by Khurt Khave
LEE HALESTON:
I made probably a dozen copies of it on my own. I had two VCR's
hooked together. I gave them out to friends. Eventually it got into the hands
of the bootleggers. I’m not sure how, but I have my suspicions. I think some
money changed hands, but I never made a dime. I did get to speak at Uncle
Con a few years back. They acknowledged me, gave me an award. That was
nice.
SAM BURKETT:
Lee’s a little bitter and I don’t blame him. Without him noticing it in
the first place, and then going out and getting the two fragments spliced
together, no one would have ever heard of Uncle Lovecraft. But them’s the
breaks.
HAPPY MUSIC
STEVE PELTS:
The opening title sequence is very Ozzie and Harriet. You see the front of this middle-class colonial suburban home, very nice, white door with rose bushes on either side. Then the door opens a crack and out slithers this absolutely disgusting tentacle. That’s all you see, a tentacle. It reaches up and wraps itself around this huge, ornate door knocker and starts knocking — one, two, three. You can see the slime.
RON KING:
What’s carved on that door knocker? That’s what I want to know.
The knocker looks out of place. It’s got a medieval vibe, like it should be on an
oaken castle door, and they stuck it on this white suburban door instead. The
footage is too grainy to make it out, but there’s definitely something carved on
there, some sort of design or insignia. I tried to upscale the image on my Mac,
you know, sharpen it up so I could make it out better, and the damn computer
melted down. I had to buy a new one.
But yeah — the tentacle. Everybody says it’s an octopus tentacle. It’s
not. I’ve been through every octopus reference book in the world. I’ve even
shown the footage to an oceanographer, a guy who wrote his dissertation
about octopi. It’s not an octopus. Or a squid.
BELINDA SHORES, Horror Author:
The tentacle haunts me. The suckers are octagonal-shaped with little
notches in them. And it has, like, little veiny things all over it, and the veins
pulse and move.
TIM BALES:
It’s entirely plausible, really. You had this third-rate sitcom that no
one has ever heard of, most likely with a shoestring budget, and somehow they
manage to create a tentacle that’s decades beyond any special effect that had
ever been made before. It’s almost at CGI-levels of detail and realism. So sure,
it had to be a rubber prop they covered in petroleum jelly. Makes perfect
sense to me!
STEVE PELTS:
Then the music starts in and the title appears in this huge script font:
Uncle Lovecraft! And the music is very bright and cheery, lots of violins, very
upbeat. Stock library music, happy music. The tentacle lets go of the knocker
and slithers back inside. Then this very tall, thin, cheery-looking guy in a nice
tweed three-piece suit walks into frame. He’s carrying a suitcase. Uncle
Lovecraft, what a nice fellow!
RON KING:
You’ve seen photos of H.P. Lovecraft, right? This guy looks exactly
like him, only he’s smiling and his chin is sharper. And he has a 1950s haircut.
Other than that, I swear, it’s like the happy-sunshine version of Lovecraft.
STEVE PELTS:
He puts his suitcase down and he looks around smiling, so happy on
this bright spring day, right? And then the tentacle reappears and taps him on
the shoulder. He turns around — and here, he’s looking back inside the house,
but we can’t see anything, it’s dark. But he can apparently see what’s attached
to the tentacle. And at first he’s shocked, but then he just shakes his head and
smiles again. And he plucks the tentacle off his shoulder and tosses it back
inside. Then he turns back to the camera, smiles and shrugs. As if to say, ‘This
is my crazy life, folks! What are ya gonna do?’ The music ends, and the tape
cuts off. That’s it. No credits, no ‘Starring so-and-so,’ nothing.
BELINDA SHORES:
The premise of the show is anybody’s guess. But from the opening sequence, I’m almost positive it was a ‘crazy uncle’ setup. Uncle Lovecraft comes to town, moves in with his brother or sister and their white-bread, middle-class family, you know, not a hair out of place, everything very normal. But Lovecraft’s not normal. He’s a wizard or something, and he casts spells and conjures up a bunch of crazy stuff and wackiness ensues. That would give the writers an almost unlimited bucket of plots. Like, his niece Becky wants a certain boy to like her, and Lovecraft tries to help by casting a love spell, only it turns the boy into a werewolf, shit like that.
STEVE PELTS:
The other clip is longer — about thirty seconds. It’s the very end of an
episode, and it’s set in the kitchen.
RON KING:
Thank God for that kitchen footage. They dressed it up with modern appliances, and that’s how we were able to date it. The refrigerator was a very distinct model from Polar Palace. It didn’t come out until the spring of 1956. So it was shot no earlier than that.
STEVE PELTS:
Uncle Lovecraft is standing in the kitchen with this sitcom family —
mom, dad, little boy, teenage girl — and they’re all covered in this thick, really
gross-looking semi-transparent goo. I mean, head to toe. Something big has
just happened, but we don’t know what. They’re just standing there looking at
each other with shocked faces, like, ‘Oh my God!’ And there’s a laugh track
going, and they’ve got it cranked up to eleven — they’re using the really
hysterical laughter, the kind you would hear on I Love Lucy when she did
something really insane. There’s a wooden chest on the kitchen table, like an
old pirate’s treasure chest, with metal straps and locks and everything, and the
tentacle from the opening credits rises up out of it. It starts to sway back and
forth, kind of dancing almost, like a charmed cobra. And this sets everybody
off even more. The laugh track is still going. The kids scream and run away.
The mom faints. The dad, I swear — he starts crying. He just stands there,
shaking, and starts to bawl. The only one who stays in character is Uncle
Lovecraft. He just looks around with this wide-eyed expression, like ‘What
have I gotten myself into?’ Then he leans his head back, way back, and starts
to shout something at the top of his lungs. But we don’t know what he’s
saying, because at that moment the audio track cuts off. So for the last few
seconds, all you see is Uncle Lovecraft’s lips moving. He starts to get really
animated, waving his arms around and stuff, and the tentacle starts whipping
back and forth really fast, too. And the guy playing the father, he just
collapses, faints, falls to the floor. Then there’s a very abrupt jump cut, no fade-out, and we go straight to a scrolling list of end credits running really, really fast, with the happy opening theme music playing again. That goes on for a few more seconds, then it all stops and we cut to a commercial for Palmolive. Remember Madge? The ‘You’re soaking in it’ ad? One of those.
DAVE NIESWANGER, Author, Sitcom Confidential:
If you slow down the credits scrolling at the end, it’s utter nonsense.
None of the actors are listed, for one thing. For all practical purposes, they
don’t exist. I
mean, they’re ghosts. No one has ever been able to identify
them, and we’re talking some of the most obsessive fans in the universe. Not
just the Lovecraft groupies, but the classic TV crowd. These are people who
memorize the credits at the end of a Gilligan’s Island episode, for cripes’ sake.
None of the actors have ever shown up in any other TV show or movie. What
are the odds that every person who starred in Uncle Lovecraft never worked
again? Or had never worked previously?
TIM BALES:
The end credits, to me, are the most bizarre aspect of the whole thing,
even stranger than the footage itself. The job titles are all made up. They
don't exist in the television production world, not now and not then. You’ve
got stuff like ‘Chief Master Chief, Elevator Division.’ And ‘Film Stock Vibrator’
and ‘Gaffer Step Count’ and ‘Switch Control Supervisor, East.’ It’s almost like
intentional comedy, like an old Bob and Ray skit.
STEVE PELTS:
The names in the credits should have been the answer to everything. You track down some of the guys who were on the crew, you interview them — chances are a few of them are still around, retired and living in L.A. But even there, it was a brick wall, because the names. . . at first we thought they were made up. They certainly weren’t names of anyone involved in TV production in the 1950s. It was only years later, with the advent of online databases, that we were able to figure it all out. Somebody got the bright idea of just typing in all of the names into a search engine for one of the big online newspaper archives. You know, they scan in millions of pages of newspapers from across the country, then charge you a subscription fee to search them. This guy — or girl, I don’t know — types in all of the names as a single search, and gets one hit: a tiny little news article in The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. It was just a listing of names of people who’d entered a local bowling tournament. Someone had apparently copied down the list and plugged in the names in the credits — in the exact same order, too.
DAVE NIEWSWANGER:
And the date of the newspaper article? Drum roll, please; March 15,
1937. The day H.P. Lovecraft died. In Providence, no less.
AN ENDLESS LOOP
RON KING:
I was almost thirty the first time I saw the Uncle Lovecraft footage, and it scared the holy crap out of me. Worse than the first time I saw Eraserhead. I remember getting physically ill. It had a real effect on me. I stayed home from work the next day. I didn’t watch it again for a long time. I felt like a fiveyear-old must have felt watching The Exorcist. I was thoroughly demoralized.
LEE HALESTON:
I’ve heard of people getting nosebleeds after they watch it for the first time. My advice: don’t watch it with a large group of people. There are other stories about fights breaking out for no reason. I mean, serious fights, not just fists, but biting and kicking. People just wig out. There’s something about that closing scene.
STEVE PELTS:
What’s he shouting in that final scene? That’s what everyone wants
to know. I did a feature on the website where I sent the footage to several
professional lip-readers. All of them said it wasn’t English. None of them
could give me anything coherent. ‘Hard, guttural consonant combinations,’
that was as far as they would go.
LEE HALESTON:
‘Cthulhu fhtagn!’ There, I said it so you didn’t have to.
RON KING:
I definitely think he’s saying ‘Cthulhu’ at the very least. That’s the
first word he says. Look how his jaw moves and his lips purse forward.
BELINDA SHORES:
The urban legends that have sprung up around the show are
fascinating. All whispers and hushed tones, campfire stories. “A friend-of-afriend had a cousin who watched it and then murdered his family with an axe
and wrote CTHULHU on the wall in blood.” When I was in college I roomed
with a girl who swore up and down that her best friend in high school
committed suicide after she watched it. Apparently this girl, the one who died,
she put together a VHS tape of nothing but the two clips back-to-back, just
spliced them together over and over, an endless loop. She recorded it on the
slowest speed, so that would be like, what, six hours? And she got high one
night in her bedroom and watched the whole tape straight through, then slit
her own throat.
LEE HALESTON:
The CIA couldn’t have done a better job of hiding information about
the show. To go back to Jim’s original tapes, we know exactly when he
recorded the monster movies on Channel 41, because the entire TV schedule
was in the paper everyday. So we went to the library, you know, did the whole
microfiche thing and looked at the schedule for those days in 1983 to see if it
said anything about Uncle Lovecraft. And in both cases the programs for those
time slots — before a movie in one case, after one in the other — it’s just ‘To Be
Announced.’
SAM BURKETT:
I collect TV Guides. I have an almost complete run from 1953 through
1979 — the Golden Era, in my opinion. Don’t get me started on the 1980s.
Uncle Lovecraft doesn’t show up once, anywhere, and I have copies from every
region of the country, the various local editions. And it definitely wasn’t
produced by any of the national networks at the time, not even DuMont.
There would be scads of paper trails if it had been, say, a CBS production.
Nothing.
TIM BALES:
My personal opinion is that there was only ever one episode
produced. The reason you can’t find anymore is that there aren’t any. That’s
why there’s very little documentation, too. It was created as a pilot, probably
by an independent production company, and then shopped around to local
networks as a syndication opportunity. A lot of people don’t realize this, but
in the early days of TV, there were a lot of syndicated shows that only played
in certain regions of the country. The networks were never the only game in
town. And then beginning in the 1970s, when UHF stations started gaining
steam and there was a real need for content 24 hours a day, syndicators
bought up the rights to a lot of these one-off pilots that were just sitting
around. They packaged them together and sold them in bulk for cheap so that
stations could use them as filler or play them in the off-hours. Anything’s
better than a test pattern.
BELINDA SHORES:
I throw in with the more subversive theory: it’s fuckin’ dark magic,
plain and simple. Somebody bankrolled the whole thing, somebody outside of
the entire television industry. The goal was never to sell it to a network or
have it run for 100 episodes or whatever. The goal was to inject this —
whatever into the bloodstream of American culture, and what better way to do
that than through television? You’ve got a damn invocation going on in that
last scene! He’s calling up something, right? ‘But Cthulhu doesn’t really exist,
blah blah blah.’ Right. Tell that to the actor standing next to Uncle Lovecraft. The guy is having a nervous breakdown on camera. You can watch him lose his mind in real time.
RON KING:
The audio’s gone during the invocation, which I take to mean that
somewhere along the way, someone figured out what was going on and
dubbed over the audio as a way to sabotage the whole t
hing. Why they didn’t
just destroy the whole tape, I don’t know. But you’ll notice it jump-cuts to the
credits right away, too — there’s no music, no wrap-up. The invocation
probably went on for at least another minute. I think the saboteur cut that
footage on purpose too. Whoever it was, they probably deserve a medal.
STEVE PELTS:
I’m not saying I buy the conspiracy angle, but just entertain the idea
for a minute. You’re a local TV station in the mid-1950s. You get a package
delivered one day. It’s a pilot reel for a new sitcom, and there’s a letter inside
saying, ‘Hey, feel free to play this, it’s yours, sell all the advertising you want,
we don’t want a cut, just think about picking us up.’ If you’re the station
manager, probably operating on a shoestring budget, are you going to doublecheck that it came from a legitimate production company? Are you going to
follow up in any way? No. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You take
it and you play it. Now imagine that happening at hundreds of stations across
the country. It didn’t happen that way for whatever reason, but that would
have been the plan: get it out there, get it broadcast in as many areas as
possible, saturate the country with this magic spell, this ceremony at the end
of the episode. What kind of cumulative impact would that have had?
RON KING:
Damn it. The door knocker. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. If I try
to enhance it again, will you buy me a new Mac?
David Acord is a longtime Lovecraft acolyte and author of the monograph The Other Mr. Lovecraft: A True Story of Tragedy and the Supernatural from H.P. Lovecraft's Family Tree. He has also written several books, including What Would Lincoln Do? (Sourcebooks, 2008); Success Secrets of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 2011); and When Mars Attacked: Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds, and the Radio Broadcast That Changed America Forever (2013). All titles (including the monograph) are available on Amazon.com.
