wilbur’s death, bad things start happening in Dunwich, which the narrator gets wrapped up in perhaps thanks to the mysterious texts left behind by Wilbur that it would take a scholar to decipher, though we’re told that with Wilbur alive, things would have been worse. There are trails of destruction, but no culprit evident, eventually leading to the revelation that they’re dealing with some kind of giant invisible monster.
Narrator determines that it’s a being summoned by magic and that can be defeated by magic, and thus is involved in the takedown.
They use a fog spritzer to make the burnt spaghetti monster (to be fair, it’s actually a pretty neat design and prop) visible, at which point it also seems to be vulnerable to bullets, which stop it long enough for the guys to chant it away. In the closing narration, Narrator notes that while they managed to stop a potential end-of-the-world scenario this time, next time Mankind might not be so lucky. Also, the monster was Wilbur’s twin brother, who took more after their father. There’s no reason or build up for this conclusion, that would give it the gravitas that it had in the original text, but okay, you got the proper ending in.
The major malfunction in this OVA is on proud display here: the creepy things are properly creepy. I dare say the claymation, while being generally no budget and rarely even able to move rather than tracking shots being used over stills, does a surprisingly good job at evoking an unsettling environment and even the ultimate monstrous forms of Wilbur and his brother. But the humans aren’t really human enough. Most of Lovecraft’s stories are written in first person, and with narrators that really like the sound of their own voice at that, so you get a very intimate sense of the character who is going to be experiencing most of the horror, forming the human connection necessary to actually be invested in what’s going on.
In Picture in the House, the traveler – the Narrator in the original – never says a word, and his claymation face is pretty expressionless, so we have to read a lot into it. In Dunwich Horror, the narrator doesn’t bring a lot of passion, which is appropriate from the position from which he is narrating, but we only have that voice for the whole thing where as in the original text we hear Wilbur’s voice quite a bit and understand him as a character, as well as Professor Armitage (the character worked into the OVA’s unnamed narrator). The human connection is also missing in a lot of the color and texture of Dunwich. We never get a sense, in the OVA, of what the town is like other than it’s probably pretty rural since we only ever see isolated farmhouses and grassy hills. And since we never get a sense of the characters, the culture, or really the mystery of it all, it’s not an awesome moment when we learn that the horrible invisible mutant monster is, like Wilbur, essentially a demigod as the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Lavinia Whately. It’s just kind of there.
Again, having waived my normal “avoid source material” policy, I’ll direct you to how Lovecraft did this. Very early we have Old Whately questioned about the paternity of his grandchildren, and among other cryptic remarks he prophecies that one day the people will all hear a child of Lavinia calling out his father’s name from Sentinel Hill. And then after the whole life of Wilbur and much buildup in the hunt for the horror, the monster’s last act is to cry out – in English – for its father, Yog-Sothoth, both providing the key to where it came from and some tragedy in that the abomination possessed at least some humanity.
Anyway, on to The Festival
The Festival is a Christmas story, but aside from getting that out of the time and place and a brief narration of our main character, a young man, declaring that he comes from a very old family that observes a certain ritual once a century, it is entirely without speech. We follow the young man as he spends some time reading many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore (Necronomicon included, of course) and then as he is summoned by his kin to attend with them.
The large extended family goes to an old church on the hill… and then underneath it, where mysterious winged creatures (the arguable appearance of the Byakhee, for anyone who followed my intro to Lovecraft article) are summoned, on which the young man mounts up like the rest, to be flown to some alien place of infinite remoteness.
There, we find the focal point of the festival
Witnessing this, the young man seems wowed. Then he, and the others, start laughing. And some of them turn into skeletons, still laughing. And the OVA just sort of lets rising creepy laughter play us out, the same way that it did in Picture in the House, albeit in this case changing quite a bit more of the sense of the production.
Once again, we lose a lot for not really connecting with the “central” character. There’s some good creepy imagery, but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning if we don’t feel anything about the threat or corruption to the one person we’ve sort of been following.
And that… really is the OVA. I’ve already discerned and related its major malfunction, so a couple of parting words to reinforce things.
The claymation… is a style. It hardly ever moves, and nothing looks natural, but all the same a lot of effort was put into the sets and even the monsters. I can’t say it looks bad, exactly, but it certainly doesn’t look like anything you’d expect out of anime.
The sound work is actually really good. The music and Foley are very effective at creating and maintaining a creepy atmosphere. When so much of the production is long, silent shots of these unnatural vistas of puppetry, a great deal of the OVA is tied up in its sound, so it’s actually quite important that it’s good.
All the same, this is best viewed less as a conventional anime and more as… an artifact. If I may make things personal for a minute, I’ve been a fan of Lovecraft longer than I’ve been an anime reviewer, and possibly longer than I’ve even been an anime fan, since that’s hard to pin down an exact date for. In days gone by, I’d even attend a Lovecraft Film Festival, which was always replete with blocks of independent short films, ranging from a minute or two up to meatier productions. There would also, of course, be screenings of professional films and TV episodes in the right vein.
This OVA is more like something I would see in the shorts block. It’s astounding that it was made by such a large, old, and generally respected company as Toei, because it has the look and feel of those independent little passion projects. Ranked against those little shorts, it would rate rather highly. Honestly, any of the three stories would if taken individually to remove the weight advantage from Toei’s offering would be in the top of the class. But ranked against the general body of anime? It’s a bizarre misfire, something that doesn’t belong with the corpus it is technically a part of.
When you think about it, that’s almost an extra layer of Lovecraftian about it. The entire work is alien; an Out-of-Place Artifact drastically removed from the environments it is found in and that would purport to have produced it. To many, this probably means it would have a sense of wrongness inherent to its very existence.
For my part, I just think it’s neat.
However, I will entirely decline to offer this OVA a letter grade. If it must be categorized as something, “Pass” is all it shall receive, but somehow that doesn’t even seem to cover the material. It really is for a different crowd and to be approached as a different kind of media than any familiar anime. In terms of any sort of objective quality it probably maxes out at a C, given how little movement there is and that it hits that one big snag translating these stories to screen, but if you’re a Lovecraft fan it’s probably going to be a treat just to experience once, worth the time at least.