In his lifetime, Howard Philips Lovecraft toiled in obscurity, mostly known only to a group of weird fiction nerds in New England during the 1920s. Dying relatively young of cancer in 1937, he never saw the newfound fame his literary work would experience beginning in the early 1960s. While cosmic horror of a sort wasn't new to film (or television) by the 1960s, it was none other than Roger Corman who first brought Lovecraft to the silver screen with The Haunted Palace, part of his broader Edgar Allen Poe cycle but based largely on Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Since then, elements of Lovecraft's disturbing universe have popped up in horror film (and later television) ever since. Harvey Hart's 1965 film Dark Intruder leans more towards old-school gothic horror, but it makes explicit reference to Lovecraftian concepts, making it one of the earliest to suggest a broader, darker universe beyond our toy reality.
The year is 1890, the place is San Francisco. Rolling fog and close streets make the city resemble London, all the more reason that a series of murders — the film opening on the fourth in progress — is driving the city into a panic, wondering if Jack the Ripper has come to America. Playboy occult detective Brett Kingsford, who sometimes works with the police on stranger cases, is asked to look into the matter. Left behind at the murder scenes are four statuettes, each with two faces, one of which seems to be progressively emerging further from the statuette with each new murder. Taking one of the statuettes to a Chinese curio dealer he knows, Kingsford learns of an ancient Sumerian demon and the seven-spoked wheel it possesses. The story goes that the demon must commit seven murders, one for each spoke, in order to complete whatever dark goal it possesses. Meanwhile, a friend of Kingsford has been acting stranger and stranger, and the evidence is starting to point his way...
Dark Intruder was originally going to be a TV pilot, written for a show called The Black Cloak that never got off the ground. When Alfred Hitchcock's production company deemed it too scary and violent for television, NBC sold the rights to Universal, who instead managed to stretch the script out to 59 minutes and released to drive-in theaters as a double bill with I Saw What You Did. Its origins as a television pilot are obvious in the element of Kingsford, who seems the archetypal occult detective with a wealthy playboy cover, complete with butler and a secret lab he keeps under the stairs. In other words, somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Batman. There's a comedic element to the film as well, with the script being extremely tonally inconsistent, and the legendary Leslie Nielsen is hard to take seriously as Kingsford when every line he utters comes off like spoof.
Nevertheless, Dark Intruder is possessed of some really good cinematography and special effects; pre-earthquake San Francisco is dark and foreboding and the costume work is pretty good. The main villain is convincingly monstrous, with his defining feature for much of the movie being sharp claws that he uses to rend his victims. The plot is surprisingly twisty and complex, and I wish the movie had given it a little more room to breathe.
While Dark Intruder is pretty firmly B-movie fare, with its brisk runtime and television origins, it's nevertheless a surprisingly decent gothic chiller that hints at things even worse than mere Sumerian demons lurking beyond the bounds of perception. It's not exactly influential in terms of cosmic horror cinema, but it remains nevertheless a point of interest on the overall timeline.
-june❤
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