Festival premieres ‘darkest’ movie ever

First it was the arrival of sound in the 1920s, then it was colour and most recently it’s been the boom in 3D.

Now Edinburgh is set to unveil cinema’s latest “technological breakthrough” – a cinematic experience that does away with the pictures altogether.

The Dunwich Horror, which receives its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival this month, is billed as “the world’s first audio horror movie”.

The audience will sit in a pitch-black movie theatre while HP Lovecraft’s classic horror story is brought to life in all its chilling glory using the latest Dolby Digital surround sound technology.

“I think it’s going to be absolutely amazing,” said actor Greg Hemphill, who will narrate the eerie monster story.

“If you have to supply the visuals yourself with your own mind’s eye then the more imagination you have the more frightened you’re going to be.”

Hemphill, the star of hit BBC comedies Chewing The Fat and Still Game, promises this is going to be much more than just a radio show played in a cinema.

“These guys are state of the art and they have got a lot of imagination,” he said. The Dunwich Horror is set in New England, but was made at Savalas’s sound studios in Film City in Glasgow.

“I am a big fan of the communal experience,” said the 40-year-old.

“A big, hot room full of people laughing is just fantastic, a great experience. The same with a room full of people screaming. Being in the cinema with that kind of response is always electric.”

The audience can expect to hear a huge monster ploughing its way across the Massachusetts countryside, munching cattle and people as it goes. It helps that the monster is invisible in the book, so the characters and cinema audience can share the experience of hearing but not seeing the creature.

“I think it’s going to be a pretty intense experience,” said Hemphill.

The Dunwich Horror – a classic mix of gothic, sci-fi and supernatural – was first published in 1929. It tells the story of a strange, precocious boy, his grandfather, who teaches him sorcery, and the “thing” that shares their farmhouse home.

Previous adaptations have included one using clay-figure animation and a low-budget 1970 film starring former teen star Sandra Dee. But many felt they did not do the original story justice.

Colin Edwards, who came up with the concept, said: “It’s always been one of my favourite Lovecraft stories. There’s a lot of stuff in The Dunwich Horror that you don’t really see. It’s very much left to the imagination.”

Edwards, a 40-year-old Glasgow-based producer and writer, developed the idea of a sound-only adaptation with Savalas.The studio has done sound for numerous films and Radio Scotland, and Edwards worked with it on the controversial Franz Kafka Big Band comedy show.

“We always used a lot of sound effects for that, but the scale of what we have done with this has blown me away. We thought we could do it as an audio cinematic event. The more we thought about it the more excited we became, because we realised by using surround sound we can put people straight – bang – into the actual experience.

“There’s no imagery at all. It’s totally in the dark. It’s just totally sound.”

Edwards heard that Hemphill was a horror aficionado and the actor jumped at the chance to get involved.

“I’m a massive horror fan,” Hemphill said. “On a Sunday night I have a couple of buddies come round and we watch a double bill of horror. I’ve been doing it for seven years. We’ve seen horror movies from every corner of the globe.”

Hemphill plays the narrator with a New England accent, which was not too much of a stretch for him as, although he was born in Scotland, he spent his early years in Montreal. It seems the narrator gets caught up directly in the story, but that’s all Hemphill is giving away.

The Dunwich Horror world premiere, Filmhouse, Edinburgh, June 23