Super Freaky

Of the five films Stuart Gordon made from stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Castle Freak (1995) is the one that completely misses the mark. Lovecraft, famously, is very hard to film in any kind of faithful adaptation. Gordon's best films take all kinds of liberties with the material--ranging very far afield from the source texts in most cases--but still manage to capture some ineffable essence of Lovecraft while also bearing the stamp of their director's own personality. Castle Freak, by contrast, spectacularly misunderstands "The Outsider," the story on which it is nominally based. Rather than turning the tables on monstrosity and finding its horror in a cosmic loneliness--as the story does--it's a stock "nuclear family in peril" film in which the horror elements act as marriage counseling for a couple who are on the rocks. It's disappointing.

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Lovecraft a Go-Go

I first read The Dunwich Horror when I was fourteen, if I recall correctly. A haunter of used bookstores even then, I found the story in an awesome old Lancer paperback with the cover at the right. This wasn't the first Lovecraft I read--I had a collection of some of his lesser prose sketches and Lord Dunsany rip-offs, and those didn't really fire my imagination. This book, on the other hand, with stories like "Pickman's Model," "The Thing on the Doorstep," "The Haunter of the Dark," and the title story--this book kicked my ass hard.

I don't think I saw the movie version for another six years. I never caught it on TV, and finally found it at a mom and pop rental video store next to the door to the porn room. It was next to Jess Franco's Eugenie on the shelf, and a couple of tapes down from Die, Monster, Die, both of which ended up in the stack of tapes I rented along with The Dunwich Horror. Also on that stack was City of the Living Dead and Liquid Sky. I was in for a disappointing weekend. That's cinephilia for you, I guess. The Dunwich Horror (1970, directed by Daniel Haller) never comes anywhere near the weirdness of the short story, mostly because it's a monster movie with out a monster and a movie about sex without any sex and a horror movie without any horror. Looking back at this film from a vantage point in 2013, it seems absurd that the MPAA rated this "R", even in those days before the PG-13. There's a lot about this movie that's baffling.

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Any Colour You Like

I wouldn't be upset at all if the filmmaking model pursued by The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society were to spread. Their relative success within their own self-defined niche of semi-pro filmmaking can be cloned. I've already seen it replicated. The results are as watchable as either The Call of Cthulhu or The Whisperer in Darkness, even if the source material, the already much-filmed "The Colour Out of Space," is a more intractable source material. The Colour Out of Space (aka: De Farbe, 2010, directed by Huan Vu) transplants the familiar Lovecraft story to Germany just after WW II. It actually thrives in its new setting.

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Darkness, Take My Hand

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society returns to filmmaking with their version of The Whisperer in Darkness (2011, directed by Sean Branney). "The Whisperer" is probably my favorite of Lovecraft's stories, so I was keen to see what the HPLHS did with it. I loved their version of The Call of Cthulhu. Like that film, this is made as if it is a contemporary to Lovecraft--an early talkie, rather than a silent film this time. This film's production values are higher than their first film, which is a double edged sword, because it lets the filmmakers attempt visuals that might best be left to the mind. But maybe not. "The Whisperer in Darkness" isn't as replete with gelid monstrosities as some of Lovecraft's other stories, and the Mi-Go, its alien creatures, are well represented in this film version. And while The Call of Cthulhu works as a kind of curio, this film aspires to more. It's a fully fledged feature film rather than a well-executed fan film, though it's not without its problems...

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