Horror Express: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (Bonami J. Story, 2023)

So, yes, a word on the title. It’s a bit ‘on the nose’, isn’t it? Could probably stand to lose the ‘angry’ at least... not that I wish to question the character’s anger, you understand, but it just seems unnecessary to cram such descriptors into the title, and it would scan better without it. Also, then maybe they could’ve made it a reference to Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Black Girl in Search of God’ or something instead, who knows? (One for the kids there!)

Anyway - at first, I wasn’t really down with the movie the title is attached to either. In fact, through the opening half hour I was getting ready to give it to stern a lecture about how I’m all for genre movies exploring socio-political issues, but how it tends to work better when they naturally arise from the genre elements. Whereas, this seems to have approached things the other way around, presenting a well-intentioned but dispiritingly one-dimensional take on systemic racism, drugs, police brutality and social inequality (all of which are bad, dontcha know), with a featherweight take on the Frankenstein mythos overlaid on top.

Meanwhile, any narrative tension seemed liable to be nullified by the presence of a central character - Vicaria, played by Laya DeLeon Hayes - who appeared to be destined to spend the film being smarter than everyone else, right about everything all the time, and generally morally unimpeachable / intellectually undefeatable.

In particular, I just didn’t buy Vicaria’s whole “death is a curable disease” shtick as a message which is in any way positive or helpful for those dealing with grief - which is a problem, given that it’s the single rhetorical device upon which most of Bomani J. Story’s script rests. And, similarly, I found the decision to open the film with a succession of close up, slo mo familial deaths to be not so much harrowing (as was presumably intended), but simply emotionally manipulative, establishing a tone of grim self-seriousness which proves hard to shake through the opening act.

Thankfully though, I also felt that the film becomes a lot more interesting as it goes along, really kicking into gear during the second half, and winning me over in the process.

Though Story clearly has no interest whatsoever in delivering the all-black-cast version of ‘Reanimator’ or ‘Monster on Campus’ I suppose I was vaguely hoping for, he does give us a surprisingly faithful reinterpretation of ‘Frankenstein’, as taken straight from the novel, concentrating in particular upon the rarely filmed trope of the creator abandoning and losing track of his/her monster immediately after creating it, only to become engaged with its plight once it returns to threaten his/her loved ones.

Towering in the darkness, its face hidden by dangling, blood-caked dreads and a voluminous hoodie, Vicaria’s ‘monster’ (a reconstituted version of her brother Chris, who was slain in a gang shooting during the opening) proves a pretty menacing and memorable creation, capable of dishing out some reassuringly gruesome ultra-violence at various points in the film. (Although, the attempt to humanise him through the use of a generic, distorted ‘monster voice’ falls rather flat, it must be said.)

Once the monster is on the scene though, the film as a whole becomes more intense, more chaotic and more convincing across the board, questioning our heroine’s motives and means in appropriately Frankensteinian fashion, and incorporating enough moral ambiguity and emotional turbulence to more than justify its existence.

An improv-heavy set of performances from the supporting cast very much helps in this regard, as characters who initially seemed pretty one-note are allowed to come into their own and acquire some depth, lending a sense of authenticity to the avowedly realist setting, and achieving some genuinely powerful moments here and there.

A particular shout out in this regard must go out to Chad L. Coleman, playing Vicaria’s father, who, to not put too fine a point on it, is fucking brilliant. As a broken man struggling to keep it together in the face of grief and substance abuse, he has pathos to burn, and in the (sadly too few) scenes when he’s on screen, the movie really takes flight in dramatic terms.

In fact, it is Coleman who carries the weight of the movie’s most cathartic moment, when he stands his ground and refuses to unlock his surrogate family’s front door for the police who are outside carrying out a door-to-door search.

Amidst all the wide-ranging political point-making and generalised rage at the state of contemporary America crammed into Story’s script, it is this tangential detail, conveyed through Coleman’s all-too-convincing fear and determination, which perhaps made the deepest impression on me, prompting me to reflect on the sobering reality of the fact that, although the family in this case have nothing to hide from the law, black people in the USA (and by extension, members of similarly marginalised communities across the globe) have nothing to gain from allowing armed cops access to their living space, but a hell of a lot to lose.

Elsewhere, Denzel Whitaker is also very good as the housing project’s resident drug dealer, blurring our sympathies as he’s revealed to be just another frightened, overgrown kid once the threat from the monster takes hold, and delivering some of the film’s very few genuine laughs in the process. Child actor Amani Summer meanwhile does great work too, in one of the more interesting portrayals of the obligatory “little girl who befriends the monster” character I can recall seeing in Frankensteinian cinema.

Whilst avoiding spoilers, I’ll conclude simply by noting that the ending of ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ is… significantly different from that of a standard Frankenstein narrative, let’s put it that way. By the time we get there though, it feels as if the film (and the characters) have earned it.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (Ken Ruder, 1972)

Yes, folks - ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. If you thought I was going to turn down the opportunity to add this one to my shelves when Mondo Macabro put it up for pre-order earlier this year… well, you clearly don’t know me too well.

Irresistible as that title may be however, it’s worth noting that this obscure and rather mysterious Franco-Spanish co-production actually found itself travelling under a wide variety of other identities as it traversed the darker corners of the cinematic underworld in the early 1970s.

English-speaking territories primarily knew it as ‘Lips of Blood’ (thus causing confusion with the Jean Rollin film of the same name), whilst Spain got a shorter, sex-free cut featuring alternate ‘clothed’ takes, under the more chaste title of ‘El Secreto de la Momia Egipcia’.

As if to highlight the differences between film markets and censorship regimes in the two co-producing nations, the French distributors meanwhile went to the opposite extreme in their marketing, inviting the public to sample ‘Perversions Sexuelles’. (Well, yes, I suppose being molested by a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy is pretty perverse, but beyond that it’s hard to believe the audience who turned out for that particular release got their money’s worth; blood-drinking aside, this Mummy’s tastes are pretty vanilla for the most past.)

But, it will always be ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ to me - a title the film first acquired upon its Canadian release under the auspices of David Cronenberg’s early sponsors Cinepix, and which, perhaps surprisingly, captures the spirit of thing more accurately than any of the alternative options listed above.

To get down to brass tacks then, what we essentially have here is a hoary and austere gothic horror framing narrative in which Spanish genre mainstay Frank Braña rides ‘cross the moors to meet his destiny at the sinister Dartmoor Castle. Therein, he meets Baron Dartmoor (George Rigaud), an amateur Egyptologist (and, it transpires, colonial grave robber), who proceeds to narrate in flashback a tale so absurd and offensive it could have been pulled straight from one of those crazy Italian porno-fumetti we all [know and love / grudgingly acknowledge the existence of / are about to google and probably lose our jobs as a result of – please delete as applicable].

So, one fateful day it seems, The Baron found himself unboxing the latest unearthed sarcophagus delivered straight to his gaff from the Valley of the Kings, only to discover that it contained not the usual papyrus-wrapped bag of bones, but the body of a perfectly preserved, eerily life-like young man (one ‘Michael Flynn’, in his only screen appearance).

Having established that his new acquisition is the body of “the depraved son of a priest, put to death for his crimes” (I wonder what the hieroglyphic character for ‘depraved’ looks like, incidentally), The Baron does what any self-respecting reclusive Victorian gentleman-scientist would do, dusting off his best Frankensteinian electrical clobber and setting out to bring the bugger back to life.

Once this small feat has been achieved with a minimum of bother though, we soon start to get an idea of why the Ancient Egyptians felt the need to get shot of this particular bastard ASAP.

Batting aside The Baron’s curious offer of a gravy-boat filled with milk, the Mummy instead hones in on a cut on the arm of Dartmoor’s man-servant John (Martin Trévières), making it clear that what he really needs to maintain his unholy existence is BLOOD, and plenty of it.

Again taking a leaf straight from the mad scientist playbook, The Baron pauses to consider the conflict between his humanitarian and scientific principles - spoiler, science wins! - and promptly sends John out to apprehend the first nubile virgin he can find wandering the blasted heathland which surrounds the castle. (The potential use of animal blood, or non-lethal transfusions from willing donors, is never considered here I note. Only the best for the Blood Mummy!)

As is the case with most of this film’s female cast, the actress who portrays the Mummy’s first victim is effectively uncredited (a list of anglicised pseudonyms on the opening credits is all we have to go on), but anyway - after guzzling down the proffered vessel of her fresh lady-blood, the Blood Mummy makes it clear that his appetites do not end there.

Rising from his slab and casually bashing John into unconsciousness, the Egyptian heads straight for the prone female captive, tears off her clothes, and, well… rapes her, to not put too fine a point on it, concluding his extended ravishment by bloodily chewing her throat out.

Using his hypnotic powers to take over John’s mind, the Mummy soon has The Baron locked behind bars in his own dungeon, forced to look on helplessly as his long-suffering man-servant is sent out again and again to find new girls, bludgeoning them into submission and carrying them back to the castle across his hunched shoulders, there to satisfy the relentless lusts of the Blood Mummy (who, monster fans will note, by this stage embodies traits usually associated with the mummy, the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster).

Bluntly staged by the filmmakers for the purposes of pure, gratuitous exploitation, these dungeon-based assaults - which comprise the bulk of the film’s middle half hour - soon prove as repetitive, joyless and robotic as the Mummy himself.

This creates an odd tonal disjuncture with the sombre and painstakingly atmospheric exterior sequences, during which reflections of twisted tree branches glimmer in icy lakes as horse gallop hither and yon, and as John (who rather resembles Paul Naschy in one his grotesque/simpleton roles) trudges out yet again across the freezing countryside, dragging captured women back to meet their doom across barren, coastal landscapes which resemble something Caspar David Friedrich might have come up with on a particularly bad day.

Once established, this grim pattern is broken only slightly when the Baron’s daughter unexpectedly arrives home from university accompanied by a friend (the latter played by Spanish horror regular Christine Gimpera). Dismounting and heading indoors, the pair are giggling like schoolgirls until - in a moment of pure, Bunuel-esque surrealism - they walk straight into a meet-cute with the Blood Mummy, leading to a surprisingly exciting horseback chase in which the malevolent Egyptian saddles up in pursuit of his prey.

After demonstrating such pluck, you might have expected the daughter (played by a very striking actress, who, again, sadly remains unidentified) to emerge as the heroine of a more, uh, ‘normal’ movie, but… nope. In fact, if there’s one thing I love about ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’, it’s its sheer, bald-faced ruthlessness.

Just as a potential hero / hapless boyfriend character was earlier thoughtlessly dispatched when he took a step backwards and fell down a well (the Mummy did not give a fuck), the daughter is soon spread-eagled down in the dungeon, receiving the full Blood Mummy treatment whilst her horrified father looks on. The only girl to get out alive (simply because the Mummy is too busy to deal with her), Gimpera’s character meanwhile flees the scene in a state of mute insanity. Nice.

When it comes to trying to fathom the mystery of precisely how and why ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ came into existence, attempting to nail the film down geographically proves a good start.

Alongside exteriors shot primarily around the coast of Brittany, it also features interior/studio work carried out on subterranean sets which I’m pretty sure are the same ones used by another Franco-Spanish co-production, Jordi Gigó’s ‘Devil’s Kiss’ (1976). Meanwhile, the chateau featured in the film is the same one seen in Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (‘La Vie Amoureuse de L'Homme Invisible’, 1970) - a film which often feels like the closest comparison to this one in terms of tone, visuals and weird/unhinged exploitation elements, and with which it was double-billed on at least one occasion [see the poster reproduced at the top of this post]. And, well… there’s a reason for that, which we’ll get on to shortly.

Though credited to a Frenchman (veteran Eurocine DP Raymond Heil), the film’s murky, autumnal photography strikes me as belonging very much in the Spanish horror tradition, heavy on the browns and greens, lending everything an antiquated, rusty/mouldy look similar to that often seen in the work of directors like Amando de Ossorio or León Klimovsky. This adds a melancholy, faintly despairing air to proceedings which is only intensified by the glacial, almost bloody-mindedly languid pacing.

The film’s music - which is fantastic - meanwhile feels very French, running the gamut from propulsive funk and weird loungey stuff to swelling, romantic strings and some creepy, avant garde electronic cues which lend an eerie, Blind Dead-esque quality to some of the Mummy’s antics.

Given the sheer variety of sounds and instrumentation featured, I had assumed whilst viewing that this soundtrack must be comprised of ‘needle-drops’ from pre-existing sources, but no - as part of his exhaustive research into the origins of this film, Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs has confirmed that ‘Love Brides..’ music credit - to composer/arranger and former pop singer Max Gazzola - is in fact genuine, and that the music featured here is (so far as we know) entirely original; which is pretty remarkable. (If any obscure reissue label moguls out there - I’m looking at you, Finders Keepers - feel like dredging up the tapes for a soundtrack LP, that would be just lovely, thanks.)

So - we’re definitely dealing here with that very particular liminal zone between Spanish and French ‘70s horror cinema, that’s for sure, with a few potential Eurocine connections swirling around in the mix… but beyond that, the question on every Euro-horror fan’s lips after first viewing this one will no doubt be: who exactly is the hilariously named ‘Ken Ruder’, the mysterious individual, referred to as an “underground American filmmaker” in some of the film’s original marketing materials, who ostensibly oversaw this baleful madness…?

When searching for an answer, it is probably instructive to consider the fact that - as noted above - ‘Love Brides..’ is a film which seems to be simultaneously pulling in two very different directions.

At times - primarily during the exterior scenes - someone definitely seems to have been attempting to make an artistically engaged, atmospheric horror film here, exhibiting an uncanny, almost ‘folk horror’-ish fixation with the natural world, including a lot of quality time spent with disorienting watery reflections, peat bogs, tree boughs, swathes of fog and a lengthy excursion through a field of glistening wheat sheaves.

Although the ‘look’ of the film’s photography remains consistent throughout, this all contrasts pretty sharply with what goes on once we get inside the castle, wherein we’re faced with the aforementioned succession of gruelling, dispiritingly quotidian mummy rape scenes - footage which, though not especially explicit, often veers toward the kind of fetishistic / quasi-pornographic realm in which the presentation of naked woman being tormented and molested becomes the central point of the exercise.

This all results in a confounding and unsettling viewing experience which often feels like a Eurocine sleaze movie directed by someone suffering from clinical depression; a prospect which very few modern viewers will be likely to even tolerate, let alone enjoy or try to understand.

Amid this entropic torpor though, ‘Love Brides..’ also incorporates frequent outbursts of pure, surrealistic strangeness, tailor-made to fascinate and perplex those of us who are likely to be more sympathetic to this kind of cinematic oddity.

When we first meet Baron Dartmoor for instance, he is thrashing a disembodied arm chained to his living room wall with a riding crop - a bizarre, rather Freudian image which remains unexplained until the film’s final act. Shortly thereafter, The Baron demonstrates his (otherwise unmentioned) magical prowess by presenting Frank Braña with a walking cane which he transforms into a writhing snake on the fireside rug - an effect realised through a totally unexpected application of genuine stop-motion animation.

This latter incident is a total non-sequitur, and is never referred to again during the film’s run time. (Given that the Baron is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, it occurred to me that perhaps he might have recovered Moses’ fabled magic staff, but if that was supposed to be the idea, it was completely overlooked in both the French and English dubbing.)

Elsewhere, more stop motion effects (presumably an expensive and time-consuming addition to a marginal production like this) are used to animate the Mummy’s disembodied hand during the film’s conclusion - which is pretty cool - whilst the incessant use of a primitive, in-camera ‘irising’ effect lends a peculiar silent movie feel to much of the footage in the film’s second half.

Combined with the mysteries surrounding the film’s creation, these inexplicable elements of weirdness seem to hint at a strange, hidden intelligence lurking behind the morbid and frequently rather dull events unfolding on-screen; an intelligence whose aims certainly seem to stretch beyond the brutish commercial concerns signalled by the film’s sexploitation content.

Indeed, if we fall back on the old saw that the best horror stories are those which emerge from genuinely disordered minds, then ‘..Blood Mummy’ ceases to be merely an ill-regarded Euro-trash obscurity and instead becomes something of an inscrutable, rather haunting quasi-classic - like a broadcast from some other cinematic universe entirely.

The punchline here though of course is that, thanks to ther aforementioned Mr Tombs’ tireless researches, we do actually now have a pretty good idea of who directed ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. In a sense, it would be nice to perpetuate the mystery by keeping everyone in the dark, but, given that the special edition version of the blu-ray containing Tombs’ comprehensive liner notes is now permanently sold out, it would seem churlish of me not to spread the good word.

So, long story short - surviving documentation from the film’s production suggests two potential suspects hiding behind the Ken Ruder pseudonym. The first is Alejandro Marti, a Barcelona-based producer and occasional director who got into political hot water in 1968 as a result of daring to make a film (the musical comedy ‘Elisabet’) in the Catalan language, and was thus presumably seeking alternative avenues for his talents at this point in time.

The second meanwhile is - wait for it - our old friend Pierre Chevalier, director of ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’, along with masses of largely forgotten softcore sex films, largely financed and distributed by (yep) Eurocine.

Whilst we have no way of ascertaining the nature or timeline of the collaboration (or lack thereof) between these two gentlemen, now that we have their names on paper, it’s naturally just a hop, skip and a jump toward speculating that Marti must have been responsible for the atmospheric / gothic exterior footage in ‘Love Brides..’, whilst Chevalier - an old hand at sexploitation, often with a fairly rape-y focus - must have been brought in to handle the more overtly sexual / gory stuff taking place down in the dungeons.

The continuity of photography, costumes and actors across the film suggests that these two directors may have worked in parallel (rather than it being a case of the sexy stuff being inserted later or some such), which is interesting, and also raises questions regarding the provenance of the alternate ‘clothed’ scenes included in the film’s Spanish cut… but anyway, not to worry! Basically, we now have a workable solution to the question of who was responsible for ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. When it comes to the why though, well… that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Though for most viewers, Ken Ruder’s magnum opus will likely prove an unpalatable cocktail of leaden pacing, gothic misery and poorly-staged rape, for certain epicurean connoisseurs of strange cinema (hi guys, you’re probably both reading), it holds the potential to soothe, hypnotise and fascinate long after the final strains of Max Gazzola’s romantic closing theme have faded away.

As I write this, I know it is destined to be one of those films which will live on, like an itch I can’t quite scratch in the back of my mind, until the next time I’m drawn to pull the disc down from the shelf like some 21st century equivalent of a dusty, thrice-translated grimoire, in search once again of lost esoteric wisdom otherwise left buried in the remains of some condemned film lab in the French-Catalan border.

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Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

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Horror Express 2020 #7: Doctor Blood’s Coffin (Sidney J. Furie, 1961)

 Following a move to London at the dawn of the 1960s, the first project young Canadian director Sidney J. Furie got off the ground was the off-brand horror picture about the son of the local GP in a picturesque Cornish village performing Frankensteinian resurrection experiments in an abandoned tin mine.

Echoing the predicament faced by Furie himself to a certain extent, the film finds Dr Peter Blood (Keiron Moore) cheerily skipping back into the quiet life of his father Robert (Ian Hunter - not the Mott The Hoople guy, needless to say) after four years spent studying bio-chemistry in Vienna. 

Given that the re-appearance of Dr Blood Jr. neatly coincides with a rash of mysterious disappearances in the local area and repeated thefts of medical equipment from his father’s clinic, few viewers will be surprised to learn the it is the younger doctor’s ‘coffin’ we’ll soon be peering into, in spite Moore’s bland, leading man good looks.

There is a certain amount of promise here - not least the somewhat novel idea of wrapping up the romantic lead and the mad scientist within the same character. Unfortunately however, Nathan Juran’s script proves decidedly ropey throughout.

Full of excruciatingly poor dialogue (“Do you know that I had analysed the protein value of an acorn by the time I was six?”; “You want me to deny God and instead kneel down and worship a new God - science!”) and low level absurdities (why do a bunch of blokes who look as if they’ve never left the local area in their lives need to rely upon guy who’s just returned from four years overseas to lead them through the local caves?), Juran’s tale also, fatally, retains some long stretches of uneventful tedium in its first half, instantly consigning ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to the status of half-remembered ignominy within the Brit-horror canon.

Given that Juran was better known as the director of ‘The Deadly Mantis’ (1957) and ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ (1958), it makes sense that (according to Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, at least) his script originally took place on the other side of the Atlantic, in an Arizona mining town. Quite why Furie went to the trouble of importing and anglicising this unpromising potboiler though is another matter entirely.

The story’s American roots can perhaps be glimpsed through the actions of Kenneth J. Warren’s policeman character (it’s incongruous to see an English copper organising the occupants of the local pub into a posse on the slightest pretext, and yelling down the phone that he needs “twenty armed men” to form roadblocks), but for the most part it seems to have survived the Transatlantic crossing surprisingly well - which is a shame in a sense, as some out-of-place Americanisms might at least have livened things up a bit.

By the time he got around to directing ‘The Ipcress File’ a few years later, Furie had reinvented himself as a mod-ish, cinematic stylist, but unfortunately there’s little sign of that ambition here, as he approaches his craft with dogged, nailed-down-camera conventionality, seemingly imitating that static, old fashioned style which Hammer’s Terrence Fisher was often (rather unfairly) accused of perpetrating.

On the plus side however, the whole thing is at least handsomely realised despite its presumably low budget, utilising some absolutely splendid - very early '60s - colour photography to highlight the picture-postcard shooting locations. (I’m obliged to mention at this juncture that Nicholas Roeg served as camera operator under ‘Zulu’ DP Stephen Dade.) Meanwhile, the film also benefits from a propulsive, Hammer style orchestral score, courtesy of Buxton Orr and the ubiquitous Philip Martell, which helps considerably with the pacing issues.

Though the cast boasts no big names, a few of the supporting players will be familiar to more discerning British horror fans. You’ll recall the aforementioned Mr. Warren for instance for taking work which should rightly have gone to Milton Reid in the likes of ‘Demons of the Mind’ and The Creeping Flesh, whilst Fred Johnson - here playing a Hugh Griffiths-esque undertaker - also essayed “old geezer” roles in ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’, ‘City of the Dead’ and ‘Brides of Dracula’ amongst others.

Most significantly of course, our leading lady (indeed, the ONLY lady on the cast list) is Hazel Court. Playing widowed nurse / mad doctor love interest Linda, she brings a strong and radiant screen presence, but her noble efforts are probably best consigned to the “does her best with a thankless part” file.

The film’s horror content meanwhile is slow to make its presence felt, but, clearly inspired by Hammer’s success in the field of medical horror, there are a few bits of ‘Curse of Frankenstein’-inspired surgical grue, including some gruesome beating heart close-ups and so forth. This is all framed by Furie without a great deal of additional, atmospheric fuss, as if he believed that success within the genre was entirely predicated upon proximity to corpses and body parts.

This approach lends the film a rather morbid, unsavoury aura, despite its relative mildness, which reaches its apex during the conclusion, when, in a fit of spurned petulance, the younger Dr Blood digs up Hazel's dead husband, who's been mouldering in the grave for over a year, and actually sticks a new heart in what's left of him. Yuck!

As a horror film, I found ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to be entertaining enough in an undemanding sort of way, despite its myriad weaknesses - perfect for the Monday night on which I chose to watch it. What I enjoyed most of all about the film though was actually its extensive use of Cornish locations. 

[The evocatively named hamlet of Zennor, near St Ives, largely stood in for village, whilst the cliff-top ruins and abandoned mine workings were played by beauty spots near St Just and Botallack - a full breakdown and a wonderful set of ‘then and now’ photos can be enjoyed on the Reel Streets website.]

As well as looking absolutely beautiful in their own right under the nigh-on atomic glare of Dade and Roeg’s Eastman Colour lighting, the village exteriors provide a wealth of time capsule-worthy period detail, which I’m sure anyone who grew up in a similarly remote corner of the British Isles should be able to enjoy. (Athough this was of course considerably before my time, the Hillman touring cars, the curtain fabrics and Court’s costumes, even the occasional glimpses of the village shop, all provide a shudder of tribal recognition.)

Even during the film’s longueurs, there’s a certain pleasure to seeing familiar actors trudging about these out-of-the-way provincial locations, so rarely visited by British genre films, which is worth the entry price alone. (In this regard, I’m reminded of the even more mundane and uneventful ‘Night of the Big Heat’, filmed in Dorset and Buckinghamshire a few years later.)

In fact, I’m even go so far as to say that gazing upon the quiet cottages of Zennor circa 1961 gave me a real twinge of sadness, reminding me that I've not been able to make it out to the coast or the countryside at all this year. All the while, the memories of earlier days and older ways of life, fleeting captured on celluloid here as an incidental backdrop to the clumsy tale of Dr Blood gadding about with his chloroform and formaldehyde bothering Hazel Court, fade further out of sight with each turn of the season, buried deeper ‘neath the wheely-bins and people-carriers of the 21st century day-to-day.

Lovecraft on Film: Re-animator (1985) and the Great ‘70s Lovecraft Drought. (Part # 2 of 2)

III.

“I must say Dr. Hill, I'm very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed. You're not even a second-rate scientist!”
- Herbert West, ‘Re-animator’ (1985)

[You can read Part # 1 of this post here.]

Prior to the surprise success of its film adaptation, H.P. Lovecraft’s six part serial ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ had remained a contentious and obscure item within the author’s bibliography.

Predating Lovecraft’s tenure as a doyen of the ‘Weird Tales’ demi-monde, the serial’s completion dates back to his earlier involvement in the slightly more genteel ‘amateur publishing’ scene, originally appearing in six monthly instalments in a periodical named ‘Home Brew’ between February and July 1922. In view of Home Brew’s “semipro” status, it has generally been assumed that the publication of ‘Herbert West..’ represented Lovecraft’s very first paid writing gig (he later boasted that he received five dollars per instalment).

Given that Home Brew appears to have been a primarily humourous / satirical publication, billing itself as ‘America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine’, and sometimes ‘A Thirst Quencher for Lovers of Personal Liberty’ (whatever that was supposed to imply circa 1922), one wonders how its readership can possibly have reacted to the then-unknown Lovecraft exercising his liberty by banging out a series of inordinately gruesome and morbid variations on the Frankenstein mythos.

Presumably the response can’t have been entirely negative however, given that ‘Home Brew’ went on to publish HPL’s ‘The Lurking Fear’ the following year, prominently announcing it on the cover of their January 1923 edition.

The June 1922 edition of ‘Home Brew’, featuring the penultimate chapter of ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ – billed top left as “The HORROR from the SHADOWS – Better than Edgar Allen Poe [sic]” - alongside what look to be some “pungent jests” at the expense of the era's Women's Movement, and a “Humorous Tale of Hootchers”, whatever they might be.

In spite of this unlikely origin however, ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ remains one of the most alarming, gore-splattered and generally over-the-top horror stories Lovecraft ever signed his name to, as well as one of the most straight-forwardly commercial. In fact, it has often been suggested that Lovecraft composed the story as a deliberate parody of the kind of crude and blood-thirsty tales peddled by the era’s pulps - hence its presence in what was ostensibly a ‘humour’ magazine, I suppose.

Possibly the author even stated this himself at some point (having not ploughed through the entirety of his voluminous correspondence, I’m unsure), but even so, it’s a theory that has never really rung true to me.

For one thing, ‘Herbert West…’ is rendered in dense and atmospheric prose which, though certainly pretty bizarre, is no less tortuously worked over than that of Lovecraft’s quote-unquote ‘serious’ tales, betraying little sign of any obvious ‘gags’. And besides – were there really a sufficient number of similar tales being published in early ‘20s pulps for Lovecraft to undertake a ‘parody’ of them…?

Again, I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of the market for weird/macabre fiction in the early 1920s, but I find it hard to believe that there was much of this kind of anatomically explicit, corpse-mangling body horror doing the rounds at the time (indeed, the notorious ‘weird menace’ / ‘shudder-pulp’ subgenre didn’t even make an appearance on America’s newsstands until the 1930s).

In terms of the general extremity of its content in fact, ‘Herbert West..’ often feels shockingly ahead of its time. It’s certainly difficult to locate many parodic chuckles amongst the story’s cannibalised children and literally ankle-deep gore, or in such chilling observations as, “he usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough”.

At a push, you could perhaps detect a certain strain of humour in Herbert West’s obsessive single-mindedness, and in his repeated insistence that the horrors perpetrated by his reanimated corpses are simply the result of his being forced to work with raw materials which are “not fresh enough” – elements with could, at a stretch, have provided the impetus for the blackly comic tone which came to define Dennis Paoli’s script for Gordon’s film.

Either way, it is certainly easy to see the kernel of Jeffrey Combs’ performance as West in Lovecraft’s descriptions of the character as, “..a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment, a languid Elagabalus of the tombs”, “..gloat[ing] calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust”. (1)

For the most part though, as with much of Lovecraft’s later work, it is difficult to really judge how much of the laughter and disbelief engendered by the tale’s assorted craziness was intentional, and how much simply the result of HPL’s weird imagination shooting off sparks in random directions, overtaking his ability to effectively convey his ideas in words.

Are we meant to laugh at the idea of West absent-mindedly depositing the severed head of Major Sir Eric Clapham-Lee in a “hellish vat” of “reptile embryo tissue”? Or at the “shocking riot” later precipitated by the ragged platoon of misfit zombies led by the decapitated airman and his replica wax head, and the baffled press report of their activities recounted by our narrator (“..he was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried”)? In what tone of voice are we to read Lovecraft’s description of the final chapter’s titular ‘Tomb-Legions’ as being variously “human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all”?

From a modern perspective, it’s difficult not to find at least some amusement in all this (indeed, the OTT zaniness of the story’s final scenes was captured extremely well by Brain Yuzna’s sequel ‘Bride of Reanimator’ (1990), which incorporates quite a lot of the Lovecraft material excised from the first film), but really, these antics are no more surreal than the kind of off-kilter physical absurdities which frequently pop up in Lovecraft’s later, more ‘serious’ tales. (Just think for instance of the revelation of Wilbur Wheatley’s mutant pineapple body in ‘The Dunwich Horror’, or the wooden head and phonograph apparatus used by the alien Mi-Go to fool our protagonist into thinking he is conversing with a human being in ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, to name but a few.)

There is certainly little to laugh at however in the heady philosophical themes which ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ dabbles with. Both pre-figuring the bleak ‘cosmicism’ of Lovecraft’s later work and echoing the scientific angst of Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, the passages concerning Herbert West’s explicit desire to “..relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth” through his experiments speaks for themselves, with the mad medical student’s proclamations of his ultra-materialist beliefs feeling very much like a reflection of Lovecraft’s own - especially when our unnamed narrator begins railing bitterly against the cozy, superstitious illusions clung to by the complacent academic establishment, as represented by the Miskatonic University Medical School’s esteemed Dean Halsey.

In contrast to his friend’s militant insistence upon “..the essentially mechanistic nature of life,” our narrator’s nonetheless harbours some hopes of extracting news of the afterlife from the duo’s revitalised subjects (he “..yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers”, he admits), receiving nothing but chattering gibberish and howls of pain for his trouble (along with a memorable confession of his partners murderous intent). This feels like a dark and gloating dismissal of the ‘soul’ or divine spark within humanity on Lovecraft’s part, directly anticipating the grimly mechanistic view of life underpinning the post-Romero zombie mythos, into whose lineage Gordon’s film would neatly slot itself over six decades later.

However it was intended to be read though, one thing we know for certain about ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ is that Lovecraft didn’t like it, decrying it in later years as worthless hack work which he only bothered completing for the money. (That $5 a month must have bought a lot of ham n’ beans for a young bachelor of Providence in the early ‘20s.)

This distaste for the material was apparently shared by Lovecraft’s primary literary executor, August Derleth, who for decades pointedly excluded ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ from any of the collections of Lovecraft’s work posthumously published by his Arkham House imprint – an omission mirrored by the subsequent mass-market Lovecraft paperbacks of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which tended to replicate Arkham House’s texts wholesale. (2)

Recalling the origins of his film, Stuart Gordon has often stated that, though he’d read Lovecraft, he was entirely unaware of ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ until a conversation about the absence of any contemporary Frankenstein movies led a friend to suggest he check it out as a potential source for his new horror project.

Following up on this lead, Gordon recalls that he was forced to put in an inter-library loan request with the Chicago Public Library, and, six months later, found himself summoned by telephone to consult the dusty, yellowing pile of pulp magazines which the noble librarians had diligently tracked down for him (presumably either the original ‘Home Brew’ issues or a 1941 set of re-prints in ‘Weird Tales’). Impressed with what he read, Gordon convinced the library staff to let him take a xerox of the story’s six chapters, and it is from this copy that the project which eventually became ‘Re-animator’ began to take shape.(3)

IV.

“Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow!”
- Herbert West, ‘Re-animator’ (1985)

In looking at the way in which Lovecraft’s episodic, repetitious and frequently distasteful tale was transformed into a lean, commercially viable 90 minute feature film by ‘Re-animator’s production team, it will probably prove most instructive to consider the aspects of the story which were removed, and the ways in which their absence affected the remaining material as the project underwent a rather convoluted transition from a filmed theatrical production, to a proposed series of 30 minute TV episodes, to a stand-alone feature.

Most obviously, we have the filmmakers’ decision to shift the action to the present day – a budgetary necessity which allows Herbert West’s depredations to play out against a drab backdrop of generic hospital corridors, basement operating rooms and college dorms, immediately reclaiming the vast quantities of dough which would no doubt have been shelled out on vintage sets, costumes and period appropriate medical equipment, but perhaps also jettisoning Lovecraft’s wildly-wrought atmosphere of squalid, Edwardian gothic creepery in the process, foregrounding realism and losing that cherished sense of a world in which pieces of crockery, minor ailments and weather alike can all be justifiably described as ‘unnameable’.

Naturally, modernising the story meant ditching the outbreak of ‘plague’ which consumes Arkham in the story’s second chapter (‘The Plague-Daemon’), claiming the life of the esteemed Dean Halsey. (In typically over-wrought fashion, Lovecraft here make it sound as if the Black Death has finally reached New England – “..and then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus,” etc.) Also crossed out at this point, one assumes, was the entirety of chapter #5 (‘The Horror from the Shadows’), which sees West and his unnamed assistant enrolling in the Canadian Army as volunteer medics prior to the U.S.A.’s entry into World War One, thus allowing them to take advantage of the steady supply of fresh meat offered by the carnage of the Western Front. (4)

Though elements from both these chapters were cleverly integrated into Paoli’s eventual shooting script, we can nonetheless imagine the profound sense of relief producer Brian Yuzna must have felt as he consigned the pages detailing these assorted episodes to the office waste paper bin.

When interviewed by the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast in 2009, Stuart Gordon also made clear that another section of Lovecraft’s tale never considered for adaptation was chapter # 3 (‘Six Shots by Moonlight’), in which West and the story’s narrator find themselves providing medical assistance to an illegal boxing ring, eventually administering their re-agent to the body of a deceased black pugilist, with predictably catastrophic results. (5)

Though this chapter is rich in potentially cinematic imagery, the main reason for its omission will, I think, be immediately clear to most modern readers. Namely, it represents one of the most noxious examples of racism in Lovecraft’s fiction, rivalled only by his singularly disturbing 1925 tale ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Alongside the inevitable outburst of choice ‘othering’/dehumanising verbiage thrown in the direction of the “negro” boxer here furthermore, it’s interesting to note an even greater quantity of hatred is directed toward the Italian and Irish population who comprise the “polyglot” labour force of the fictional factory town of Bolton.

Forcibly reminding us of Lovecraft’s deep-rooted fear and loathing of pretty much everything in the world except Anglo-Saxon men of proven aristocratic lineage, his characterisation of these recent immigrants as a kind of brutal, barely sentient under-class is spiteful and ignorant in the extreme, leaving a bad taste in the mouth which significantly undermines the ghoulish pleasure we might otherwise take in the chapter’s memorably horrific finale – an image which in itself would likely have proved a bit too much for even the most liberal of rating/censorship boards, had it made it to the screen in the mid ‘80s. All in all then, no surprise perhaps that this entire episode met with a clear “no f-ing way” from the budding filmmakers.

Further changes meanwhile were necessitated by the casting of Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, as the actor’s dark complexion and commanding presence immediately contrasted with Lovecraft’s repeated descriptions of his character’s “yellow hair, pale blue eyes and soft voice” – an example of the curious ambiguity Lovecraft’s work of this era seems to express toward the Teutonic racial ideals one would naturally have expected him to gravitate toward, given his virulent white supremacism. (See also his fascinating 1920 story ‘The Temple’, which seems to fall back on left-over WWI propaganda portrayals of the dastardly Hun, and the disquiet he apparently expressed to friends regarding the rise of Nazism during the 1930s.)

Yet another element excised from the film meanwhile was the story’s aforementioned philosophical angle, with the tightly paced horror/action/comedy formula understandably offering little opportunity to mull over the finer points of West’s materialist zealotry (although the motif of the re-animators attempting to obtain a message from the after-life is amusingly reprised in the “you…. BASTARD” exchange between West and Dr Hill’s severed noggin).

Rather than being consciously rejected by Gordon and Paoli however, one imagines that this aspect of the story was side-lined simply because it felt unnecessary to re-state it in the context of the mid 1980s.

When Lovecraft was writing, his strident expression of an almost misanthropically cruel scientific atheism, alongside his portrayal of the human body as profane, dead clay powered only by crude, electrical impulses, must have seemed a shocking, or at least provocative, statement of intent. Sixty years later however, such a stance was pretty much the default expectation for an audience of horror fans shaped by the work of Romero, Fulci and Cronenberg (not to mention the increasingly grotesque run of European Frankenstein movies which proceeded them in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Wasting time allowing the characters to pontificate about it would simply have been surplus to requirements. Zombies, man - we get it.

Far more of a shocker for the Lovecraft purists who dutifully rocked up to witness ‘Re-animator’ upon its release in 1985 must have been – brace yourselves – the addition of a female character to the story… and one who persists in going to bed with men, and taking her clothes off, even!

We needn’t dwell too much here upon Lovecraft’s pointed avoidance of the feminine within his fiction, but suffice to say, whilst nine out of ten horror fans would probably agree that Barbara Crampton’s performance as Megan Halsey adds immeasurably to ‘Re-animator’s success as a movie, her presence must similarly have proved the last straw for some of the dustier defenders of the author’s literary legacy.

Whilst most of us can likewise agree that the future of Lovecraftian cinema was better off without such hypothetical outraged purists however, there is immense irony in the fact that, although he would go on to establish himself as the greatest booster for Lovecraft’s work cinema has yet known, Stuart Gordon initially succeeded in putting ol’ H.P. back on the filmic map with an adaptation entirely lacking in any of the ideas or aesthetic tropes we would generally consider “Lovecraftian”.

Indeed, by systematically nixing the story’s gothic/period atmosphere, metaphysical pondering and overtones of racist/classist white male hysteria, Gordon and his collaborators transformed ‘Re-animator’ into a sleek, contemporary, audience-pleasing horror movie, so far removed from the ‘feel’ of its contentious literary precursor that, given the story’s obscurity at the time the film was made, they could probably have gotten away with not crediting their source material at all, had they wished to. Scrub out the script’s references to Arkham and Miskatonic, and in all likelihood, only a handful of scholars and ‘Weird Tales’ obsessives would even have noticed the theft. And, in the pre-internet era, what would a few spluttering editorials in ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ have mattered anyway?

But, Gordon and Yuzna are honest gents, and they did credit their sources, even allowing executive producer/Empire Pictures head honcho Charles Band to proudly trumpet “H.P. Lovecraft’s classic tale of terror..” on the film’s posters and other marketing materials. In fact, this billing gels rather nicely with the film’s bold, orchestral score (from Band’s brother Richard), it’s luminescent animated credits sequence, and the broad, theatrical acting styles favoured by Gordon, all of which help lend a touch of literary ‘classicism’ to proceedings, squaring the circle of Lovecraftian cinema to that date by evoking the conventions of the Corman/Poe cycle of the 1960s, whilst at the same time rekindling the frayed links between horror cinema and Lovecraft/Weird Tales fandom for a new generation of insurgent, VHS-rocking gorehounds.

Whether any of the comparative flood of Lovecraft adaptations that have made it to the screen in subsequent decades have matched up to ‘Re-animator’s success as a perfectly formed entertainment is debatable, but making a Lovecraft movie is always a bold move, and I’d contest that even the wonkiest and most misguided attempts to do so have helped enrich our culture in some small fashion. Certainly more-so than the yawning void which preceded ‘Re-animator’s release through the ‘70s, that’s for sure, and for breaking the “unfilmable” curse, we owe Gordon, Yuzna, Paoli and co. a mighty thanks.

---

(1) Elagabalus = Roman emperor from 218 to 222AD who rose to power aged 14, and died aged 18 in an assassination plot reportedly orchestrated by his own grandmother, following a reign characterised by an unprecedented degree of sexual depravity and religious idolatry. Boy, those Romans, eh? (Thanks Wikipedia.)

(2) As far as I’m aware, the first publication of ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ subsequent to it’s original appearance in ‘Home Brew’ and the 1942 re-print in ‘Weird Tales’ came in Arkham House’s 1987 anthology ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’, the final collection in a three volume set of Lovecraft’s work edited by S.T. Joshi, which has been widely reprinted ever since. Though Arkham House claimed the contents of these collections were “selected by August Derleth” (who passed away in 1971), one naturally suspects that the inclusion of ‘Herbert West..’ must have been influenced by the recent success of Gordon’s film. (Source.)

(3) Although I don’t have a print source for this story, you can hear Gordon reiterate it in various place – the 2007 ‘Re-animator: Ressurectus’ documentary, his director’s commentary track for the film, and during his aforementioned guest appearance on the above-mentioned H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, to name but a few.

(4) One writer who clearly did recall Herbert West’s adventures on the Western Front is Kim Newman, who includes West as a minor character in his WWI-set ‘Anno Dracula’ sequel ‘The Bloody Red Baron’ (1994), which sees him operating a deranged field hospital of pain, working under the tutelage of his equally misunderstood predecessor, the notorious Dr Moreau.

(5) Episodes 24 and 25 of the podcast, for the record – if you’ve enjoyed reading all this, you’ll probably find them worth a listen.

Lovecraft on Film: Reanimator (1985) and the Great ‘70s Lovecraft Drought. (Part # 1 of 2)

I.

“While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”
- H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Herbert West: Re-animator’

To get this out of the way right from the outset: this post (split into two parts for reasons of length and general practicality) is not going to be a conventional review of Stuart Gordon’s ‘Re-animator’.

I mean, if you’re reading this blog, chances are you like horror movies. And if you like horror reviews, chances are you’re already familiar with ‘Re-animator’. And if you’re already familiar with ‘Re-animator’, chances are you like it. I know I certainly do.

In fact, Stuart Gordon is one of the few living genre directors of whom I can truthfully say that I have seen most of the films, and have enjoyed all of them (yes, even ‘Space Truckers’). I’m a fan, it’s fair to say, but even so, I’d find it difficult to arguable against the proposition that Gordon’s first feature remains his very best.

From the mordant wit of Dennis Paoli’s script, to a magnificent set of performances provided by Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott and David Gale (all adhering perfectly to the Vincent Price principle of going BIG whilst keeping a tight hand on the reins), to the unhinged sense of excess and bad taste brought to the project by producer Brian Yuzna and the gifted special effects team… what can you say, it’s a classic of the genre. One of those rare instances when all the stars align, all the elements are in place, and a great movie is summoned forth.

Beyond that however, I simply don’t have much to say about it, to be honest. In keeping with the wider remit I’ve tried to establish in earlier instalments of this ‘Lovecraft on Film’ series [see sidebar for links] therefore, I thought it might be more interesting to explore the wider circumstances which led Gordon and his collaborators to reignite the possibilities of adapting H.P. Lovecraft for the screen through the least quote-unquote “Lovecraftian” route imaginable, and before that, to reflect upon the remarkable fact that, during the fifteen years which preceded the release of ‘Re-animator’, no feature length film based on Lovecraft’s writings made it to the screen, anywhere in the world.

Given the extent to which Lovecraft’s influence has saturated horror culture these days, and particularly in view of the fact that the ‘70s saw sales of his fiction rise exponentially as the market for paperback horror took off and prime-mover Stephen King began talking him up as a key influence, such a statement seems extraordinary, but nonetheless, it’s true.

Between the release of AIP’s The Dunwich Horror in January 1970 and ‘Re-animator’ in October 1985, the only entries on IMDB which credit H.P. Lovecraft as a source are two episodes of the ‘Night Gallery’ TV series (both 1971), a fifty-minute West German TV movie based on ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ (H.P. Lovecraft: Schatten aus der Zeit (1975), starring Anton Diffring, no less), a couple of episodes of Italian TV anthologies in the early ‘80s (based on ‘The Silver Key’ and ‘The Thing On The Doorstep’ respectively), and two amateur short films based on ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ and ‘Pickman’s Model’ respectively. In terms of feature films though – zilch. (1)

So, caused the dark old well dry up for so long, following a brief burst of productivity during the 1960s? Behold, as assorted answers to that question crawl out of the murk and present themselves for inspection!

For one thing, none of the four Lovecraft adaptations made during the ‘60s proved particularly successful, either critically or commercially. Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace probably did least worst of the bunch, but it has still tended to get lost in the shuffle amongst the director’s more fondly remembered gothic films, and, given its branding as an ersatz Poe movie, few besides diehard genre fans would even have acknowledged it as a Lovecraft adaptation at the time. The three subsequent films meanwhile all found themselves variously written off as obscurities, embarrassments or disasters… which can scarcely have done much to encourage prospective producers to take a dip in the same stagnant waters.

Then, for another thing, we need to address that old chestnut about horror cinema ‘changing’ through the ‘70s, which I’m sure I don’t need to bore you with at length here. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ > ‘Last House On The Left’ > ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ – you know the score. Although gothic horror may have limped on in various mutant iterations in Europe, as far as the U.S. box office was concerned, gothic was already pretty much six feet under by the turn of the decade, surviving only in the tongue-in-cheek / post-modern context of the ‘Count Yorga’ movies and Dan Curtis’s ‘Dark Shadows’ franchise.

Of course, fans of HPL’s literary work could probably argue for days on end about the extent to which his writing may or may not be considered ‘gothic’, but so far as the movers n’ shakers on the shadier end of the mid-century U.S. film industry were concerned, Lovecraft was simply the guy you went to when you’d run out of Poe. And, after AIP gave up on their dogged attempts to milk a few more bucks from Edgar Allan following the flaccid reception accorded to Gordon Hessler’s deeply muddled ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in July 1971, Poe movies were well and truly off the menu in America for a good long while – never mind those bearing the name of his perceived literary successor.

And, as if that wasn’t enough to discourage potential producers, we’re also talking here about an era in which the successive impact of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘The Omen’ had helped ensure that, if you did want to place your bets on a fantastical / metaphysical horror movie, you’d damn well better stick to the familiar world of Christian dualism -- the very thing which Lovecraft pointedly excised from his fiction from the outset, arguing that it was boring, played out and antithetical to his essentially scientific, atheistic worldview.

After all, with an international audience revved up and hungry for all things Satan, what filmmakers in their right mind would waste their time struggling to bring the dread realm of Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth to the screen? I mean, just think how many black candles and scary contact lenses you could get for the same outlay! It would be little short of lunacy.

Along similar lines meanwhile, I also have an inkling that, in some ways, the more people actually read Lovecraft during these years, and the more the outré nature of his work was acknowledged and discussed, the less likely screen adaptations of his work became. After all, fools rush in etc. Given that the Lovecraft movies produced during the ‘60s, when his work remained relatively obscure, continued to be written off as failures, could it have been during the following decade that the author’s reputation as being “unfilmable” really took hold…?

As comprehensively unpromising as the outlook for full-blooded Lovecraftian cinema may have been during these years however, the extent to which his ideas began to seep into popular culture through other means cannot by overestimated, and the process by which his influence gradually began to seep up through the floorboards of the horror genre through some weird kind of fanboy osmosis, making its presence felt it a series of ostensibly unrelated movies, remains fascinating.

II.

“The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself.”
- H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’

I’m sure there must be other examples I’ve overlooked (suggestions to the usual address please), but so far as I’m aware at the time of writing, the only commercially released American horror film of the 1970s to take significant inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft was Willard Hyatt & Gloria Katz’ retrospectively revered ‘Messiah of Evil’ (1972).

In addition to winning praise from its fans for a nebulously defined “Lovecraftian atmosphere”, ‘Messiah..’ goes as far as to borrow its basic set-up (protagonist seeks lost relative in coastal town controlled by sinister cult) and a number of plot points from HPL’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1931), with Elisha Cook Jr’s wonderful turn as an exposition-spouting alcoholic hobo in particular seemingly modelled directly upon the story’s Zadok Allen character.

Though only published posthumously, ‘..Innsmouth’ certainly stands out one of Lovecraft’s more cinematic and comparatively action-packed tales, and it is possible that Hyatt & Katz’ script for ‘Messiah of Evil’ may have even started life as a direct adaptation. Wisely though perhaps, the couple took the decision to entirely ditch both the story’s Cthulhu Mythos references and Lovecraft’s barely-concealed fears of racial miscegenation, instead introducing their own equally compelling and ambiguous supernatural schema which, together with the film’s bold and expressionistic visual style, has helped ‘Messiah..’ live on as a haunting and fascinating artefact, widely regarded as one of the era’s most unique and accomplished independent horror films.

Elisha Cook Jr tells of the Dark Stranger and the Blood Moon in ‘Messiah of Evil’ (1972).

After that though, the trail pretty much goes cold in terms of Lovecraftian cinema for the remainder of the ‘70s, only really picking up at the dawn of the 1980s, by which point wink-nod references to Lovecraft and his mythos had firmly established themselves as a common-place in the in-joke-happy, none-more-nerdy domains of comic books, fanzines and RPGs, slowly but surely making their way into heavy metal lyrics (Metallica’s ‘The Call of Ktulu’ appeared on ‘Ride the Lightning’ in ’84, most significantly), and, inevitably, the newly resurgent world of independent / underground horror cinema.

First off the slab according to my calculations was Lucio Fulci’s defiantly nonsensical gore-fest ‘Paura Nella Città Dei Morti Viventi’ [‘City of the Living Dead’], released in Italy in August 1980, which pays direct tribute to Lovecraft by establishing its setting as the fog-strewn New England town of Dunwich, even though it otherwise relies such familiar horror tropes as dead priests, ‘hell’, telekinesis and zombies to do its dirty work.

Lovecraft’s work seems to have been fairly widely read in translation in Italy (Mario Bava declared himself a fan during the ‘60s), and suffice to say, Fulci and/or his co-writer Dardano Sacchetti must surely have been devotees of the Weird Tales canon, as is made abundantly clear by their next film, the legendary ‘L’ Aldilà’ [‘The Beyond’], first unleashed upon a paying public in April 1981.

A 1974 Italian Lovecraft collection (name & rather way-out cover illustration both taken from ‘Dreams in the Witch House’), from the personal library of Dino de Laurentiis, no less. (Yours on Ebay for $70.86 U.S. at the time of writing.)

Although it shifts its action down the East Coast to a particularly swampy New Orleans, and retains the reanimated corpses and hell-fixated metaphysics of its predecessor, ‘The Beyond’s evocative, period-set opening - in which a posse of lantern-bearing Edwardian townsfolk cross a lake to forcibly put an end to some black magickal goings-on in the lower depths of the film’s decrepit Southern gothic hotel - bears more than a passing resemblance to Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (written 1927 / published 1941), as well as sharing that novel’s musty, decrepit atmosphere.

Curiously though, ‘The Beyond’s script also goes on to repeatedly evoke, not the more famous Necronomicon, but The Book of Eibon – a rival grimoire created by Lovecraft’s friend and contemporary Clark Ashton Smith in his 1933 Hyperborean tale ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ and subsequently added to the ever-expanding lists of forbidden tomes which HPL liked to incorporate into his tales, before its history and contents were significantly expanded upon by Lin Carter, in his later fantasy work and posthumous C.A.S. ‘collaborations’.

Being somewhat of a pedant regarding such things (as you may have noted), I’ve often found myself sitting through ‘The Beyond’s assorted eye-gougings and face-meltings wondering exactly what led Fulci & Sacchetti to this fairly esoteric bit of mythos referencin’. Did the Necronomicon already feel a bit obvious and old hat by this point? Were they worried about copyright, or about the expectations that referencing the more famous tome might create? Or, did ‘The Book of Eibon’ simply sound cooler, and more mysterious..? Who knows.

Speaking of grimoires meanwhile, the film which arguably did more to raise awareness of the Lovecraft mythos than anything before or since was just around the corner whilst Fulci & co were raising hell at the Seven Doors Hotel. If you’ve kept reading this far, you probably won’t need me to remind you that ‘The Evil Dead’ premiered in October 1981, and that its enthusiastic portrayal of the dread Necronomicon – writhing supernatural faces carved into the human skin of its binding, in a beautiful piece of production design – soon became the stuff of pop culture legend.

Actually, the extent to which Sam Raimi and his collaborators were directly inspired by Lovecraft in their decision to include the book in their film is debatable – its portrayal as a “Sumerian book of the dead” points instead to the influence of the bogus ‘Simon’ Necronomicon which emerged from the scene surrounding Manhattan’s ‘Magickal Childe’ occult supply shop in 1977 – but nonetheless, the film’s impact in terms of cementing the Mad Arab’s fearful tome in the public consciousness and encouraging horror fans across the globe to investigate its literary origins, cannot be underestimated. (2)

Post-‘Evil Dead’, we begin to see this kind of veiled Lovecraft referencin’ seeping into Hollywood studio productions for the first time, even whilst direct attributions or adaptations were not yet forthcoming.

It would perhaps be stretching the point a little to claim that John Carpenter’s esteemed ‘The Thing’ (released in June 1982) seems to draw upon imagery and ideas taken from Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ (written 1931 / published 1936) in addition to its more obvious sources (the 1951 Hawks/Nyby film, John W. Campbell’s original story, ‘Alien’) – but, we certainly wouldn’t be the first to make this connection, and the fact that Carpenter went on the seed similarly oblique Lovecraftian ideas into his later films (‘Prince of Darkness’ (1987), ‘In The Mouth of Madness’ (1994)) likewise lends weight to the argument. (3)

Looking at the other big names in horror meanwhile, we could perhaps read the ‘Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’ segment of George Romero & Stephen King’s anthology ‘Creepshow’ (1982) as a tribute to Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out of Space’ (1927), but, as Kim Newman has puckishly observed on at least one occasion, the biggest Cthulhu Mythos movie of the 1980s was actually none other than ‘Ghostbusters’ (1984).

I mean, just think about it – strangely-named, malevolent gods breaking through from other dimensions, assorted rambling about keys and gatekeepers, mind-bending non-Euclidian geometry? Whichever way you care to look at it, the final act of ‘Ghostbusters’ gets closer to the heart of HPL’s vision than anything that had been put on screen up to this point.

The Temple of Gozer rises from the unfathomable abyss in ‘Ghostbusters’ (1984).

The most extraordinary aspect of this realisation I think is that, by throwing all this stuff into their script, Ramis & Aykroyd were essentially parodying a style of horror which, in cinematic terms at least, didn’t even exist in any meaningful form - a testament to the extent to which Lovecraft’s influence had seeped into the foundations of American culture, in spite of the entertainment industry’s reluctance to approach his work directly.

And, it’s at this point that we re-introduce our friend Stuart Gordon, a former ‘60s radical and principal founder of Illinois’s confrontational Screw Theatre ensemble, who, when he started work on the project which became ‘Re-animator’, remained a director of Chicago’s successful, and slightly more conventional, Organic Theatre Company, which he had helped establish in 1969 in partnership with his wife, actress Caroline Purdy-Gordon.

Though Gordon had no previous experience in the film industry, the early ‘80s found him with a yen to move into the realm of film and/or TV production, and, making a quick scan of the preceding years’ budgets and box office, he soon decided, as so many had before him, that a horror project would seem an expedite way to make the transition.

As a keen reader of Lovecraft and Poe, we can easily imagine Gordon gleefully scanning back through his favourite stories in search of budget conscious inspiration… but the path which eventually led him to almost single-handedly reinvent the film industry’s perception of H.P. Lovecraft took him considerably beyond his well-thumbed paperbacks.

To be continued…

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(1) The Music of Erich Zann (John Strysik, 1980) runs 17 minutes and was screened at the Young Chicago Filmmakers Festival in October 1980. Pickman’s Model (Cathy Welch, 1981) runs 32 minutes and screened at some point that year in Austin, Texas. To my knowledge, neither of these films has ever been commercially released, but if you know where I can track copies down, please feel free to hit me up, because I’d love to be able to factor them into my overview of Lovecraftian cinema at some point.

(2) A bit of a digression, but for anyone curious about the origins of the ‘Simon’ Necronomicon, I highly recommend this 2014 NY Press article, which is a great read re: ‘70s NY counter-cultural weirdness more generally, although, ironically in view of the subject matter, the NY Press website neglects to include a by-line telling us who actually wrote the damned thing.

(3) It’s interesting to note that the three Carpenter films which draw upon Lovecraftian imagery are the same ones the director has retrospectively grouped together as what he deems his “apocalypse trilogy”. Coincidence? Probably. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be great if Carpenter had quit tippy-tapping around the margins of the mythos and make a full-blooded Lovecraft movie? Come on John - as the tale of Herbert West so clearly reminds us, it’s never too late!