The Call Of Cthulhu (1975)
The Call Of Cthulhu (New World Pictures, October 1975)
Screenplay by Curtis Hanson. Based on The Call Of Cthulhu and The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft.
Special Effects by Ray Harryhausen
Music by David Lee
Directed by Gordon Hessler
Produced by Roger Corman
Cast
Vincent Price as George Gammell Angell
Stephen McHattie as Henry Anthony Wilcox
Harris Walker as Francis Wayland Thurston
Robert Reed as Police Official John Raymond Legrasse
Betty Aberlin as Emma Johansen
Jonas Bergstrom as Gustaf Johansen
An unseen man is creating a sculpture of a scaly creature. As the credits end, the camera zooms in on the sculpture.
The Winter of 1926-1927: We meet Francis Wayland Thurston (Walker), a young Bostonian anthropologist. Thurston is the grandnephew of the recently deceased Brown University linguistics professor George Gammell Angell (Price), and the sole heir and executor of his estate. Thurston starts going through papers and artefacts left by Angell, creating a manuscript. Among these is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature, similar to the one being made in the opening credits. The statuette, in a narrative by Angell as Thurston is looking over notes, is said to yield "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature."
The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox (McHattie), a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Wilcox based the work on his dreams of a "nameless city". As Thurston continues on with his research, an elaborate city is shown. It is described in Wilcox's voice as a great Cyclopean city of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror." As he speaks, an elaborate city is shown. There is indeed cyclopean masonry and massive monoliths. The city is inhabited by an unnamed race of reptilian species with bodies shaped like a cross between a crocodile and a seal. They have protruding foreheads, horns, and alligator-like jaws. The creatures move by crawling around. The words Cthulhu and R'lyeh are spoken.
1925: Wilcox begins having strange dreams on March 1, 1925. It continues for several weeks, as the young man begins showing increasingly bizarre behaviour and speaking of the aforementioned nameless city. The dreams culminate at the end of the month when Wilcox falls into a state of delirium.
A voiceover by Angell reveals that there were similar occurrences around the world. He also reveals that this was not the first time he had heard of Cthulhu.
1908: At an archeological society meeting, New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse (Reed) asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. He then goes on to reveal (via flashback) to the attendees, among them Angell, a horrifying event that took place the previous year.
November 1, 1907: Legrasse is leading a search party looking for several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police are horrified to discover the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a ritual that centred on the statuette, attended by roughly a hundred men repeatedly chanting the phrase, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogates the prisoners and learns "the central idea of their loathsome faith":
"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died [...] hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Someday he would call when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him".
The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu". They then translate the chanted phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
While going through papers, Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper reporting the discovery of a derelict ship, the Emma. Second mate Gustaf Johansen is listed as the sole survivor. Thurston has been in contact with his widow, who has agreed to travel from Norway to meet him.
1925: The Emma, which was named after Johansen's wife, is being attacked by a heavily armed yacht called the Alert. The crewmen of the Emma kill those aboard the Alert but lose their own ship in the battle. After the crew commandeer the Alert, they discover an uncharted island. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew dies on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death.
In the meantime, Thurston anonymously receives a statue in the mail that is said to be retrieved from the Alert. It is identical to the previous two. [1]
A few weeks later, Thurston arrives at a train station to pick up Johansen's widow, Emma (Aberlin) who has made the trip to visit Thurston from Norway. Emma tells Thurston that her husband died suddenly after an encounter with two Lascar sailors. At Thurston's home, she provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript. The uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh.
1925: Johansen's crew struggles to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally release Cthulhu, finally seen on film, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crew-mate flee aboard the Alert and are pursued by the creature. Johansen rams the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escapes, but Johansen's crewmate dies.
Emma asks how Thurston's grand-uncle died. The wound is still fresh, an emotional Thurston tells her. Thurston explains to Emma that Angell was a "widely known authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums."
Late 1926: Angell is returning home from a pier. The old man walks along a narrow hill street leading up from a waterfront when a sailor suddenly accosts Angell and pushes him to his death.
Thurston sees Emma off at the train station. As Thurston returns home and finishes completing his manuscript, he realizes in voiceover that he himself is most likely now a target of the cult:
"Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men." He assumes that he will soon meet the fate of Angell and Johansen: "I know too much, and the cult still lives." He also thinks that Cthulhu, whilst restoring his broken head, was dragged down again with the sinking city, thus keeping humanity safe until the next time, when the stars are right.
END
NOTES
The film was shot over a year earlier but had a longer period of post-production than most Corman films. Hessler and Harryhausen added stop motion scenes in after the initial filming. Corman also held the film back as Jaws was doing really well. The director would later admit to deliberately leaving Cthulhu's full appearance out of press materials and the trailer in an effort to emulate what Spielberg did with the shark in Jaws.
Critical reception was mixed. Although box office was modest, the picture made it's money back. Harryhausen was contracted to do another Sinbad movie, 1977's Sinbad and The Eye Of The Tiger, but was interested in working with Corman again on a planned Godzilla movie.
Michael Armstrong, the director of 1969's The Dark served as Assistant Director. Upon learning that Armstrong had been down on his luck since directing The Dark, Corman offered Armstrong a chance to direct a film for New World Pictures.
Curtis Hanson was originally attached to write and direct prior to Harryhausen and Hessler becoming involved. The original plan was to hire an actor to portray Cthulhu in a rubber suit. Tab Hunter was attached to play Thurston at this point but dropped out after being dissatisfied with another Hanson picture he'd starred in for Corman, the heavily cut thriller Sweet Kill (1973). Hanson had previously written and directed another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, The Dunwich Horror (1970) for Corman.
Tab Hunter was attached to play Thurston but when Hanson was directing but dropped out after being dissatisfied with another Hanson picture he'd starred in for Corman, the heavily cut thriller Sweet Kill (1973).
Perry King was offered the part of Wilcox but opted to appear in The Lords Of Flatbush instead.
The small character of William Channing Webb was written out to give Vincent Price more screentime. Despite the high billing in the credits and promotional materials, Price's role amounts to little more than a supporting role. The actor was a regular on-set, however, and even landed a larger role in Secret Of The Damned, a film that was released first but shot after Cthulhu using leftover sets and costumes from other film productions including this one.
Robert Reed was said to be upset that despite being a well-known film, TV and stage actor with a sizable amount of screentime, he was not billed over McHattie and Walker. McHattie has a pivotal supporting role, while Walker essentially serves as a sort of narrator/protagonist.
Reed was apparently so upset over the billing issue that he blamed his agent. This might have worked out in Reed's favour as he was soon scooped up by Hollywood agent to the stars Sue Mengers. Mengers had a client list that included Barbra Streisand, Peter Bogdanovich, Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, and Tuesday Weld.
As Mengers herself would tell Vanity Fair 25 years later:
Sue Mengers: What was that movie Harris Walker did with the squid monster? Now, something was really off with that schlub. He was one of Helen Benson's clients. She did have Sam Westwood and Dorothy Dandridge, but a lot of her roster was...people I would never have signed. Anyway, I sat through this really weird movie, but I had heard Robert Reed was pretty good in it. He got fourth billed in this thing over Harris, Vincent Price, and some other schmuck Roger Corman used to put in films a lot. Anyway, I found out through the grapevine that Reed was upset and was thinking of firing his agent because he felt he should have been given second or third billing. I thought he'd be good for Broadway, or some better film roles. So I went up to him at El Coyote, handed him a card and said "Get rid of that a**hole your agent! You should be doing stage! You are too talented to be doing glorified B-Movies and crappy sitcom pilots!" Apparently, that was what he wanted to hear. I signed him.
Despite Walker only having scenes alongside Betty Aberlin, Vincent Price was a regular visitor to the set Walker filmed his scenes on. As Walker remembers:
"Vincent hung around a lot. I didn't open up to the other guys as much until we shot Secret Of The Damned, though. I was alone a lot in Cthulhu. I had a couple scenes with Betty (Aberlin), who I had worked with before on stage".
Jonas Bergstrom was a Swedish actor who had previously appeared in Jerry Lewis' unreleased The Day The Clown Cried. Corman had heard of him and cast him in both this and Secret Of The Damned. His character in the latter film was rewritten from American to Swedish to accommodate Bergstrom. Bergstrom went back to Sweden soon after, later popping up as the love interest in the video for ABBA's "The Day Before You Came" (1982).
[1] In the story he travels to Australia and Norway. Since the film was shot in England and Corman was too cheap to shift production to either locale, the excuse of the statuette being received in the mail is given instead. The ship scenes were shot on a set.
Screenplay by Curtis Hanson. Based on The Call Of Cthulhu and The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft.
Special Effects by Ray Harryhausen
Music by David Lee
Directed by Gordon Hessler
Produced by Roger Corman
Cast
Vincent Price as George Gammell Angell
Stephen McHattie as Henry Anthony Wilcox
Harris Walker as Francis Wayland Thurston
Robert Reed as Police Official John Raymond Legrasse
Betty Aberlin as Emma Johansen
Jonas Bergstrom as Gustaf Johansen
An unseen man is creating a sculpture of a scaly creature. As the credits end, the camera zooms in on the sculpture.
The Winter of 1926-1927: We meet Francis Wayland Thurston (Walker), a young Bostonian anthropologist. Thurston is the grandnephew of the recently deceased Brown University linguistics professor George Gammell Angell (Price), and the sole heir and executor of his estate. Thurston starts going through papers and artefacts left by Angell, creating a manuscript. Among these is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature, similar to the one being made in the opening credits. The statuette, in a narrative by Angell as Thurston is looking over notes, is said to yield "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature."
The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox (McHattie), a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Wilcox based the work on his dreams of a "nameless city". As Thurston continues on with his research, an elaborate city is shown. It is described in Wilcox's voice as a great Cyclopean city of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror." As he speaks, an elaborate city is shown. There is indeed cyclopean masonry and massive monoliths. The city is inhabited by an unnamed race of reptilian species with bodies shaped like a cross between a crocodile and a seal. They have protruding foreheads, horns, and alligator-like jaws. The creatures move by crawling around. The words Cthulhu and R'lyeh are spoken.
1925: Wilcox begins having strange dreams on March 1, 1925. It continues for several weeks, as the young man begins showing increasingly bizarre behaviour and speaking of the aforementioned nameless city. The dreams culminate at the end of the month when Wilcox falls into a state of delirium.
A voiceover by Angell reveals that there were similar occurrences around the world. He also reveals that this was not the first time he had heard of Cthulhu.
1908: At an archeological society meeting, New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse (Reed) asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. He then goes on to reveal (via flashback) to the attendees, among them Angell, a horrifying event that took place the previous year.
November 1, 1907: Legrasse is leading a search party looking for several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police are horrified to discover the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a ritual that centred on the statuette, attended by roughly a hundred men repeatedly chanting the phrase, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogates the prisoners and learns "the central idea of their loathsome faith":
"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died [...] hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Someday he would call when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him".
The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu". They then translate the chanted phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
While going through papers, Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper reporting the discovery of a derelict ship, the Emma. Second mate Gustaf Johansen is listed as the sole survivor. Thurston has been in contact with his widow, who has agreed to travel from Norway to meet him.
1925: The Emma, which was named after Johansen's wife, is being attacked by a heavily armed yacht called the Alert. The crewmen of the Emma kill those aboard the Alert but lose their own ship in the battle. After the crew commandeer the Alert, they discover an uncharted island. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew dies on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death.
In the meantime, Thurston anonymously receives a statue in the mail that is said to be retrieved from the Alert. It is identical to the previous two. [1]
A few weeks later, Thurston arrives at a train station to pick up Johansen's widow, Emma (Aberlin) who has made the trip to visit Thurston from Norway. Emma tells Thurston that her husband died suddenly after an encounter with two Lascar sailors. At Thurston's home, she provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript. The uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh.
1925: Johansen's crew struggles to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally release Cthulhu, finally seen on film, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crew-mate flee aboard the Alert and are pursued by the creature. Johansen rams the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escapes, but Johansen's crewmate dies.
Emma asks how Thurston's grand-uncle died. The wound is still fresh, an emotional Thurston tells her. Thurston explains to Emma that Angell was a "widely known authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums."
Late 1926: Angell is returning home from a pier. The old man walks along a narrow hill street leading up from a waterfront when a sailor suddenly accosts Angell and pushes him to his death.
Thurston sees Emma off at the train station. As Thurston returns home and finishes completing his manuscript, he realizes in voiceover that he himself is most likely now a target of the cult:
"Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men." He assumes that he will soon meet the fate of Angell and Johansen: "I know too much, and the cult still lives." He also thinks that Cthulhu, whilst restoring his broken head, was dragged down again with the sinking city, thus keeping humanity safe until the next time, when the stars are right.
END
NOTES
The film was shot over a year earlier but had a longer period of post-production than most Corman films. Hessler and Harryhausen added stop motion scenes in after the initial filming. Corman also held the film back as Jaws was doing really well. The director would later admit to deliberately leaving Cthulhu's full appearance out of press materials and the trailer in an effort to emulate what Spielberg did with the shark in Jaws.
Critical reception was mixed. Although box office was modest, the picture made it's money back. Harryhausen was contracted to do another Sinbad movie, 1977's Sinbad and The Eye Of The Tiger, but was interested in working with Corman again on a planned Godzilla movie.
Michael Armstrong, the director of 1969's The Dark served as Assistant Director. Upon learning that Armstrong had been down on his luck since directing The Dark, Corman offered Armstrong a chance to direct a film for New World Pictures.
Curtis Hanson was originally attached to write and direct prior to Harryhausen and Hessler becoming involved. The original plan was to hire an actor to portray Cthulhu in a rubber suit. Tab Hunter was attached to play Thurston at this point but dropped out after being dissatisfied with another Hanson picture he'd starred in for Corman, the heavily cut thriller Sweet Kill (1973). Hanson had previously written and directed another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, The Dunwich Horror (1970) for Corman.
Tab Hunter was attached to play Thurston but when Hanson was directing but dropped out after being dissatisfied with another Hanson picture he'd starred in for Corman, the heavily cut thriller Sweet Kill (1973).
Perry King was offered the part of Wilcox but opted to appear in The Lords Of Flatbush instead.
The small character of William Channing Webb was written out to give Vincent Price more screentime. Despite the high billing in the credits and promotional materials, Price's role amounts to little more than a supporting role. The actor was a regular on-set, however, and even landed a larger role in Secret Of The Damned, a film that was released first but shot after Cthulhu using leftover sets and costumes from other film productions including this one.
Robert Reed was said to be upset that despite being a well-known film, TV and stage actor with a sizable amount of screentime, he was not billed over McHattie and Walker. McHattie has a pivotal supporting role, while Walker essentially serves as a sort of narrator/protagonist.
Reed was apparently so upset over the billing issue that he blamed his agent. This might have worked out in Reed's favour as he was soon scooped up by Hollywood agent to the stars Sue Mengers. Mengers had a client list that included Barbra Streisand, Peter Bogdanovich, Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, and Tuesday Weld.
As Mengers herself would tell Vanity Fair 25 years later:
Sue Mengers: What was that movie Harris Walker did with the squid monster? Now, something was really off with that schlub. He was one of Helen Benson's clients. She did have Sam Westwood and Dorothy Dandridge, but a lot of her roster was...people I would never have signed. Anyway, I sat through this really weird movie, but I had heard Robert Reed was pretty good in it. He got fourth billed in this thing over Harris, Vincent Price, and some other schmuck Roger Corman used to put in films a lot. Anyway, I found out through the grapevine that Reed was upset and was thinking of firing his agent because he felt he should have been given second or third billing. I thought he'd be good for Broadway, or some better film roles. So I went up to him at El Coyote, handed him a card and said "Get rid of that a**hole your agent! You should be doing stage! You are too talented to be doing glorified B-Movies and crappy sitcom pilots!" Apparently, that was what he wanted to hear. I signed him.
Despite Walker only having scenes alongside Betty Aberlin, Vincent Price was a regular visitor to the set Walker filmed his scenes on. As Walker remembers:
"Vincent hung around a lot. I didn't open up to the other guys as much until we shot Secret Of The Damned, though. I was alone a lot in Cthulhu. I had a couple scenes with Betty (Aberlin), who I had worked with before on stage".
Jonas Bergstrom was a Swedish actor who had previously appeared in Jerry Lewis' unreleased The Day The Clown Cried. Corman had heard of him and cast him in both this and Secret Of The Damned. His character in the latter film was rewritten from American to Swedish to accommodate Bergstrom. Bergstrom went back to Sweden soon after, later popping up as the love interest in the video for ABBA's "The Day Before You Came" (1982).
[1] In the story he travels to Australia and Norway. Since the film was shot in England and Corman was too cheap to shift production to either locale, the excuse of the statuette being received in the mail is given instead. The ship scenes were shot on a set.
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