The Shuttered Room
David Greene
Initial release: May 20, 1967 (Japan)
Howard Philips Lovecraft died penniless in a hospital ward in 1937, and was buried in a small ceremony in a cemetery in his beloved Providence, RI. Though most of his best work had been in the decade prior to his death, he made almost no money from any of it and was forgotten by all but a few of his closest friends for many years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, a series of collections of Lovecraft's work were published, primarily by Arkham House which laid claim to the copyright. Combined with collections edited by Lovecraft's friend August Derleth, who wrote and completed stories base on Lovecraft's notes, there was a big upswell in Lovecraft's popularity, decades after his death. While the original story that David Greene's The Shuttered Room is based on is probably more Derleth's work than Lovecraft's, it's still part of an early wave of cosmic horror film that, notably, isn't all Lovecraft.
David Greene was mostly a TV kind of guy, making episodes and made-for-TV movies, with his biggest feature film credit being directing the 1972 Godspell adaptation. The Shuttered Room is a strange film from early in his career, that I have something of a hard time deciding how I feel about. The basic premise is that a young woman named Susannah returns to the island off the Massachusetts coast that she spent her earliest years on before being sent away to New York City. Following the deaths of her parents, she's inherited their house and the abandoned mill that was attached to it, and so she and her new husband Mike travel to the island to check it out. The island itself is sparsely populated and difficult to travel on, as there are few roads and fewer cars, but there's enough of a self-sustaining community for a general store and a repair shop. They soon find out from the locals that the mill is supposed to be cursed, but the real threat is the local hoodlum Ethan and his shitty friends. He takes an immediate shine to Susannah, and continually harasses and stalks her; his behavior only gets worse when he finds out that the mill he was due to inherit actually went to Susannah.
There isn't really much in the way of any sort of supernatural business to this film; the "curse," such as it is, will be familiar to anyone who saw "Treehouse of Horror VII" on The Simpsons. It's Ethan, played by the late, great Oliver Reed, who is the centerpiece of the film, sleek and monstrous, a classic 1960s bad-boy predator type, almost archetypal in his denim and slicked back hair. Not even getting his ass kung-fu'd into the sea by Mike and then having scalding water dumped him by his aunt to "cleanse his sinful thoughts" can really diminish his menace. Nevertheless, there is some surprisingly good cinematography to this film, way more than you would expect for an otherwise almost potboiler chiller. It's one of those films where the sum is greater than its parts, as aside from the silliness of trying to make regular England stand in for New England and the occasional nonsensical move by one character or another (why would you leave your wife alone when the obvious rapist and his friends are lurking about?) it somehow manages to make most of the whole affair work, coming off as a sort of Z-grade Straw Dogs with all that implies. (While no sexual assault actually happens in this film, much of the film revolves around Susannah being menaced by Ethan; it is arguably the central point of the film, with a less than satisfying payoff as he is unceremoniously killed off in the finale.)
This isn't a Ken Russell movie, but it sort of feels like Greene's attempt to fill in for Russell after the latter, originally picked to direct, was replaced at the last minute. There's a subversive quality to the film that leaves it uncomfortable, tonally inconsistent and somehow better (yet also worse) than I expected. Regardless of how you might feel about Derleth's involvement with the myriad scattered, unused ideas of Lovecraft and how much of the story belongs to one man or the other, it's at least passingly Lovecraft-associated, albeit fairly obvious that it wasn't much more than a loosely sketched out idea jotted down in Lovecraft's commonplace book. So feel free to toss it on the pile of 1960s and 1970s Lovecraft adaptations, alongside The Haunted Palace, Die, Monster, Die!, Curse of the Crimson Altar, and The Dunwich Horror. (Arguably also Dark Intruder borrows a plot point from Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep.") It's not a great film, but it's not something I'd put away in the attic to forget, either.
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