H.P. LOVECRAFT ON THE SILVER SCREEN

In a letter that he wrote to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright in 1933, H.P. Lovecraft revealed himself to be no great fan of the horror films of his day:

“The Bat” made me drowse back in the early 1920s—and last year an alleged “Frankenstein” on the screen would have made me drowse had not a posthumous sympathy for poor Mrs. Shelley made me see red instead. “Ugh!” And the screen “Dracula” in 1931—I saw the beginning of that in Miami, Fla.—but couldn’t bear to watch it drag to its full term of dreariness, hence walked out into the fragrant tropic moonlight!

How ironic then, that in the twenty-first century, Lovecraft has become one of the most-adapted horror writers for the silver screen. In the past half-century, more than one hundred treatments of his work have appeared in movie theaters or on television, in a dizzying array of formats and approaches: big budget and low budget; high concept and exploitative; big screen and direct-to-video; live action and animated; feature length and short subject; special-effects extravaganza and silent-film homage. Adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories have attracted some of Hollywood’s best-known directors, screenwriters, and actors. They have also cultivated a loyal and devoted base of fans who attend the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, held annually since 1996.

The ubiquity of film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories is such today that one might well ask why it took forty years from Lovecraft’s first professional sale before Hollywood came knocking at his door (metaphorically speaking, that is; Lovecraft had already been dead a quarter century by the time the first film of his work was produced). The answer has to do with the peculiarities of both Hollywood and Lovecraft’s writing. The first wave of horror films in the 1930s and ’40s were mostly adaptations of classic works that invoked the monsters we now consider horror icons: the vampire, the werewolf, the mummy, the zombie, and Frankenstein’s monster. All of these beings are conspicuously absent from Lovecraft’s unique type of horror fiction. The second wave of horror films in the 1950s spliced in threads of science fiction to create cautionary tales that addressed our nation’s Cold War anxieties and concerns about the dawning nuclear age. By the 1960s, though, a more liberal and eclectic sensibility began percolating through Hollywood, due in part to the inroads made by an increasing number of independent filmmakers. And some people who knew Lovecraft’s fiction from their youthful reading of it in pulp fiction magazines of the 1920s and ’30s were at the height of their careers as writers and directors in the film industry.

Lovecraft’s debut adaptation for the screen happened virtually anonymously in 1963, with the release of The Haunted Palace. Don’t go looking for that title anywhere in Lovecraft’s body of work. It comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and the film was directed by Roger Corman at the height of his Poe adaptation frenzy in the early sixties. A tale of sorcery and supernatural possession, it was based loosely on Lovecraft’s short novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” The film starred Vincent Price, and in supporting roles Lon Chaney, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr., both veterans of horror (as well as other) films. The screenplay was by Charles Beaumont, a gifted writer of fantasy and science fiction and a seasoned screenwriter who scripted some of the best episodes of television’s The Twilight Zone. An uncredited (and then-unknown) Francis Ford Coppola contributed dialogue. It’s hard to guess what Lovecraft would have thought of the movie, though he might not have minded the association with Poe, the writer whom he considered to be the greatest influence on his own work.

You would think a regular flow of Lovecraft films would have followed after this initial ice-breaking, but such was not the case. Over the next twenty years, fewer than a dozen films based on Lovecraft’s stories were released, some of them more ambitious in scope than others. In 1965, Daniel Haller directed Die, Monster, Die! (a.k.a. Monster of Terror), a rendering of Lovecraft’s science fiction terror tale “The Colour Out of Space” that paired master horror actor Boris Karloff with teen heartthrob Nick Adams. The screenplay was written by Jerry Sohl, whose credits included scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. Sohl also scripted Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” that matched Karloff with Christopher Lee, who in the years just previous had become well-known for his portrayals of Count Dracula (among other roles) in a series of films produced by England’s infamous Hammer Studios. Probably the best-known of all Lovecraft adaptations from this era was “The Dunwich Horror” (1970), the first film to take its title directly from one of Lovecraft’s stories. A loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s classic tale, it featured former child actors Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee in the lead roles.

Although many of Lovecraft’s colleagues and contemporaries saw their stories from the pulp magazines adapted for pioneering television programs such as Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960–1962), it wasn’t until 1971 that Lovecraft made his own television debut on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, an hour-long weekly program that had been conceived as something of a follow-up to Serling’s critically acclaimed and influential The Twilight Zone from a decade before. Presented in an anthology format that featured two or three different episodes each program, Night Gallery ran back-to-back adaptations of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and “Cool Air” (scripted by Serling himself), respectively, as the lead episodes of its December 1 and December 8 programs. Owing to television’s wider viewership these shows were, at the time, the Lovecraft adaptations that reached the biggest audience.

By 1985, nearly a dozen films or television episodes based on Lovecraft’s fiction were in circulation, a rather modest amount for Lovecraft’s twenty-two year presence in Hollywood. It took a signature event to open the floodgates of contemporary film treatments of his fiction and that proved to be Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon’s provocative adaptation of “Herbert West—Reanimator.” Written to order for a semi-professional magazine of dubious quality, Lovecraft’s tale of a medical student’s experiments to resurrect the dead was self-consciously and self-mockingly gruesome. Gordon retained many of the story’s basics set pieces but amped up the gore and introduced a thread of lurid sexuality. The result was a film that played as outrageously on the screen as Lovecraft’s original reads in print. Gordon’s screen treatment received considerable attention and quickly became a cult classic. It helped to establish him, and starring actor Jeffrey Combs, as leading exponents of Lovecraft’s work on film. It also helped to show a new generation of filmmakers that imaginative modern interpretations of Lovecraft’s fiction were possible.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the first film of a Lovecraft story played in movie theatres and in that interval perhaps half of Lovecraft’s macabre tales have been translated into movies—several more than once. These include the short shockers “Cool Air,” “Pickman’s Model,” “From Beyond,” “Dagon,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “The Unnamable,” and “The Rats in the Walls,” some of which have been filmed as short subjects and some elaborated as feature-length productions. Many of Lovecraft’s longer horror stories have been adapted as well: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” All have posed unique challenges to filmmakers. The virtual absence of female characters in Lovecraft’s fiction has invited many directors and screenwriters to take creative liberties with the plots of the stories, introducing a love interest and new characters necessary for it. And many of Lovecraft’s tales that work most effectively on the printed page do so because they build to a crescendo of horror within the mind of the narrator through a correlation of associations and insights that don’t always lend themselves to cinematically exciting depictions. The stories of Lovecraft’s often referred to as his tales of the Cthulhu Mythos present their own difficulties. They feature otherworldly entities whose immense size and terrifying non-anthropomorphic biology call out for special make up effects and computer graphic imagery that only movies with significant special effects budgets can credibly create. Even then, the thrust of Lovecraft’s descriptions of these creatures in his stories is to impress upon readers how indescribable and inconceivable they are—a quality that the literalness of the screen image virtually contradicts.

The quality of films spun from Lovecraft’s fiction varies widely, and often it is in the eye of the viewer. Some films with impressive budgets seem to shoot significantly wide of the mark of their source story, while other more modestly financed movies better capture the essence of Lovecraft’s original. Several of the least effective Lovecraft adaptations are those that have stuck slavishly to the plots of a story while some of the more creative have used the basics of the Lovecraft story as a springboard into wildly imaginative realms. Regardless of what moviegoers may think of the treatment of Lovecraft’s work on the silver screen, the merits of his stories are indisputable. This book features some of Lovecraft’s most highly regarded and frequently reprinted tales of horror. Just as many people have enjoyed treatments of Lovecraft’s stories in the movies without ever having read a word of his fiction, so is it possible to read these stories as works that stand apart from the films they have inspired. Both the fiction and the films are tributes to the dark imagination of H.P. Lovecraft, a writer acknowledged as the greatest American writer of weird fiction after Edgar Allan Poe, and an artist who never could have guessed that three quarters of a century after his death his work would still be read, much less adapted for the movies.

—Michael Kelahan
New York, 2011