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Like the present writer, some readers
may be in the habit of scanning TV Guide each week so as not to miss a
single showing of favorite monster and sci-fi flicks, especially Lovecraftian
ones. Despite their flaws, it's always fun to watch the film adaptations of
"The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shuttered Room". You've really
got to be on your guard to catch others, whose titles have been changed, like Die
Monster Die!, the movie version of "The Colour out of Space", or
the even more rarely shown The Haunted Palace (= The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward). Some even whisper that Boris Karloff's The Crimson Cult
is based on "The Dreams in the Witch House". But the most surprising
Lovecraftian film adaptation of all may be (just may be, now) King
Kong (1932), which bears striking resemblance at several points to "The
Call of Cthulhu", published just four years earlier. May Kong's creators
Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper have read Lovecraft's tale of a giant monster
worshipped on an uncharted island, and had their own imaginations fired?
Norwegian Captains and Uncharted
Islands
Both our monster-gods live on lost
islands in the South Pacific. In both cases, the location was learned by a
Norwegian sailor from a boat load of islanders. In King Kong, the
director Denham tells his ship's captain, "You won't find that island on
any chart, big or little, Skipper. All we've got to go by, I've shown you here.
This picture and the position, both made up by a friend of mine, the skipper of
a Norwegian barque." In Lovecraft's story, a newspaper clipping recounts
that "Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence . . . had been
second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland. . . ." Of
this sailing party, it is related that "They raised and landed on a small
island, though none is known to exist in that part of the ocean. . . ."
In Kong the Norwegian found
Skull Island, the home of King Kong, with the aid of instructions taken down
from the last dying member of a canoe full of natives from that island, washed
too far out to sea. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Johansen's party finds
out about R'lyeh indirectly after dispatching a boat load of natives and other
cult-worshippers of Cthulhu, who had tried to stop the Emma from
continuing in its current direction. After killing the cultists, the Emma's
crew figured that something interesting must lie beyond, and decided to find out
what. In both cases the natives were degenerates. The Skull Islanders had
"slipped back Into savagery", whereas the "swarthy
cult-fiends" encountered by Johansen and company are described as "a
queer and evil-looking crew of Kanaskas and half-castes."
King Kong, of course, shows no
sea-battle between Denham's party and the islanders, though there is a brief
scuffle on the beach. Instead, the encounter with the boat of islanders
described by Denham (see above) does bear close resemblance to a later scene in
"The Call of Cthulhu", the rescue of Johansen himself. The passage
from "Call" reads, "On April 12th, the derelict [boat] was
sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one
survivor in a half-delirious condition, and one man who had evidently been dead
for more than a week." The parallel description in Kong goes: "A canoe
with natives from this island was blown out to sea. When [a] Norwegian barque
picked them up only one was alive."
Cyclopean Masonry
When we compare Skull Island and R'lyeh, we find some interesting similarities. As for the location of each, we
have already noted that both are somewhere in the South Pacific. More
specifically, R'lyeh is to be found at or near "S. Latitude 49°, 51', W.
Longitude 128°, 34'." Skull Island is simply "Way west of
Sumatra." As to topography, both islands are dominated by a single mountain
or hill. "Above the dense upland growth, and seemingly from the center of
it, rose a mountain whose crudely drawn outline suggested a skull" (King
Kong). "I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous
monolith-crowned citadel whereon great CthuIhu was buried, actually emerged from
the waters" ("The Call of CthuIhu").
The similarity does not end here. For
in King Kong's description of Skull Island, "The last detail was the
most curious, and startling. It was a wall, higher than a dozen tall men, and
impregnable. And the wall, at the base of the peninsula, stretched from the sea
on one side to the sea on the other, serving as a mighty barrier against who or
what might attempt to come down the precipice from the back country." With
this we may compare the oddly-angled, non-Euclidean, and massive stone ruins on
R'lyeh. The narrator expresses a similar "awe at the unbelievable size of
the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith.
. . ." The cyclopean edifices of R'lyeh are literally pre-human, but even
the wall on Skull Island is a relic of a forgotten civilization. It was
"built so long ago that the descendants of the builders have . . .
completely forgotten the remarkable civilization which erected the [wall]."
Twin Blasphemies
When we turn to the monsters
themselves, we find that both CthuIhu and Kong are gigantic behemoths, and both
survivals from aeons past. Both are worshipped, Kong by the Skull Islanders, and
Cthulhu by a worldwide secret cult. And both are the object not only of worship
but also of legend. Of Cthulhu, the mestizo sailor Castro "remembered bits
of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists. . . ." Kong,
on the other hand, is "a Malay superstition. . . . A God, or devil, or
something. . . ."
When the interlopers are unlucky enough
to encounter the resident titan, the spectacle is terrifying. "The
beast-god they sought was lumbering towards them from the center of the asphalt
field" (King Kong). Equally shuddersome is the sight of "great
Cthulhu [as he] slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast
strokes raising waves of cosmic potency." Members of both crews rapidly
perish under the monsters' wrath. "Three men were swept up by the flabby
claws before anybody turned." "Kong curved both forearms under his end
of the log and straining upward got it off the ground and jerked it violently
from side to side. Two of the men lost their holds. One . . . went whirling down
into the decaying silt at the bottom."
After reading the Johansen narrative,
Lovecraft's narrator shivers at the prospect of Cthulhu breaking loose to menace
the world at large, a horror temporarily postponed by the second sinking of
R'lyeh. Of course, this contemplated rampage is exactly what happens in King
Kong, where the monster is eventually let loose to wreak havoc in New York.
There is destruction aplenty, but it all comes back upon Kong's own head.
When this writer first noticed the
parallel between Kong and "Cthulhu", his first thought was that
Lovecraft might have been inspired by the film. But a quick check of the dates
ruled this out. Any influence must have been in the other direction. But if
"The Call of Cthulhu" could not have been inspired by King Kong,
we may still suspect the influence of Kong on a sequel to Lovecraft's
tale. For the Kong-Cthulhu comparison is drawn full circle in Robert Bloch's Strange
Eons. There we find the recapitulation of the "Bride of Kong"
scene where Fay Wray, strapped between two mammoth pillars, is
"introduced" to the King. In Strange Eons, the heroine is
escorted amid pagan ceremony to an altar where she will await Cthulhu. At the
climactic moment, an atomic bomb obliterates the island, and Cthulhu with it. So
it seems that, like Kong, Cthulhu was eventually vanquished by human technology.
But just as certainly as the "Son of Kong" would pinch hit for his
father in a sequel, so in Bloch's story, the impregnated "Bride of
Cthulhu" lives to beget a child who years later becomes the vehicle for the
rebirth of Cthulhu who goes forth, at last, to rule.
Was King Kong inspired by
"The Call of Cthulhu"? There is no way to know, and the similarities
we have indicated may be nothing more than remarkable coincidences. It is always
fun to speculate, as any regular readers of Crypt of Cthulhu know well
enough. Still, it is tempting to think that two of the great American
monster-classics might be "killin' cousins".
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