Masters of Horror, episode 2: H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House (Stuart Gordon, 2005)
Stuart Gordon, along with longtime collaborator, producer and director Brian Yuzna is definitely the foremost adapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for the screen. The classic horror comedy Re-Animator is probably the best known example, but the recent Dagon is supposed to be quite good too. I admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Gordon’s work. It has the trappings of Lovecraft’s fiction, but none of the mood. The adaptations to modern times are often incongruent, especially given Lovecraft’s insistence on archaic vocabulary and a gothic mood. Also, there’s frequently both sex and comedy mixed in. Lovecraft himself probably never laughed in his life, and had little if any sex life to speak of. So the tone, for me, just doesn’t work, although I think Re-Animator is hilarious, of course.
Episode 2 of Masters of Horror is an adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House, one of my personal favorite Lovecraft stories, along with The Rats in the Walls. Both of these stories prominently feature rats that are heard scurrying around inside the walls (which, in turn, makes me wonder how much of horror/comedy classic Of Unknown Origin was inspired by Lovecraft), but that’s not what I like or find scary about them. Unlike some people, I’m not particularly scared of rats. Indeed, the first year I was in Mexico, we trapped a rat by hand in the kitchen of our rented house, Hans Petter, in an act of physical elegance and swiftness I’d thought him incapable of, trapped the fleeing rat under the sole of his combat boot, holding it fast without killing it, and it fell upon me to bash its head in with a piece of pipe. I didn’t particularly enjoy that experience, and I was shaken by it, but it didn’t scare me.
What always scared me about Dreams in the Witch-House was the brooding, creeping menace of the setting. It’s told in retrospect, so there’s an inevitability of the goings-on, and, as in many other Lovecraft tales, the certainty that they can only end badly.
Stuart Gordon keeps a lot of the main threads of the story in his adaptation. Most of the characters are maintained, merely updated to the modern-day setting. There’s also little to no comedy elements, which seemed like a good idea to me. However, there are also large changes. Gordon’s Gilman character knows nothing of the house and its history when he moves in, which presses the plot into a standard complex discovery pattern. Also, Gordon introduces a love interest, a poor next-door neighbour with an infant child, and then uses a vision of her naked body in a gratuitous scene whose ending echoes the beauty-to-crone transformation in The Shining, but is much less effective.
The updating of the “science” is surprisingly effective. While Lovecraft’s original concept was based on (then very new) quantum physics and a somewhat twisted reading of non-euclidean geometry, Gordon updates it to involve superstring theory and brane cosmology, and doesn’t even screw up the terminology or the explanations too much. Within the setting of the story, it makes a lot of sense, even though our protagonist’s acceptance of the weird angles in his room being exactly like the ones he’s working on for his thesis is a bit convenient and hard to believe.
In what I think is the biggest problem, the Cthulhu mythos aspects of the story are replaced by a rather conventional setup involving a traditional witch, satan worship, and the blood sacrifice of infants. Instead of making the traditional witch folklore of New England a part of the greater cosmic horror of the mythos, with the witch sabbat Black Man being a form of Nyarlathotep, like Lovecraft does, Gordon takes the witch stories at face value, making the story much more small-scale. The love interest’s child is of course the one chosen for the blood sacrifice, and Gilman himself is compelled to perform the deed.
Also, Brown Jenkin, the rat-human hybrid familiar to the witch, is not at all as creepy and monstrous as in the story. It’s a human actor’s head pasted onto a rat’s body, and although the compositing effect isn’t bad, the result is more slightly comical than it is terrifying. And Brown Jenkin was scary as hell in the story, so that’s a bit of a disappointment for me.
It’s not particularly creepy or scary throughout, and it’s largely predictable, especially the parts that are different from the original story. What does work is the ending. Instead of shying away, Gordon forges ahead with a downer ending in which almost everything that can go wrong, does. People end up in insane asylums, commit suicide, are tunnelled through by rats, etc., and those final 5-10 minutes work well. The final shot of the “Room for Rent” sign outside of the witch-house is slightly reminiscent of 80s horror which always ended with a “get ready for the sequel” shot, but it works. If the tension and stakes had been higher throughout, and perhaps the special effects a bit more subtle, and more emphasis had been placed on the mood, this would have been great. As it is, it’s actually pretty good, definitely one of the better Lovecraft movie adaptations, and one of Stuart Gordon’s best works, too. Like the first episode of the series, it’s not particularly scary, but it is enjoyable.
Masters of Horror is definitely worth watching, and my respect for Stuart Gordon as a more serious horror movie director has increased. I’ll be on the lookout for Dagon now, I want to see if this is part of his development as a director, or just a fluke.