Carnacki on Film

John Coulthart's blog { feuilleton } has a  post about the recent appearance on youtube of an early television adaptation of one of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, "The Whistling Room." A version of this adaptation appeared on youtube in the 2010s, and the unusually crisp version up on youtube now is diminished only by the lack of quality of the adaptation.  Coulthart notes:

Whatever power the original story may possess is thoroughly absent from the TV adaptation, a mere sketch of a narrative that wasn’t very substantial to begin with. Alan Napier—Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series—is hopelessly miscast as Carnacki, being more of a bungling buffoon than any kind of serious investigator.  

Coutlhart dates the production to 1952, which is doubtful. Oddly, IMDB gives two separate listings for this show, the first, gives it as Season 1 episode 32 of Chevron Theatre, broadcast 22 August 1952.  The second, gives it as Season 1 episode 42 of the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, broadcast on 18 July 1954.  The new youtube version, linked at Coulthart's blog but also here, sources it from the 1954 Pepsi-Cola Playhouse. 

I suspect the 1954 date is the correct one, for on 2 April 1953, Hodgson's sister Lissie wrote to August Derleth, pleased that she was imminently to receive $125:  "It is most exciting to know you may be able to sell other Carnacki stories to be 'televised'. I am afraid I am very foolish, but I don't understand what a 'television film' is! They surely cannot act 'The Whistling Room'!" Lissie was paid in May 1953, but no other Carnacki stories were sold to be filmed at that time. 

Coulthart suggests that the source of interest in "The Whistling Room" was probably the printing of the story in Dennis Wheatley's A Century of Horror Stories (1935),  but the above correspondence shows that the proposal came to Derleth and it was likely a result of the Mycroft & Moran edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published on the 31st of December 1947. Derleth had spent much of the month of August 1952 in California working on teleplays of his own stories, so he certainly had Hollywood connections by that time. 

I previously wrote about the surviving Hodson adaptations at Wormwoodiana in 2009. I am pleased to add this newly discovered one to the short list.