'The Whisperer in Darkness' is a new movie filmed partly on location in Vermont and Massachusetts.
View full sizeOn location at Jamaica State Park, VermontVermont river water is cold in late September, and colder still if it’s sprayed on your head for two straight hours.
This is the story of how I became a featured extra in a new indie scifi/horror movie The Whisperer in Darkness, which was shot partly on location in Bellows Falls and Jamaica, Vermont and at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The movie had its world premier in March 2011 at the SFF-rated Film Festival in Athens, Greece and came out on DVD just this month. The Whisperer in Darkness (hereafter TWID) is based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story of the same name and was made with fastidious and loving care by the folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, the same crew who made the silent film version of Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu in 2005 (currently available on Netflix Instant). Sean Branney and Andrew Leman wrote the screenplay and Sean Branney directed, and they styled the film after the classic early Universal Pictures horror films of the 1930s, like Dracula and Frankenstein. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an early pioneer in science fiction and horror, lived for much of his life in Providence, RI, and set many of his stories in various real and imaginary towns in New England.
First published in 1931, TWID tells the story of Albert Wilmarth, a literature professor at Miskatonic University, H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional university in Arkham, Mass. After receiving a series of mysterious letters from a Vermont farmer, Wilmarth becomes involved in investigating the existence of a race of extraterrestrial beings (the Mi-Go) rumored to be active in the “wild hills” of Vermont’s (well, presumably they were wild back then). The Wilmarth of the story is in many ways a typical Lovecraft protagonist, which is to say that his passivity is exceeded only by his bone-headed obliviousness. He spends most of the tale nestled in the safety and comfort of his university office, and when he finally does venture out to the "wilds" of Vermont, his first encounter with something otherworldly sends him screaming like a little girl back to the train station. A man of bold action he is not (a trait he shared with Lovecraft himself, who definitely preferred the sit-and-observe-life-from-a-distance approach to life). So it was obvious that the filmmakers needed to make some changes to the story to bring it to the screen, since, as they admit on their production blog, “[L]et's face it, unless there's some adaptation, The Whisperer in Darkness would largely be a movie about a college professor reading his mail.” Most of the additions occur in the third act, where Wilmarth finds his courage and, instead of skedaddling back home, discovers just what those pesky Mi-Go are up to in the wild hills of Vermont. I won’t say more but suffice it to say that Sean and Andrew found a way to end the story with a little more oomph while remaining true to Lovecraft’s original vision.
My involvement with the film came out through sheer coincidence. A good friend of mine, Mat Jacobson, is a huge Lovecraft fan and a few years ago he reintroduced me to this visionary author's work. I hadn’t read Lovecraft since high school and I fell in love with his unique vision and arch, idiosyncratic writing style all over again. Mat had approached the filmmakers early in the process of adapting the film and offered to help them with location scouting. TWID is set primarily in the vicinity of Townshend, Vermont, a tiny little town in Windham County about 20 miles north of Brattleboro. Lovecraft visited the area in 1927 and 1928 and retained much of the area’s real geography for his tale. Mat had lived in the area and knew many of the actual locations mentioned in the story. So though most of the film was to be shot on a sound stage in California, the filmmakers planned to spend a week shooting exteriors on location, mainly in Vermont but also at Mount Holyoke College, which would stand in for Miskatonic University, and at a train station in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Mat mentioned the shoot to me and added that they would need extras. After a chance meeting in the new release section of the local Blockbuster (remember them?), Sean Branney, the film’s director, offered me the part of the farmer, who has no dialogue but is the first character seen in the film.
TWID opens with the Vermont floods of 1927, which were a series of very real and very devastating floods in the area, only in this version, the flooding also involved “certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers.” Lovecraft wrote, “What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.”
In short, the Mi-Go, Lovecraft’s interstellar, fungi-based lifeform.
In the opening scene, which takes place during these floods, a farmer carrying a walking stick (that’s me!) works his way down the swollen banks of the West River. According to the script, he approaches a blockage of flood debris, where he finds, first, a drowned sheep and then . . . something more . . . a mass of debris that, with his prodding reveals “a HINT OF A WING and a limb ending in a PINCERED CLAW.”
The first day of shooting for The Whisperer in Darkness was September 22, 2009, and the call sheet for that day included three locations, the first of which was Jamaica State Park in Jamaica, Vermont, which is situated on a particularly picturesque bend in the West River. My call time that morning was 7:00 AM, and I was 20 minutes early despite the hour-long drive. The park of course was utterly deserted at that hour, and I sat in the parking lot listening to a book on tape, Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (a terrific book, by the way, despite the fact that it is entirely lacking in Mi-Go or really any fungi-based life forms). It was quite cool for the season but as I sat with my car windows open soaking up the early morning sun I thought, "Hey, at least it’s not raining."
About half an hour after I arrived a huge yellow rental truck pulled into the lot. The side of the truck was emblazoned not with the familiar Hertz logo but instead with a huge customized logo that read: “Fungi Truck Rental.” The Lovecraft people had arrived.
The entire shoot at Jamaica State Park was slated to take five and a half hours, from 7:00 to 12:30. The crew consisted of twelve people: Sean Branney, the director, Andrew Leman, the art director (who doubled as the Mi-Go wrangler), and David Robertson, the director of photography, as well as production assistants, a boom operator, the wardrobe and makeup people, etc. Approaching the truck, I introduced myself to Amanda Deibert, the production assistant, who handed me a copy of the day’s call sheet. Looking it over, I realized with a shock of disappointment that my name was not listed under Staff & Crew. “Oh, so they cut me,” I thought. Then I found my name under another heading: Talent. Yeah, I thought, that’s more like it. All I need now is a director’s chair with my name on it and a customized Airstream trailer. Maybe some paparazzi to take unflattering pictures of me on the beach. The only other name in the Talent box was Matt Foyer, the actor who plays Albert Wilmarth. He was shooting two scenes later that day but wasn’t in the first.
I piled into a large white passenger van with the rest of the crew and, with the lumbering rental truck following behind, we drove deeper into the park to a spot that Mat had located where there was a large wooden viewing deck overlooking a bolder-strewn bend in the West River. Within minutes of our arriving the deck was covered with a pop-up tent and the crew was unloading equipment at a feverish pace. Though this was the first day of the shoot, the crew, many of whom had worked together on The Call of Cthulhu, worked together with admirable speed and cooperation. Glenn Alfonso, the movie’s makeup artist, quickly staked out a corner of the deck, and he called me over and began to ply his trade. As he dusted my face and forehead, I asked him who was the most famous person he’d ever made up and without a pause he answered, “Cher.” That’s when I knew I was in good hands. As he worked, I struck up a conversation with Matt Foyer, the lead actor, who is a slight guy with glasses and a kind, intelligent face. When I told him I’d never acted before he said, “Remember, less is more. The camera can pick up the slightest reaction, so go for the subtle rather than the big, over-the-top response.” But how, I wondered, does one play subtle when coming upon Mi-Go parts on a flooded riverbank?
Makeup was followed by wardrobe, which consisted of your basic 1930s farmer ensemble: overalls, boots, wide-brim hat. During this time, Sean, Andrew and David were setting up the camera, a big Hi Def Sony F900, for the first shots, which would capture me approaching from quite a distance down the river. I would move downstream, pause on top of a large boulder, spot the obstruction in the river, and climb down to investigate. Simple, except that that it required three or four different camera set-ups, and was further complicated by the fact that they wanted wispy, early morning fog in the background, which meant that the fog machine had to be coordinated with the rain.
Oh, did I mention it was supposed to be raining?
“Rain” in this case being movie talk for “river water sprayed in a heavy drizzle from a long silver pole with a shower head at the end.” This was not a problem for the initial long shots, since the water was sprayed in front of the camera to give the illusion of rain in the distance, but the rain did come as something of a shock when it came time for me to climb down from the boulder and begin to poke at the Mi-Go parts, since at that point the cold Vermont river water was sprayed directly onto my head – for the next two hours.
One of the challenges was that they could never seem to get enough fog out of the fog machine, and what did come out inevitably drifted off in the wrong direction, covering the river downstream in a rapidly dissipating strands of white, wispy smoke. Sean and David also wanted shots from several different angles, one from over my head, another from below, each of which required some time to set up and fine tune, during which time I would stand on the shore, dripping wet in overalls and heavy jacket. But even so I didn’t have it as bad as Andrew Leman, the art director, who, clad in a wetsuit, had been in the river all morning, arranging the sheep and the Mi-Go pieces and spraying the rain. When he finally did come out hours later he could barely make his hands work to shed the wetsuit.
My final action that morning was quite simple: come upon the blockage, prod it tentatively with my walking stick, lean in, and then rear back when I encounter something unexpected (which would be added later with the magic of special effects). Matt’s less-is-more advice ran on a constant loop through my head as I approached the mass in the water, and that first time I must have pushed it a little too far to the ‘less’ side of the spectrum, because, after the take, Sean asked to do it again, this time bigger. Obviously my ‘inward shudder of profound revulsion’ had not fully registered on camera. So everyone took a moment to get back into position, the fog machine sputtered to life, the water pump was turned on and the rain resumed, and then Sean called action. Again I approached the mass, again I prodded it and leaned in, only this time I started back with a visible jerk. Sean called cut and said, “Bigger still.” So we did it all again, and again he wanted bigger. By this point I had a deep respect for actors who have an entire crew of people counting on them and are trying to get it right but can’t seem to nail something essential. To add insult to injury, all of my prodding was wreaking havoc on Andrew’s lovingly crafted Mi-Go parts, and I’d already broken one of the pincered claws. (He said it was to be expected but I felt as though I’d beaten his child.) So as I trudged through the water back to my original mark, I thought, “Damn less-is-more. I’m going for more-is-more.” This time when I prodded the mass I lurched back with all my force, only my foot caught on a rock and I fell backwards, completely submerging myself in the cold West River. When I came up, sputtering, Sean said, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” So we did it again just like that a few more times and then Sean called a wrap.
I got out of my wet clothes (or most of them: I’d forgotten dry underwear), Andrew got out of his wetsuit (with some assistance), the Fungi truck was loaded, and we all headed to lunch at a local pizza place. I joked with Sean that I could be available for the commentary track, where I tie the action in every scene back to the farmer. After lunch, I headed home while the crew went on to the second of their three locations that day. Honestly, I don’t know how they did it.
The crew spent five more days shooting in the area, including several especially picturesque farmhouses in Vermont as well as the train station at Bellows Falls, Vermont and in a lecture hall at Mount Holyoke College. After that, they headed back to California to shoot the rest of the film on a soundstage. This was followed by miniatures, models, and effects shots, then of course editing, scoring, voiceover work, etc. The movie was finally completed on March 1, 2011, eighteen months after our shoot at Jamaica State Park and about four years after Sean and Andrew first began work on the project.
For my part, about a month after the shoot in Vermont an envelope with the return address of “Fungi LLC” in Pasadena, California arrived in my mailbox. Inside was a check for $150, less $13.13 in withholding. Then, just this month, another envelope arrived, this one with two copies of the DVD. Cthulhu lives, indeed.