The Dunwich Horror
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"The Dunwich Horror" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in 1928 and first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales (pp. 481-508). It takes place in Dunwich, a fictional town in Massachusetts. It is considered one of the essential core stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.
A movie version of The Dunwich Horror appeared in 1970. It starred Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley, and also starred Ed Begley and Sandra Dee. While the script borrowed some elements from Lovecraft, the final film bears little resemblance to the short story.
Synopsis
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of the few tales Lovecraft wrote where the heroes successfully defeat the antagonistic entity or monster of the story.
"The Dunwich Horror" tells the story of Wilbur Whateley, the son of a deformed albino mother and an unknown father (alluded to in passing by the mad Old Whateley as "Yog-Sothoth"), and the strange events surrounding his birth and unprecedentedly precocious development. Wilbur matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. All the while, his sorcerer grandfather indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft.
The plot revolves around the desire of Wilbur to acquire an unabridged Latin version of the Necronomicon — his imperfect English copy ill-suited for his dark purpose — so that he may open the way for the return of the mysterious "Old Ones", whose forerunner is the Lovecraftian Outer God Yog-Sothoth. Furthermore, Wilbur and his grandfather have sequestered an unseen presence at their farmhouse; this being is connected somehow to Yog-Sothoth. Year by year, this unseen entity grows to monstrous proportions, requiring Wilbur and his patriarch to make frequent modifications to their residence. People begin to notice a trend of cattle mysteriously disappearing. Eventually, Wilbur's mother also disappears. By the time Wilbur's grandfather passes away, the colossal entity occupies the whole interior of the farmhouse.
Wilbur ventures to Miskatonic University in Arkham to procure a copy of the dreaded Necronomicon – Miskatonic's library is one of only a handful in the world to stock an original print of the frightful tome. The Necronomicon has certain spells that Wilbur can use to summon the Old Ones for dark purposes unfathomable to men. When the librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage, refuses to release the university's copy to him, Wilbur breaks into the library that night to steal the loathsome book. Unfortunately (for Wilbur rather than for humankind), he is killed by the guard dog, which attacks him with a most unusual ferocity. When Dr. Armitage and two other professors arrive on the scene and see Wilbur Whateley's corpse, they realize that the youth was not wholly of this earth:
The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin.... It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest...had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.
The story culminates with the actual Dunwich horror: with Wilbur Whateley now dead, no one can attend to the mysterious presence growing in the Whateley farmhouse. Early one morning, the Whateley farmhouse explodes as the thing, an invisible monster, rampages across Dunwich, cutting a path through fields, trees, and ravines, leaving huge "prints" the size of tree trunks. The frightened town is terrorized by the invisible creature for several days, until Dr. Armitage, Professor Rice, and Dr. Morgan, all of Miskatonic University, arrive with the knowledge and weapons needed to defeat the creature. In the end, its nature is revealed: it is the twin brother of Wilbur Whateley, though it "looked more like the father than [Wilbur] did." The actual death of the Horror is a surrealistic satire of the Crucifixion of Christ: the Horror's final words are "Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...".
Cthulhu Mythos
Although Lovecraft first mentioned "Yog-Sothoth" in the novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it was in "The Dunwich Horror" that he introduced the entity as one of his extra-dimensional Old Ones. "The Dunwich Horror" was also the first story to mention Shub-Niggurath.
External links
- ["The Dunwich Horror" text online]
- [Onara Films], an Australian Independent film production Company, produced a feature film in 1996 entitled 'Cthulhu' [(more information can be found on this Authorised Cthulhu movie fansite)], based on the short stories "Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror".
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