Ghosts of the Haunted Palace: Alien Abduction in nuce avant le lettre

The 1963 horror film The Haunted Palace, based on a novella by H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, opens with a young woman in a hypnotic state walking to the titular mansion, where she is met by the protagonist, Vincent Price as Ward’s ancestor Joseph Curwen, who leads her into the mansion’s depths, where he chains her before a covered pit, from which a green light and growling emanate. Before Curwen’s project can come to completion, an angry, torch-bearing mob pounds on the mansion’s door and Curwen and companion emerge with the young woman, who, fatefully for Curwen, is still mesmerized and unable to answer the questions the mob puts to her. Curwen is summarily burnt to death.

More than a century later, Curwen’s great-grandson, Charles Dexter Ward, arrives to take possession of the mansion. During a meal with one Dr Willet, the doctor fills Ward in on the rumours about his ancestor:

…according to legend, a number of strange things occurred when Curwen moved into the village…Young girls were said to have disappeared from their homes, to be gone until dawn, and then to reappear with no memory of their whereabouts…Curwen was a warlock…There were terrible rumours about him. It was thought he had gained possession of a book called The Necronomicon…It held enough secrets to give a man absolute power… The Necronomicon supposedly contained formulas through which one could communicate with, even summon, the Elder Gods, the Dark Ones from Beyond who had once ruled the world and now are merely waiting for an opportunity to regain that control…Joseph Curwen and two other warlocks were trying to open the gates to those Dark Gods. Joseph Curwen was trying to mate these beings with humans to create a new race through which the gods could gain control…

Anyone familiar with the alien abduction mythology, especially as developed by David M. Jacobs, can’t help but be struck by the analogues between it and Willet’s narrative. Young (fertile) women in a state of altered consciousness are abducted to be mated with malevolent nonhuman beings, abetted by human collaboraters, to create a hybrid race to conquer earth.

However much H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre arguably influenced the development of UFO and Ancient Astronaut mythology, Dr. Willet’s tale is the invention of the The Haunted Palace‘s screenwriters. What is surely striking is how prescient his words are. John G. Fuller’s account of the archetypal abduction account, that of Betty and Barney Hill, was not to appear in print until 1966. I am not immediately moved, however, unlike some proponent of the Psychosocial Hypothesis, to immediately infer the film’s scenario somehow seeded or cultured the myth as it came to be developed in the Eighties of last century. However suggestive, that thesis demands a robust account of just how such precursor stories and images come to contaminate the culture at large and actually cause misperception, how the myth takes on a reality. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the screenwriters, by whatever chance, unconscious processes, present the alien abduction myth in nuce avant le lettre.