The Whisperer in Darkness (2011)

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS is one of the creepier and tenser short stories from H.P. Lovecraft. Readers are given enough hints to know all too well that something bad is going on as the story’s protagonist, despite his academic intelligence, seems too clueless and too stubbornly grounded in his notion of the realistic world to realize that he’s heading to a perilous destination. Journeying along with this character, Professor Albert Wilmarth, into an unnatural and creepy situation written in a first person perspective is largely what I think makes this short story work so well. In the first half there’s a lot of tension that is built up from the letter exchange correspondence between Albert and another character, Henry Akeley, whose farm is seemingly being invaded by alien monsters. However, nothing really ends up being truly conclusive with a lot being left to suggestion or just being the possible result of some weird and unexplainable phenomena or coincidences.

While I don’t think that it reaches the same high tension found in Lovecraft’s original story, the film adaptation by The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) does an exceptional job at taking the liberty of filling in a lot of blanks by rounding out the story with much more definite events and including a third act that contains some new surprises that don’t disgrace the original story in the least. Though the narrative is understandably tweaked a bit to be more suitable for film, this still feels like one of the most faithful and near-perfect Lovecraft adaptations since the HPLHS’s CALL OF CTHULHU from 2005, though I honestly enjoyed THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS a bit more.