American scientist Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) arrives in the village of Arkham at the invitation of his fiancée Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer). Requests for directions to the Witley house are shunned by the locals, but Stephen makes his way there, to a frosty reception from Susan’s elderly, wheelchair-bound father Nahum (Boris Karloff). Also present, but bedridden is Nahum’s wife and Susan’s mother Letitia (Freda Jackson). But what was the cause of her maid’s mysterious illness and disappearance? Why is there a blackened patch of land nearby, which doesn’t look like it was caused by a fire? And who is the cloaked figure appearing at the window?

Die, Monster, Die! (also known as The House at the End of the World and Monster of Terror) is a low-budget horror film, shot in the UK for a US company, American International Pictures (AIP). However, it is of some significance for several reasons: one of Boris Karloff’s best roles in his final decade on screen, at a time when age (later seventies) and infirmity restricted his ability if not will to work. It’s also one of the earliest films to draw on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in this case his short story “The Colour Out of Space”, which was first published in the September 1927 issue of Amazing Stories – and with that British-English spelling of “colour” too. Lovecraft is a well that filmmakers have returned to many times in the decades since, including four further takes on this story alone. Generally, though, they have taken his concepts more or less faithfully, but jettisoned his deep-purple prose and also, thankfully, the racism that’s very much a feature of the stories and the reclusive Howard Phillips’s apparent worldview. (That’s an argument that has raged in weird-fiction circles for decades, and here is not the place to delve into it further.)

The film was shot at Shepperton Studios, with locations in the Surrey village of Shere (of which more below), and one reason for that was that their star, Boris Karloff, still evidently a name to conjure with over thirty years since Frankenstein, was living in the UK. He had severe back problems – not helped by years of labouring work before he established himself as an actor and having had to carry Colin Clive in James Whale’s film – and increasing arthritis restricted his movement and this was the first film in which he performed his entire role in a wheelchair.

Lovecraft’s story was set in his native USA, but Jerry Sohl’s adaptation relocates it to England and has Stephen arriving at Arkham by train. We’re on familiar ground from the start, with a local taxi driver refusing to drive him to the Witley place and the man running a bicycle-hire shop not only refusing to rent him a bike when he hears where he’s going but not giving him any directions either. So Stephen has to find the house by himself, which somehow he does, and to walk there, going round the gate with its forbidding sign attached. The film has five principal actors, who all get portrait shots in the end credits, but also in the film is quite some array of familiar British or Irish character actors, all in small roles, such as Leslie Dwyer as a potter, Sydney Bromley as one of a group of old men in a pub and Patrick Magee as the village doctor.

This was Daniel Haller’s directing debut. He had been an art director before this, and you can sense a trained eye at work, though Colin Southcott is credited for that role. Nick Adams is a good-looking if bland leading man, but to be fair that’s how his role is written. Suzan Farmer has a rather thankless role requiring her to scream a few times. Freda Jackson is suitably sinister, but spends much of her role in a bed hidden behind veils. So it’s Karloff’s film from the moment he appears to the very end, and despite his obvious infirmity he takes firm grip of his role. He is the major reason to see the film, but that’s good enough for anyone. This is one of his best roles of his final decade on screen, though many including me would give the nod to Targets, three years later and also on a BFI Blu-ray. Die, Monster, Die! had its original UK release on a double bill with AIP’s The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman, also a Lovecraft adaptation (of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a novella or short novel depending on your definition) though with a title from Edgar Allan Poe and eight lines from the poem in Poe’s story inserted to justify the title.

Die, Monster, Die! is released by the BFI on a Blu-ray encoded for Region B only. The film had an X certificate (then, sixteen and over) in 1965 under the title The House at the End of the World, then in 1972 was rerated to the then-recently-introduced AA certificate (fourteen and over) as Monster of Terror. Under the current title, it was a 15 on its VHS release in 1986 and has been a 12 from 2004 onwards. That said, the package carries a 15 due to an additional feature rated higher, not listed on the BBFC website as I write this but presumably the scenes from Let Me Die a Monster, due to strong language and mimed drugtaking. However, it’s doubtful that too many twelve-to-fifteen-year-olds would be the target audience for a film like this. The Peaches was an A originally and is a PG now.

The Blu-ray transfer is in the ratio of 2.35:1. Die, Monster, Die! was shot in 35mm colour, but this Scope film was not shot with anamorphic lenses. No process is named in the credits, though some publicity materials say that the film was filmed in Colorscope. The process was actually SuperScope 235, which shot the whole of the frame but cropped the images to Scope dimensions. Via an optical printer the frames were anamorphically squeezed so that they could be unsqueezed onto the wide screen when it was projected in cinemas. This was a predecessor of Super 35, which was much used from the 1980s onwards and still is for 35mm-shot films to this day. (Given that anamorphic lenses weren’t used in production, you don’t get out-of-focus backgrounds squeezed so that circular lights become vertical ovals.) The process, with its optical-printer stage, produced grainier results than (more expensive to rent) anamorphic lenses would, and that was a feature of Super 35 two decades later. The transfer is appropriately colourful – the vivid reds of the giant tomatoes in the greenhouse, for example – and renders Paul Beeson’s cinematography very well, and grain is natural and filmlike and not as intensely grainy as other films shot in the process, or the similar process Techniscope, can be.

The soundtrack is the original mono, rendered as LCPM 2.0. There’s not a lot to be said about this, as it’s a product of British studio expertise, with dialogue, sound effects and music well balanced. Hard-of-hearing English subtitles are available for the feature only, and I didn’t spot any errors in them.

Commentary with William Fowler and Vic Pratt
William Fowler and Vic Pratt are an established curatorial and commentary team, and are the authors, as they tell us, of The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film & Television. While Die, Monster, Die! isn’t a BFI Flipside release, they’re well suited for commentary duties for a film like this and as you might expect of two who go back a long time, there is a lot of banter involved. But between them they do impart a lot in the not especially long running time, from the vaguely pre-psychedelic opening titles (the work of Les Bowie, who also did the special effects), to the much used location of Shere, a village in Surrey, near Guildford. Shere wasn’t too far from Hammer’s usual home of Bray Studios, so they often went there for location shooting, but its film life goes back at least as far as D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World and as recently as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, via A Matter of Life and Death, Freddie Francis’s Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly and even The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They also discuss the film’s marketing, generally aimed at teenagers as adults were at home watching television and younger teens (if allowed to see the film, which they wouldn’t have been in the UK) aspiring to watch what older teens could, but not vice versa, and girls likely to see films for boys but not vice versa either. There’s a level of film nerdery you might expect here, with Fowler mentioning that the opening shot of the train arriving is shot at the same angle as the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), though there can’t be many other ways to shoot a train. Pratt ends the commentary by reading his list of twenty-five horror tropes which feature in the film and ticks them off one by one. If you can add any more, feel free to advise the BFI.

A Karloff Konversation (19:23)
Vic Pratt talks to Boris Karloff’s biographer Stephen Jacobs, who locates Die, Monster, Die! in the context of his career at the time. Karloff was living in the UK at the time, and in poor health. That included arthritis in his legs and that’s a reason why he was often sitting down in his films, and in the film at hand is wheelchair-bound for the first time. However, he was keen to work, not just in the cinema: he appeared on talk shows, recorded audiobooks for which his sepulchral voice was well suited, He was quoted as wanting to die with his boots on, and nearly did. Karloff was highly regarded by other actors. Nick Adams took the role in this film simply to work with him, as did Ian Ogilvy in The Sorcerers. However, due to his health, Karloff couldn’t be insured, which sometimes resulted in his having to swap parts with other actors for a less demanding role.

Scenes from Let Me Die a Monster (14:07)
Let Me Die a Monster was a screenplay written in 1996 by Ken Hollings and David McGillivay but was never produced. It is a fantasia on the life of Nick Adams, who in real life met both James Dean and Elvis Presley, and introduced the latter to Natalie Wood whom he dated for a while. It was also rumoured that Adams and Dean had been lovers. The screenplay takes this further, with Presley being bisexual and he and Adams being an item. Topped and tailed by addresses to camera by Hollings and McGillivray, we see read-throughs of some scenes between Adams and Presley, played by Iain Stirland and Darryl Crick respectively.

Nick Adams and Die, Monster, Die! (7:23)
Hollings and McGillivray again, talking about Nick Adams and their fascination for his career and his short life. He died in 1968 from a drug overdose, aged just thirty-six. As per above, he was either gay or bisexual: whether or not his marriage was a lavender one, it did produce two children. Hollings proudly shows us his original 1980s VHS tape of Die, Monster, Die! McGillivray quotes his diary and his enthusiastic review of the film from his first viewing in 1966, though he is less fond of it now. He also remembers that at age nineteen he reviewed Frankenstein Conquers the World for Films and Filming in 1967...starring Nick Adams.

Sell, Monster, Sell! (12:13)
One stumbling block for extras on films like this, nearly sixty years old, is that most people who were involved in its making are no longer alive. In the case of Die, Monster, Die!, all the principal cast have gone and most of the crew too, other than director Daniel Haller. He’s still with us at age ninety-four as I write this, but his state of health is unknown and in any case he doesn’t contribute to this disc. However, we do have unit publicist Tony Tweedale, who talks about his career and his work on Die, Monster, Die! and with Boris Karloff in particular. Like just about everyone else who worked with him, it seems, he holds the actor in high regard. This item could have been tightened, as Tweedale does repeat himself from time to time and after discussing Die, Monster, Die! refers to it again as “something else I worked on”. But there is useful material here, and his profession is not one we hear much from in disc extras, so that’s a bonus.

The Peaches (16:13)
This short film has appeared on a BFI disc before: you can find it as an extra on Girl With Green Eyes, part of the 2018 Woodfall box set. Dating from 1964, it was directed by Michael Gill, whose career up to then had been in television documentary, from a script by Yvonne Gilan, his wife. Making an appearance as a young bespectacled chess player is their son Adrian, later the writer A. A. Gill. Narrated by Peter Ustinov, The Peaches is the surreal tale of a Very Beautiful Girl (Juliet Harmer, two years away from her role in Adam Adamant Lives!) and her passion for peaches. Walter Lassally was the cinematographer, in somewhat grainy black and white 35mm. This short is presented in 1.37:1, which looks more or less right, though it’s questionable if many cinemas outside arthouses and repertory houses could show that ratio at the time.

Image gallery (10:59)
A self-navigating gallery of production and promotional stills, all in black and white for this colour film. No posters or lobby cards this time.

Theatrical trailer with optional audio commentary (1:55)
An effective little summary of the film you might spend your hard-earned to see, with several shots that would be major spoilers if they had been seen in context. Messrs Fowler and Pratt provide a rather scattershot commentary with under two minutes at their disposal. Don’t listen to this before watching the feature as it does contain some significant spoilers.

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release only, runs to twenty-eight pages. It begins with a spoiler warning and “A Menagerie of Horrors” by Stephen Jacobs. This begins with AIP’s making its first Lovecraft film, The Haunted Palace (1963). Die, Monster, Die! was the second, with a postponed production of The Dunwich Horror in between (and not made until 1969). Karloff’s role as his “first real gothic monster character” for some thirty years attracted attention in the press, including an interview on the then BBC Home Service. Jacobs’s piece is mostly an overview of the film’s making, with quotes from others involved – including Suzan Farmer, who seems to have been one of the few not to have got on with the leading man. Jacobs doesn’t shy away from the film’s unevenness and Nick Adams’s blandness, but still rates it as one of Karloff’s best films of the 1960s.

In “All the Colours of the Cosmic Dark: H.P. Lovecraft and the Unrepresentable”, Xavier Aldana Reyes takes a look at Lovecraft, a man widely (if inevitably not especially faithfully) adapted for the cinema, even though that only began in the 1960s, nearly three decades after the author’s death. In “The Colour Out of Space” and other stories, Lovecraft’s project was to attempt to describe the indescribable in his stories of ancient terrible entities, and he did in highly ornate prose which some find impenetrable. None of that is kept in film versions, of course, which inevitably is at least an attempt to portray the indescribable. Reyes looks at the five, so far, big-screen adaptations of this particular story, the present film being the first and the most recent being Richard Stanley’s take from 2019. Needless to say, many versions of Lovecraft have taken the titles and some concepts and ran with it – it’s rather hard to see Die, Monster, Die! and, for example, Re-Animator (1985) as being in the same ballpark, the greater licence for gore in the latter notwithstanding.

After two pages of cast and crew credits, we have two pieces on Let Me Die a Monster, from Ken Hollings and David McGillivray. Hollings describes how he first saw Nick Adams in the Japanese production Astro-Monster (1965, also known as Monster Zero) and became interested in the man’s life and work, which led to his writing a film treatment. This was liked, but the production company he approached suggested he team with an experienced screenwriter, which was how David McGillivray came on board. McGillivray suggested that after ten minutes of script it was high time for a sex scene and didn’t like Hollings’s suggestion that the actors play their lines as if they’d been dubbed into English. McGillivray takes up the story and on his first meeting with Hollings sat through Astro-Monster accompanied by a whole tin of Cadbury’s Roses. Let Me Die a Monster remained unproduced, as it does to this day, but the script was published, with a read-through of some scenes at the launch party, which have been recreated for this disc.

The booklet ends with credits for and notes on the special features, including an extended piece by Katy McGahan on The Peaches. There are also plenty of stills.

Die, Monster, Die! probably wouldn’t be counted amongst the great horror films of the 1960s, but it’s still a good one, and notable for first joining the dots between two icons of the genre from the 1930s, Boris Karloff and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s well presented on this BFI Blu-ray.