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.
Hi Douglas. I was a little confounded by the screening dates assigned to The Whistling Room, IMDB being various degrees of unreliable, incorrect and generally annoying. I went with the 1952 date, however, since I couldn't imagine an earlier screening was (in this case) a complete invention.
ReplyDeleteA lot of IMDB's non-cinematic information seems to have been sourced from other sites. Looking around today for more information about Chevron Theatre turned up a detailed listing ( https://ctva.biz/US/Anthology/ChevronTheatre.htm ) of all the broadcasts in the Chevron series for 1952, including The Whistling Room which is given a screening date of 22nd August of that year. I think you're right about Derleth being the source of the story, however; the series adapted three of Derleth's stories, one of which was also scripted by Howard J. Green.
Thanks for writing. Indeed the IMDB is a morass, especially when it comes to early television. I note you have an additional Carnacki post up now: https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2025/11/26/carnackis-first-manifestation/
DeleteI see that Matango was one of the films you noted in the earlier post. In the US this was renamed Attack of the Mushroom People (which is fair, really) and was frequently shown on TV during my youth, a golden period for horror films on television. If you are 10 years old and you stay up past your bedtime until, say, 11 pm when all the sensible people in your house have gone to bed, and you fiddle with the TV antennae enough to get a decent reception on your independent local TV station, this film is bound to freak you out. It also has some superficial similarities to the Outer Limits episode "A Feasibility Study", which aired a year after Matango's release.
ReplyDeleteI'll have a look for the Outer Limits episode. Thanks for mentioning it!
DeleteI just watched the Outer Limits episode. A Feasibility Study (Season 1 episode 29, aired 13 April 1964). I don't remember Matango especially well, but the silver node people of the Outer Limits show have a superficial resemblance to the fungus people in Hodgson's story "The Voice in the Night"--and also to the mushroom people in Matango, visually at least. I can't say that the Outer Limits episode is worth watching!
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