The Fiend Without a Face and Amelia Reynolds Long

A few days ago I wrote about invisible monsters in Weird Tales. Little did I know that one of those tales was the basis of the 1958 film, The Fiend Without a Face. As I researched the piece, I learned this and had to see this classic SF/Horror film. To my surprise, Long even got a story credit at the beginning of the film.

The original story was “The Thought-Monster” (Weird Tales, March 1930). As can be expected, the film version and magazine story vary on many details but over-all it is a good adaptation. The original story has an unnamed town the center of a series of killings. The victims are found dead with a horrific look on their face, but no other visible sign of murder. When the mayor gets killed, the attention draws experts like Gibson, the famous detective. He organizes a search at night, which ends with him going missing. When he turns up a week later, he is stark raving mad. To make matters worse, someone has dug up the mayor!

The next expert to show up is Michael Cummings, the psychic investigator. Cummings is smart enough to stay out of the woods at night. He tells everyone to use strange purple lights to drive off the supernatural killer. His odd suggestion works and for a time no one dies. Unfortunately, the lights can’t help those coming to town, like the car filled with three dead people one night.

Cummings makes friends with the coroner, Dr. Bradley. Bradley introduces Cummings to the local scientific recluse, Walgate. He is a researcher in psychology, so not one to have dangerous lab animals running around. Cummings isn’t so easily put off. He calls up Walgate again but the scientist asks him to come in half an hour. Cummings and Bradley comply, finding a manuscript waiting for them. It recounts how Walgate created the Mental Vampire through his experiments in thought materialization. He admits to digging up the mayor’s body to check his wounds. Walgate asked for the half hour’s wait, because he has created a lead-lined room to trap the monster in. Cummings and Bradley open the room, waiting long enough for the monster to die, and find Walgate completely insane.

Now the movie version has the same shape with some important changes. The small unnamed town becomes a US army base in Manitoba, Canada! Occult detective, Michael Cummings becomes Major Cummings (played by Marshall Thompson), lead officer/researcher on a nuclear-powered radar system. The film wastes most of the first half on dull stock footage and aerial tests. We also meet Walgate’s pretty secretary, Barbara Grizzell (Kim Parker). The thought monster isn’t one but a squad of killer monsters feeding off the radioactivity of the reactor, which they try to blow up. We get a pretty good fight scene with people trapped inside a house surrounded by mental vampires. The stalwart men shoot as many of the monsters as they can but Cummings has to rush to the base to blow up the operations building of the reactor (as if that would stop nuclear meltdown!)

The radioactivity becomes so high we get to see the brain eaters. They look like brains with spinal cord and antennae. They like to wrap their tails around the victim’s throat then drive two fangs into the brain to eat it. (The creators of Alien must have been inspired by this when they created the Face-Huggers, which use their tails in a similar way. Cummings, after destroying the threat, ends up with the girl, of course.

If you strip away all the 1950s nuclear/army stuffing you find Long’s tale pretty much intact. It has all the same shock points, like the deaths, the confident man driven insane (he was changed from a city detective to a loud-mouth local), the same strange odd conversation on thought materialization and the phrase “Mental Vampire!” which the cast spout three times in succession. Perhaps the most surprising is the journal of Walgate’s experiment is there. The main thread of the film switches to Walgate’s story of creating the monsters before shifting back to the men trapped in the house. Walgate doesn’t create the lead room but just runs out and gets pointlessly killed.

Which all leads me to ask: how many Weird Tales stories became movies and how much did they stick to the original? The Dunwich Horror starring Dean Stockwell is a famous one. There were the Stuart Gordon films: Reanimator, Dagon, The Unnameable, etc. As well as “Pickman’s Model” and Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse” on Night Gallery. “The Black Ferris” became Something Wicked This Way Comes, so sort of. The Conan stories are behind the movies but only in pieces. (“The Tower of the Elephant” in Conan the Barbarian and Thak from “Rogues in the House” in Conan the Destroyer.) “Pigeons From Hell” was done on Thriller as well as “The Dead Man” by Fritz Leiber. I can only come to the conclusion I need a post on this, with a thorough list of all the stories and where they were filmed.

Conclusion

I often watch old movies and think to myself, hey, that stole that from (insert Pulp story here). Hollywood is not known for paying much for source material. Sometimes not at all. I guess that was why seeing Amelia Reynolds Long getting a credit struck me as unusual. ( Long must have had a good agent. It was Forrest J. Ackerman as it turns out. — Thanks, Alex!) Weird Tales is the golden child of Pulp collectors and fans but to people outside that circle, it was just another cheap Pulp magazine providing fodder for the Dream factory. It is always enjoyable to see one of these old stories realized on the screen.