Yes, it’s not a great movie, and it has a terrible title. But Die, Monster, Die! is a fascinating third axis in cinema’s formulation of the modern science fiction scientist.
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, science fiction movies reinvented the lone genius, deepening his motivations while adding layers of sociological commentary to his work. No longer was he the mere cackling madman of Frankenstein but a man simultaneously haunted by demons and driven by a higher purpose.
I’ve written before about two of the most important scientists in this transition: the flawed, arrogant questing of Morbius in Forbidden Planet (1956), who thought himself intelligent and rational enough to harness an immense alien technology that had destroyed its own creators, and Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973), who was willing to steer his community into savagery to try to uphold a scientific advance that had failed.
Poised exactly mid-way chronologically between the two is Nahum Witley, the protagonist of Die, Monster, Die! (1965), and he’s actually the most complex and interesting of the trio.
And it is a trio. Of course, I agree that on the surface The Wicker Man is predominantly an originator of what we now call ‘folk horror,’ but as I’ve shown in my previous post, it’s not the only genre it inhabits. The Wicker Man is actually about the contraction of a scientist into a trap of his own making. Better than the rather awkward trilogy with Witchfinder’s General and The Blood On Satan’s Claw — two movies with which it shares only superficial similarities — The Wicker Man fits neatly into the trilogy with Forbidden Planet and Die, Monster, Die! as exploring the scientific response to godlike power and the way that power is twisted by the baser instincts of flawed men.
This post is going to explore Die, Monster, Die! in detail to reveal those links and unravel its strange and complex message. Naturally, spoilers will follow, so if you haven’t seen the movie already, do it right now. It’s worth the breezy 80 minutes you’ll spend.
Die, Monster, Die! (there are actually three monsters that need to die in the movie, but the title probably refers to Nahum Witley) is a very loose adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s story ‘The Color Out Of Space,’ rewritten by Jerry Sohl and directed rather well by Daniel Haller. The cinematography is especially notable. Every shot is beautifully framed in the widescreen, with some sophisticated lighting effects, matting, and even puppetry. The main issue is the camera lens, which causes weird spatial shifting whenever it pans sideways. Even if it’s not a notable movie as art, it’s a striking and well made one, and happily there is no narrator to distance the viewer.
Look closely, and the production worked hard to deal with its technical limitations. In one scene, our hero and heroine (Nick Adams and Suzan Farmer) descend a staircase at night. She’s holding a candle which is supposed to be the only illumination. The shadows are in the wrong places, and at one point Farmer has to hurry to her mark to keep up with where the light should be.
Wardrobe seems to have had problems that were only noticed, if at all, after filming. When we first meet Farmer, she’s wearing a somewhat dated pink crochet top. She’s supposed to look young and virginal, but the top clearly reveals a painfully pointy bullet bra underneath. You can even see the slider rings on her straps.
But there is also some excellent matte paintwork, every bit the equal to the similar work on Forbidden Planet. Here Adams is walking past a strange pit in the heath. The skeletal trees are particularly fine. Note, however, the evidence of an excavation and something having been hauled out of the pit on the right of the shot. It’s surely on the wrong side as it’s leading away from Adams’s destination rather than towards it.
A moment later there’s this equally striking matte of Adams walking away from the pit into a wood of creepy dead trees.
The puppetry is every bit as surprising. Briefly, in the scene in the infernal potting shed, we see in visceral, Thing-like close-up a collection of mutated animals (as shown in detail in the header to this post). The one center left would appear to be a snake, and the one on the far right a spider, but really your guess is as good as mine.
The creatures are crudely but effectively matted into the live action. Here, our first glimpse of the “menagerie of horrors” (to use Farmer’s phrase) is a genuinely scary monster to the far right of the row of puppets.
We see the rest of the collection soon after. Note that the limitations of the matte technique mean that the cage behind the two actors is now empty.
The good work makes up for the poor. Chief among the poor is the final, climactic monster, which happens just to be an actor wearing a green rubber mask and dishwashing gloves.
The movie’s cast is adequate, with the possible exception of Adams, a sort of pouting breeze block whom you would never believe is a University graduate and scientist himself.
The meat of the production, of course, is the script, and though it’s a little muddled and fragmentary — and there are maddening gaps in our understanding of it — it does actually hang together logically. Just like Forbidden Planet and The Wicker Man, we’re introduced into the action by an outsider who intrudes into a community in the throes of dissolution. In all three cases there’s a love interest. Notably, though, in both Forbidden Planet and Die, Monster, Die! the intruder forms a symbolic link with the scientist’s daughter and hence creates an opposition that hastens the destruction of the community.
Let’s now go through the plot of Die, Monster, Die! in chronological order, rather than the order in which we are told the story in the film itself.
Chronologically, our tale opens “over 150 years ago,” meaning around about 1810, when a man called Elias Witley builds an impressive manor house some distance from the nearest village in England, Arkham.
We can gauge the distance loosely between the house and the village by the journey our outsider, Stephen Reinhart (Adams), takes to get there in the opening of the movie. “Morning,” a taxi driver hails him as he arrives off the train in Arkham. He spends some time in the village before trekking out to the house on foot. Even if it’s lunchtime when he leaves, as signaled by the colorful drunks in the local boozer, it takes him a long time. When he arrives at the house a clock is chiming 4:15pm.
Here’s Reinhart arriving at the house, actually Oakley Court in Windsor. It’s certainly an impressive place even when wreathed in an archetypal horror movie mist, fecund, decaying, and laid out with the fashionable Victorian exotic plants and trees.
After his arrival, we’re treated to a brief gallery of ancestors, including this portrait of Elias Witley. I’m reminded strongly of the similar ancestor painting we’re invited to admire in The Wicker Man. It’s a rough kind of painting, a budget movie painting, and quite anachronistic. Hardly a Victorian portrait, and more like Van Gogh came over to paint it.
But let’s not quibble. The point is that Elias Witley was a good man, well-liked by his community. We are told there were many parties in the house during his time.
The same certainly cannot be said of Elias’s son Corbin, whose portrait we are also invited to gaze upon. In fact, we see it several times in the movie, including at the very end, as if Corbin is somehow important to the plot rather than an immense red herring.
At one point, we view his imposing gravestone in the family plot, and we learn the precise dates that delineate his life: 1889–1942. He died, therefore, about 23 years before the movie opens, at the age of 52 or 53, and our heroine, his granddaughter Susan (Farmer), who is surely only in her mid-twenties at most with a bra like that, can hardly be expected to remember him. And yet his memory makes her shudder. (Note also this problem with continuity: Elias built the house in about 1810, but his son was born 79 years later. Either the “150 years ago” is wrong, or we’ve somehow skipped a generation or two.)
For the parties most certainly did not continue under Corbin’s watch. He became a scholar of the occult, and unknown depravities and evils were conducted by him. It is worth reminding ourselves, at this point, that there is absolutely no occult in the movie. The entire overlay of Corbin’s black magic, or demonic conjuring, or whatever it is he is supposed to have done, is irrelevant to the plot.
Nevertheless, one of Corbin’s chief legacies is the creepy, cobweb-smothered cellar beneath the house, in which his black arts were presumably practiced based on the paintings we see on the walls.
Another of his legacies is a library. Reinhart has a browse through the volumes during his visit, and we are witness to one of the books. It’s called Cult Of The Outer Ones. Our attention is directed to the first page of the book, where we read: “Cursed is the ground where the Dark Forces live, new and strangely bodied…He who tampers there will be destroyed…”
A warning, then, not to meddle in things of which you have little understanding. If only the Krell had left behind such a book.
Under the dates on Corbin’s grave is this inscription: “The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh away.” It’s a weird, multi-layered memorial. Whatever its point — and let’s assume Corbin himself did not dictate it — there’s a curious double meaning to the word “Lord” since very likely Corbin or his successor is not here referring to god but to the demon with whom Corbin consorted.
The immediate upshot of Corbin’s obsession is the darkening of atmosphere in the Witley manor. Just like Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, the current head of the household is a man who grew up under the damaging influence of this deviant, obsessive father. Lord Summerisle, too, had a grandfather with good intentions whose lineage veered into the dark in his father’s time. Like The Wicker Man (and by extension Forbidden Planet, at least in principle), Die, Monster, Die! is a tale set against the gravest shadow of the sins of the fathers.
What was the final result of Corbin’s conjugations? “He went insane,” Susan claims of her grandfather. But Corbin’s son Nahum (Boris Karloff) is still haunted by him. We never quite learn what Corbin did to his own family and to the villagers of Arkham, but it is clear that his main legacy is an overwhelming sense of guilt in Nahum that has shadowed his days and clouded everything he himself has tried to do. At the end, we learn that Nahum’s own actions have been a desperate attempt to bring good to the world to try to atone for the evil that Corbin had done.
The final point is this: Corbin was an occultist, some sort of Aleister Crowley toff dabbling in the black arts in his secret basement, protected by his name and wealth. A typical occult movie villain, in other words. But all this occultism is merely a backdrop to the plot of the movie, a reason for Nahum to act the way he did, just as the back stories of Forbidden Planet and The Wicker Man are reasons for their protagonists to act the way they did. Like the original Lord Summerisle’s paganism, Corbin Witley’s occultism has no basis in truth.
There is only one scene in the entire movie in which we see the current generations of the Witley family all together, and it is a little bit confusing to introduce to you here since it is close to the end when one of those family members has already mutated into a monster. In this shot, then, we see (from left to right) Nahum’s wife and Susan’s mother Letitia Witley (Freda Jackson) in her monster form, Reinhart who is actually here to request her daughter’s hand in marriage and hence to join this family, Nahum Witley in his wheelchair, and Susan.
Nahum is a fascinating character. He is performed, like Morbius (Walter Pigeon) and the present Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), by a fine character actor who, like the others, has links to gothic and horror cinema but here plays against type. Boris Karloff was 78 years old at the time and close to the end of his life. He is surely too old to play Susan’s father since he must have been in his mid 50s when she was born. Jackson is more believable, having been 58 in 1965 which means she carried the child in her mid 30s. I guess she was attracted to Nahum’s wealth and charisma despite the age difference, and certainly despite his horrendous father. (For what it’s worth, Farmer was 23.)
The wheelchair does not just give the old actor a chance not to do too much walking around, though there’s a little of that at the end. It implies a degeneration, the reason for which remains unexplained. The manor is equipped with ramps and elevators. These things have likely been there a long time. They seem to imply that his infirmity is merely the result of old age rather than of the plot. It’s simply unthinkable that the ramps and elevators have been installed recently enough to make the wheelchair a manifestation of Nahum’s own descent into a monster.
The triggering act, the literal falling from heaven of a new paradigm as in the lamp that kicks off Truman’s awakening in The Truman Show, is what we eventually learn was a meteorite that fell one Sunday morning onto the heath near the manor.
And here’s where Corbin’s influence comes into play. Nahum is not a stupid man, but he is a man burdened by bad belief. He witnessed the meteorite’s fall. He tells Reinhart at the end of the movie that he saw it “screaming down out of the heavens to crash and bury itself in the heath.” But he didn’t know what it was. He decided that it was a manifestation of his father’s evil. “That stone was sent from the other side,” he explains, “by the hand of Corbin reaching out to us from beyond the grave.”
We learn, hazily, one thing from the speech: Corbin was already dead when the meteorite crashed. Indeed, Corbin died long before, since it appears that the meteorite has not been there very long. A few years at most.
Susan certainly remembers the event. There was a fire on the heath, she tells Reinhart early in the movie, and the villagers who came to investigate vanished inexplicably. After that, the village has shunned the place and her father forbade her to go on the heath. The pit is, of course, the one that Reinhart passed on his trek from the village to the manor, meaning it’s on the village side of the manor.
Nahum himself was fascinated by the stone. He noticed that “the next morning the heath was covered with a lush vegetation that should never have grown there.” So he dug up the stone — we later learn it’s a large, green, hot, glowing, humming, smoking, glassy thing — and hauled it home, and installed it in his father’s infernal cellar. “I thought it was a gift from heaven,” he tells Reinhart at the end of the movie. “I thought I’d found a way to turn this wasteland into a place of beauty. Great vineyards, gardens, that was my dream.” An exact mirror, in other words, of what the original Lord Summerisle thought his special chemicals could do to the orchards of his own island.
Here, from early in the movie, is our first view of the resting place of the meteorite, though at this point we don’t know what it is and we don’t get to see it until right at the end. We are led to believe, falsely, that it is some kind of occult presence down in the cellar. There’s some sleight of hand involved here. The pit is covered by a heavy grating with a winch that passes through a bizarre metal plate in the shape of a spike-toothed skull. The point again is to make us think that this is an occult object — and hence, again falsely, that this is an occult movie — whereas in fact it is nothing of the kind.
But questions, questions. We can understand that Nahum, literally hagridden by his father’s occultism, should place this manifestation of the dead man in the heart of his ritual space. But what in the Lord’s name did Corbin originally use this pit for?
“Chains for devils,” Nahum scoffs in this scene, clanking plastic chains that if they were really made of iron would be much too heavy for Karloff to lift. He’s implying that it is not mere devils we’re faced with, and that all this gothic torture chamber vibe is a distraction. He’s then surprised by a very un-British tarantula.
The immediate upshot of Nahum hauling the stone home is that the villagers, who already feared the Witley place, knew that Nahum had taken it into his monstrous house. Indeed, it’s likely some of them were persuaded to help with the work. So now Witley Manor is absolutely shunned to the point that when Reinhart arrives in Arkham nobody will take him there, or even rent him a bicycle so he can ride there by himself. What we deduce from this is that the locals are something of a superstitious lot, as hagridden as Nahum himself.
And such a lovely place, too. A couple of painted signs are all the production needed to turn a sleepy village railway station in England (actually Baynards, Surrey) into Arkham, which of course was originally the name of Lovecraft’s city in Massachusetts, USA. It is here that our visitor Reinhart, himself symbolically an American, decants at the opening of the movie.
And the English “Arkham” (actually the much-filmed Shere, also in Surrey) is simply beautiful, the typical rural jumble of houses of various antiquities, including Georgian and Tudor. If it reminds you of the similarly beautiful houses of Summerisle, that may not be a coincidence. Note that Reinhart calls the place a “town” early on, but later refers to it as what it more obviously is, a remote village.
But a village of credulous yokels like Summerisle? It’s actually hard to tell. The movie teases us on this score. Here’s Reinhart, rebuffed by a taxi driver who won’t take him to the Witley place (heavy shades of Frankenstein or Dracula!), heading toward a pub where he hopes to get help in his journey. The pub is called The Sun, a pagan name added by the production like The Wicker Man’s Green Man. In real life, it’s The White Horse, Shere. I think you’re supposed to make a superstitious, perhaps even pagan reference, though we later do see the church in the middle of this village.
What we certainly seem to see are three gurning locals out there having their lunchtime beer, but we’re not allowed to know whether they’re real yokels or just acting the fool. They’ve been tipped off by a local woman that Reinhart is coming, and hence they may well be pretending to be more stupid than they are — just as we later see on the quayside in The Wicker Man. Certainly one of them hams up his rural simpleton act for all it’s worth.
Reinhart’s final stop in this secretive, Summerisle-type village is to try to rent a bicycle or motorbike from this rather unconvincing shop. All the production bothered with were a few bikes and Raleigh signs out front, and one bike hoist onto a hook on the front of the building.
Again, we do not learn if the shopkeeper has been primed to act in a certain way. What we do know is that nobody will go near Witley Manor and they’re all deeply hostile to the family and anybody who associates with it. But could they possibly believe, like Nahum, that the stone that fell is an occult force, perhaps even a manifestation of Corbin? Is this place, like Summerisle, so remote and retarded, regardless of its bicycles and cars?
There’s one person in the village who might have kept his wits about him, but unfortunately he hasn’t. This is the local physician, Dr. Henderson (a wonderful but all-too-brief Patrick Magee), who attempted to treat Corbin during his decline into demonic madness and, as a result, became an alcoholic recluse. So he’s no help at all. We never learn what Henderson witnessed in Corbin’s manor, and the depravities he had to treat or hush up, but it doesn’t actually matter because the entire Henderson scene is an irrelevance. The drunken doctor has no insight on the stone.
Our only takeaway is that the voice of reason in this village is the most broken of all, leaving it without any hope of scientific truth. We don’t need to venture into the church to know this, and that’s likely why the movie doesn’t bother taking us there.
Returning to the plot, something remarkable seems to have happened to Nahum Witley as a result of his encounter with the stone. We’ve already learned that he hauled it home because of the way it had produced such strange sudden plant growth on the heath. Now he begins what we can only assume are scientific experiments on the thing. He chips off little glassy lumps and buries them in plant pots in the manor’s greenhouse or conservatory, causing both incredible growth there and Food Of The Gods style giant produce. In this curiously understated matte shot we see Reinhart and Susan investigating the huge flowers and tomatoes that are growing there.
Nahum also begins animal experiments in the potting shed, caging various unknown local critters and exposing them to more lumps of the glassy stuff. Could we deduce, in fact, that the tarantula we saw in the cellar is actually an ordinary British spider that has mutated all by itself? Again: a gothic misdirection disguising what is actually a scientific process.
What does Nahum know of what’s happening here? It’s likely very little. His scientific researches are of a childish, occult-level kind. He doesn’t seem to have undertaken serious studies, and we never see anything that looks like a notebook. All he knows are these things: there are strange powers in the world. The stone is a strange power. It changes things that are exposed to it for a long period. And that, seemingly, is all, though he does have the good sense to store it under that heavy lead-like lid even if it has holes in it.
A poor excuse for a scientist, except Nahum doesn’t realize how badly his researches are compromised by his demonic faith. There are some very strange conversations toward the end of the movie where Nahum struggles to express the twin currents that are buffeting his life as a result of this gift from the skies. For one thing, he tries to keep his researches secret from his daughter, and Susan is herself a scientist, somehow, who has gone off to study at an American university, perhaps even one in Massachusetts.
“Nothing is going to deter me from my purpose,” Nahum tells Susan. “That’s what Corbin said,” she retorts. “He’s been dead for a long time,” Nahum says. He leers to himself: “If there was evil, it’s buried with him. All that remains of Corbin is a few harmless objects in the cellar.” He repeats this litany to Reinhart later. “It’s only a stone. It’s harmless!” he cries, but Reinhart is unconvinced.
Susan accuses her father of having become like Corbin. He can’t see it, just as Lord Summerisle, when confronted, seemingly can’t see his own derangement. “I’ve uttered no incantations,” Nahum protests. “Neither have I cried out to any other of the so-called creatures of evil. I don’t believe in it, any of it.” This, if true (and it certainly may not be), also places him on a parallel with Lord Summerisle, who likely does not believe in the pagan rituals he uses to control the local villagers. At least, The Wicker Man leaves this question ambiguous just as Die, Monster, Die! does.
But just as happened on Summerisle, and just as happened to Morbius, there’s a change in the air. Nahum’s mission is to atone for Corbin’s depravity by bringing good into the world in the form of the stone which he believes to be part of Corbin’s evil presence (and yes, this is hard to parse), but in the process he has become blind to the true effects of the stone.
That wonderful plant growth on the heath? The plants soon decayed and turned to the powdery rot that Reinhart encounters on his initial journey to the manor, perhaps because the source of their vitality, the stone, has been taken away. At least one of the plants in the conservatory has become carnivorous. We never learn in the movie, but let’s presume that the tomatoes are inedible, just like in Lovecraft’s original story. The horrors in the potting shed are pitiful screeching creatures. And there’s a human consequence, too.
Though Nahum himself seems unaffected, his wife and maid Helga — both of whom were put to work in the conservatory, unknowingly exposing them for long periods to the stone fragments — became ill. Susan seems to have avoided this fate only because she went off to study abroad. Even Nahum’s own butler and retainer, Mervyn, is showing signs of the disease behind his sinister blue tinted glasses.
How quickly is all this happening? The shorter the timescale, the more of an excuse Nahum might have for not recognizing his mistake. Here we can give him at least a partial break, since the experiments seem to have been conducted recently. Susan tells Reinhart that she returned home from college a month ago and has not been in the conservatory since then. So the plants have only grown since the last time she was there, perhaps only a few months previously. (She did come home for vacations, right?)
Helga, whose disease is most advanced, first fell ill “about a month ago” according to Letitia, which would be about the time Susan came home. At first she merely veiled her face and Letitia concluded: “It almost seemed like self-loathing.” That’s the Corbin thing rearing its head once more. Now Letitia herself is bedbound and hiding behind her curtains. “She was frightened of what was happening to her,” Letitia says. And so, in turn, was Letitia, since it was she who invited Reinhart to the manor expressly to try to get him to rescue her daughter.
Yes: the hero of Die, Monster, Die!, just like that of The Wicker Man and arguably Forbidden Planet, was summoned by a distress call.
Swiftly, now, the disease escalates. “About a fortnight ago,” Letitia tells Reinhart, Helga disappeared. Mervyn collapses and dies, leaving just this human-shaped burnt patch on the carpet. Letitia declines rapidly. We see only the hazy, deformed shape of her face and one heavily mutated hand. She’s sensitive to light like an Edgar Allen Poe heroine. Susan tells Reinhart she’s been this way “not long” but has become much worse in the past few days.
In the waning of her facultative abilities, Letitia draws Reinhart’s attention to the single gold earring that Helga left behind her. “It’s gold,” she tells him, “but its importance doesn’t lie in the metal it is made of.” It’s easy to miss the importance of this speech, but it’s central to the theme of the movie.
Helga has in fact turned into a murderous mutant. Now Letitia does the same. Here she chases after Reinhart and Susan, smashing Here’s Johnny style through this heavy manor door as if it were balsa wood. Once through, she does a bit more ineffectual chasing before she collapses and dies. Her body rots away at once.
Until this point, Nahum’s motivations have been incomprehensible. When Letitia warned him that she saw a repeat of Corbin’s moral degradation from a god-fearing man to one possessed by the devil, Nahum scorned her. “Whatever happened to my father will not happen to me,” he declared. Even when she told him it was already happening he refuted her version of the truth. “The truth is that I see the future,” he declaimed to a swell of majestic music. “And all that I’ve planned for it will fill it with a richness we have never known.”
So he ignored his wife’s entreaties because he had this Morbius/Lord Summerisle belief in his own skewed moral compass and reasoning male superiority. Morbius blocks from his own mind the monstrous things that happened to the Bellaphon expedition and now to the C-57D spacecraft that comes to check on him. Lord Summerisle refuses to change his ways even as his community marches, Capitol riot style, into murder. Nahum was sure what he was doing was right, even though the evidence piled up all around him to the contrary. He had become like Corbin after all. As Susan told him: “It’s only your methods that differ.”
Nahum’s method is science, or a primitive version of it. The very last scene of the movie is a dialog between Susan and Reinhart, the only two survivors.
“I don’t understand, Steve,” she sums up. “Why did all this have to happen?”
“I don’t think it had to happen,” he replies. “In the proper scientific hands your father’s discovery could have been beneficial.”
Just like Morbius. Just like Lord Summerisle. But all three men lacked the ability to look past themselves.
The consequence of Nahum’s blindness has been that he failed to do what was in his daughter’s best interests even when the motivation of three of the four main characters in the movie were entirely aligned. Letitia brought Reinhart to the manor to try to get him to take Susan away. Reinhart wants to take Susan away. Nahum has wanted Reinhart gone from the very start, and not just, I suspect, because he fears that Reinhart will discover his dirty little secret. And now, the moment Letitia becomes a ravenous mutant, Nahum finally wakes up: “Get my daughter out of here!” he begs Reinhart.
Belated, you’d think, but at last some reason. Except we’ve had a faulty view of Nahum from the start, just as we have with Morbius and Lord Summerisle. We see all of them as driven scientific men, leaders, charismatic, sure of themselves — bullish, perhaps, but definitely in the Alpha Male class. And yet we glimpse all kinds of chinks in their armor. Morbius is gruff but conflicted. There’s fear behind Lord Summerisle’s jaunty facade. And Nahum Witley is a real enigma.
In the very first scene in which we meet him, Reinhart has arrived, apparently unannounced, at the manor. What we know of Reinhart is only that he is some kind of swaggering American graduate who has come to see Nahum’s daughter, with whom he has shared a romance while they “were in the same science class,” presumably believing that he has been called there to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. Straightaway Nahum scoffs at the word “science” and barks at him to leave.
Susan, fortuitously for her, draws him into their nightmare. And Nahum’s gruff, archetypal father’s dislike for his daughter’s suitor is tempered by what we take to be genuine concern. He asides to Reinhart that “for reasons that I cannot go into” he should leave at once. This would be something for us to dwell upon, except Suzan Farmer’s disorientating bra drives it from our mind.
Let’s assume that Nahum is not crazy. He wants Susan to leave from the start, even though he’s incapable of making a very good fist of expressing it. There seems no reason for Reinhart to have to stay overnight unless Nahum forbids Susan from leaving, and he seems like a reasonably good man so that can’t be true.
There are other conflicting signals. We meet one of the strangest at the beginning of the movie, when Reinhart reaches the gates to the Witley estate only to find them padlocked and, moreover, booby trapped with a foothold trap. Why the padlock? You’d think it was something to do with all the KEEP OUT signs, except the lock is on the outside of the gates. And the foothold trap? Did the villagers do this, to try to keep the evil in the manor? (Moreover, we learn Mervyn is a driver, so how does he get his car in and out?) Did Nahum do this out of concern for the villagers? I ask because during the movie we see him padlock the conservatory, again from the outside, and this time it seems clear he’s doing it either to keep Reinhart out or to try to protect his daughter from what’s inside.
But later, when Nahum discovers that Reinhart is snooping around, Nahum comes this close to bashing out his brains with a candlestick. The corporate cynic in me feels the murderous impulse has the most mundane possible reason: Nahum wants to keep his lucrative secret all to himself. I can’t figure out why he changes his mind.
Only Susan doesn’t seem to want to leave the manor, and that’s because she doesn’t want to leave her sick mother. Or could it be that Reinhart isn’t much of a catch? He belittles her from the start. He reels off a catalog of typical male reactions to female intuition, telling her it’s just her imagination, or that she’s mad or hysterical. He doesn’t slap her at once, but he does slap her later, after she faints. She ought to leave, I reckon, but not with him.
Toward the end of the movie, Reinhart puts everything together. He realizes that he has seen the green glow before, in a radiation lab. “Those flickering colors,” he tells Susan in the potting shed. “It must be some kind of energy. Uranium! This room is being exposed to some form of radiation.”
Well, putting aside the fact that monster movie mutation by radiation is so fifties, the idea that this is mere “uranium” is ridiculous. Even the most movie-indoctrinated kid in 1965 must have known that uranium didn’t look or act like that. Still, Reinhart has his science to cling to. “Genetic mutations probably caused by radiation,” he says of the mutant animals. “It’s a scientific fact that continued exposure to radioactive energy can change the characteristics of living things.”
Well, there you are. Mystery solved. Regardless, Reinhart remains cavalier about the lethal effects of this radiation to the end of the movie. Even after he knows what harm the meteorite causes, he still sticks his head in the open pit to have a peek. Cue skin rubble and murderous rages and a hacked-to-pieces Susan just outside the timescale of the film.
We end with what feels like a tacked-on horror denouement to reward viewers for paying money to sit through a monster movie with almost no monsters in it and an occult thriller that turned out to be boring old science. Now that his wife is dead, Nahum seems to recognize his mistake, and resolves to destroy the stone. He begins smashing at it, succeeding only in breaking through to whatever hollow core was encased in the thing’s glassy shell. What that core is we never learn. An alien entity, trapped or imprisoned in the rock? Whatever: it floods into him, turning him within seconds into a green glowing creature.
This thing, which does look like Boris Karloff even if it’s a stunt man in a mask, lurches around the manor, engaging in an inept battle with Reinhart before falling to its death and turning into sparklers and firecrackers, oddly enough (and a little nonsensically) just like what must have happened to Mervyn. These in turn set fire to the manor and the whole infernal place burns to the ground.
Here, then, is a clear stepping stone in the evolution from the mad scientist as a man who merely unleashes evil into the world to one with a much more complex relationship with the unknown. Like Forbidden Planet, Die, Monster, Die! documents a scientist’s foolishness in meddling with alien powers far beyond his understanding or control. But it also documents, like The Wicker Man, a scientist’s inextricable tangle with religious belief, in both of which that belief is irrelevant but pervasive as if summoned by science from the pit itself.
And what of evil? Bizarrely, the three movies take the opposite course. Morbius may be driven, and perhaps a little mad, but he is not any more immoral than the rest of us. Nahum Witley is conflicted because of his father, and wants to do good in the world even if his course is ungodly. Lord Summerisle is most certainly wicked, as well as more cynical than either of the others.
The parallels between Die, Monster, Die! and Forbidden Planet are striking: a big, isolated house with a secret, a scientist father and the daughter who has to be coaxed by a lover to leave him, an incredible force unleashed by him, a father who unravels as soon as his daughter starts to defy him, and a purifying fire to destroy the source of the problem. But were these things present in the source material?
Not really. Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out Of Space’ is inspiration but largely irrelevant. Though scientists are involved in Lovecraft’s tale, they’re not the focus, and the meteorite’s effects — growth, deformity, madness — are incidental rather than purposeful experiments. Lovecraft’s meteorite certainly does house an alien life form that sucks vitality from the life around it, but it is never even suggested in Die, Monster, Die! that the thing in the stone might be alive, that it is an alien, that it is indeed anything more than a form of unknown radiation.
The parallels with The Wicker Man are just as interesting. Both see modern scientists subsumed by primitive spiritualism so that, lacking perspective, they become victims of their own belief systems. Both movies are warnings that, in the wrong hands, progress isn’t just stifled, it’s perverted. We’ve seen this story play out many times over in movies since, but never so starkly as in these three movies, an unrecognized trilogy of hubris.
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