From Solstice to Equinox

Frank Bonner (1942-2021) has died. Most people remember him as Herb Tarlek from the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982), but he got his start on screen more than a decade earlier in a completely different kind of role and in a completely different kind of film.

You may have seen Equinox (1970). If you haven't, you should. It's not a great movie, but it's a fun and interesting one. Originally filmed in 1967 as a short subject called The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural, Equinox was expanded and reworked for theatrical release in 1970. (That explains the anachronistic clothing worn by the young people in the film.) Billed as Frank Boers, Jr., the late Mr. Bonner was one of the two male leads in a group that included two young actresses as well. It occurs to me now that the plot device of two young couples encountering the supernatural in a remote location has some similarities to the first Mothman sighting, which took place in November 1966, only a few short months before the original version of Equinox was made.

Equinox became a cult classic. It played at the drive-in and in cheap theaters and was on late-night television. That's where we saw it when we were kids, all as a family, including my dad, who didn't like fantasy or science fiction movies at all. According to the Internet Movie Database, "The story combines numerous elements of various novellas by H.P. Lovecraft." That may be true, but a thing isn't true just because a source on the Internet says that it's true. If you're going to make an assertion, you have to back it up with evidence. Let's have the evidence.

There may have been an influence of H.P. Lovecraft on the making of Equinox. Any researcher looking into that question could extend his or her work into the influence of both Lovecraft and Equinox on Sam Raimi's film The Evil Dead (1981). Mr. Raimi is said not to have seen Equinox before making his film, but the similarities are apparent. It seems to me, though, that both he and the makers of Equinox were working from the same general idea, one that nobody really invented but that is useful when you're creating a horror film. The idea begins with the intended audience: young people, more specifically young couples, who are out at night, in their cars, in the dark, away from home and the safety of home. Once you get a bunch of young people into an isolated place, cut off from everything safe and familiar, the horror-story ball starts rolling. See The Blair Witch Project (1999) for another example, one more overtly influenced by Lovecraft and his creations. See also The Blob (1958), which was based on a story by Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990), "Slime," from from Weird Tales, March 1953. (Click here and here for images.) Both Equinox and The Blob were produced by Jack H. Harris (1918-2017).

You might search here and there and come up empty, but there are in fact easy connections to be made between Equinox and the Lovecraftian oeuvre of old. One of the actors in the film is Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1910-1992), who was of course a teller of weird tales and a Lovecraft associate. Leiber had acted in movies from time to time since his young adulthood. His father, Fritz Leiber (1882-1949), was also an actor and a famous one at that. Leiber the elder was in movies from 1916 to his death, including the genre films Cry of the Werewolf and Cobra Woman, both from 1944. Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) was also in Equinox, but only his voice. Always the performer, Ackerman had appeared in movies as early as 1944 and would continue to appear as late as 2017, after his death. He and Leiber the younger shared billing in the 1957 short subject The Genie. Oddly enough, writer, artist, and future Star Trek savior Bjo Trimble (b. 1933) was also in The Genie.

We offer our condolences to the family and friends of Frank Bonner, who died on June 16, 2021, at age seventy-nine.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley