Books: Bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome.

About three-fourths of the way into Mat Johnson's new novel, Pym, we meet a hack landscape painter, unapologetically modeled on the master of mall art Thomas Kinkade, who, after adopting an apocalyptic millennial strain of Tea Party ideology, uses the massive profits from his schlock empire of oddly illuminated landscapes to create a self-contained biosphere hidden in the icy wastes of Antarctica. There he lives with his wife – a perpetually peeved housewife who secretly grows and smokes pot in the biodome as a tactic in a losing war against boredom and domestic disenchantment – trying to perfect the internal landscape of his arctic layer, quixotically wrestling with his purchased reality in an impossible effort to impose his saccharine aesthetic on the world around him. Eventually this artist will be required to take up arms to defend his bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome against an invading army of abominable snowmen. And women. And children.

And that doesn't even rank as the weirdest thing in the book. In fact, I don't know that I would even put that up in the top ten.

The log line on Pym is simple. A recently canned African American lit prof finds the journal of Dirk Peters, a supporting character in Edgar Allan Poe's maddeningly eccentric novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which proves that (with some minor liberties) Poe's tale was essentially a true story. In Poe's work, there appears a tribe of black arctic natives (so black that even their teeth are black) that, the ex-professor reasons, must still exist: a black society never touched by the colonialism, slavery, and exploitation that has been the curse of the native African population and its diaspora. Though a series of unlikely connections, an all-African American exploratory crew, led by the professor and following Poe's novel and Peters' journal, sets out to find this lost world of blackness.

And it goes all to hell.

Poe's original Narrative is a grand mess of a book. Characters appear and disappear, the plot regularly flirts with incomprehensibility, and the ending of the book is so abrupt and provocatively illogical and unsatisfying that it is, perhaps justly, widely ignored by the reading public. Those that do read it are often compelled to impose a scrim of explanatory order on it. If you're Herman Melville, Jules Verne or H. P. Lovecraft, you basically rewrite the thing. Melville, who unlike Poe had actual experience with life at sea, stripped everything he thought was nonsense out of the book and recycled what was left into Moby-Dick. Verne and Lovecraft created works, The Sphinx of the Ice Field and "Mountains of Madness" respectively, that defused the work and placed it comfortably within the realm of their own creative endeavors (which is a fascinating case study in the anxiety of influence, as Verne's optimistic humanism and Lovecraft's darkly smoldering nihilism couldn't be further apart; it's as if both author's needed to complete Arthur Gordon Pym in a way that would make Poe their spiritual father, but ended up making two Poe's). Lesser readers often claim, erroneously, that the novel is unfinished. When I first read it, approximately a bazillion years ago, in a Penguin paperback edition – yellow color bar on the spine, Penguin's way of denoting "American literature," as opposed to red, green, or purple (English, Middle East and Asia, and "the Ancients," in order) – from the local library (long since plowed over to make way for an "urban center" of upscale markets and chain restaurants, I'm told), the back cover copy actually stated that the novel was Poe's great unfinished novel. It was more than a decade before I found out I'd read the ending wrong: it’s not an unfortunate cut off, but the most deliberate middle finger ever extended towards the reader in all American literature.

But I digress.

I bring up Verne and Lovecraft because this admittedly limited sample (and we could throw Melville in here too and the conclusion, which you have not yet read, will hold) shows that, in the game of being influenced by Poe's Narrative, the winner is the dude who goes the most afield from Poe's original work. Verne set out to write a work-specific sequel and his novel is rightly forgotten. "Mountains of Madness," on the other hand, requires no knowledge that it is basically a sequel to Poe's Narrative and is justly considered one of the key texts in Lovecraft's body of work.

Johnson gets the Pym Principle: You've got to betray the influence to make it work for you. With it's overly quirky cast, it's pulpy narrative drive, and it unembarrassed willingness to discuss it's own themes and make the subtext the text, Johnson's Pym doesn't resemble Poe, but rather Vonnegut. Pym's a burlesque horror/satire/adventure/pomo scramble that manages, somehow, to simultaneously never take itself to serious and never treat itself like a joke. The result is an examination of America's perennial obsession racial identity played as if it were a boy's adventure novel.

Well worth the price of admission.

Spiegel and Grau (if that means anything to ya') put up for this party. It's in hardback now and will set you back 24 Washgintons. You could wait for the trade paperback, but that's basically like announcing to the world, "Yeah, a vibrant literary culture of switched-on readers and authors that produce interesting work isn't worth ten bucks to me."

Stuff: Eldritch spice.

Stuff: "Dig down far enough into this oogly-googly magnetism, and you will find yourself kneeling before the most depraved and nihilistic of gods."

One of the oddest things about the enduring popularity of the work of H. P. Lovecraft is that, among all the various cult fandoms in horror, it might the intentionally goofiest. Despite the relentless nihilism of the Cthulhu mythos and the grim and somewhat humorless rep of the author himself, Lovecraft's fans enjoy being silly. Really really silly. Is it a reaction, conscious or otherwise, against the bleak core of Lovecraft's art, some mass subversion in the guise of fan love? Is it a natural consequence of Lovecraft's famously overwrought prose? Perhaps, as time has pushed his unique style closer and closer to self-parody, Lovecraft's fans have stepped in to make the parody explicit.

I've never been able to rig up a satisfactory answer, but Erik Davis over at HiLobrow stares into the face of wacky madness and confronts the rise of Cute Cthulhu. [Warning, the illos get very NSFW at the end of the essay - CRwM] From his article:

At the risk of madness, we must study the anomaly at hand, that monstrous correlation known as the Cute Cthulhu: the chimeric fusion of Lovecraft’s obscene and infamous octopoid monster with that gooey, hard-wired mammalian sentiment now propagated through Japanimation, infantilizing design, and the spewing cute feeds of the Internet. Cute Cthulhu entered our dimension in force a decade ago, when Lovecraft’s “green, sticky spawn of the stars,” who even now lies dreaming in the sunken city of R’lyeh, transformed into a cuddly green plush toy designed and sold by a company called ToyVault.

What's he conclude? Well, half the fun is getting there, but I'm no tease:

But here is the great secret, my fellow mortals: cute is the true horror, the ultimate obscenity.

Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions. Just watch heads turn in the grocery aisles as a particularly photogenic baby gets paraded by on the shopping cart, or watch your own heart melt when that little puppy with the velvety ears stumbles over a bone. Dig down far enough into this oogly-googly magnetism, and you will find yourself kneeling before the most depraved and nihilistic of gods: the abject.

Indeed.

If you've got enough sanity points left, check it out.

Link Proliferation: Chewed, swallowed.

Easter Kong

Here's some beautiful holiday-themed art from pop surrealist Todd Schorr.

The Zombie Holocaust Began 3 Days Ago, and Nobody Noticed

Actual headline from the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm.

Beauty Is In the Eye of the Beholder

Some more art stuff.

Currently on display in the "Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy" show, at the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art in Brussels, is Esther Stocker's short, silent video "Sehen als 1", which appears to show somebody writing on their eye. Sadly, I can only find stills on the Interwebs.

Available in Regular and Mint

From the McNally Jackson site. I detect the fell hand of Dustin in this matter.



Recession Proof the Fright Biz?

Perhaps horror could learn a few tricks from the bodice rippers. Despite the widespread carnage the Great Depression 2.0 is causing to the culture industry, apparently romance publishers are making a killing. Megham Daum, of the LA Times, drops some numbers:

Harlequin, still the biggest name in serial romances, saw a $3-million gain, year to year, in North American sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 (by contrast, book sales in the general marketplace are down slightly).

It's so easy to poke fun at contemporary romance novels that there's really no sport in it. The plots, by definition, are formulaic; the prose manages to be at once overwrought and underdeveloped; the covers, well, they're where that famous, flaxen-haired slab of manhood named Fabio got his start. But romances have long dominated sales of mass-market paperbacks (which, in turn, dominate sales of books in general). According to statistics from Romance Writers of America, an organization of more than 10,000 published and aspiring novelists, romances generated $1.375 billion in sales in 2007. It's even been said (granted, by a Harlequin author) that, worldwide, someone buys a Harlequin book every four seconds.

How does this genre – which, along with true crime, might be the only genre with less cred in straight world than horror – keep bringing in the bucks?

1. Stay cheap.

It's not exactly a surprise that the romance novel business would be pretty recession-proof; as bad as things get, a lot of people -- OK, mostly women -- can still afford a $5 paperback.

2. Serve as many niche groups as possible.

But, in parsing the titles listed on Harlequin's website, it struck me that the real reason serial romances are thriving in a desiccated economy is not just because they're the ultimate escape fantasies but because, in their own way, they are that Holy Grail of marketing and business -- they offer something for everyone. Among Harlequin's 10 imprints are dozens of categories and sub-categories, including medical romance, Christian romance, paranormal romance, suspense romance and even NASCAR romance (titles include "Checkered Past" and "Black Flag, White Lies"). Unexpected pregnancy scenarios are popular across categories ("Forced Wife, Royal Love Child," "The Heart Surgeon's Baby Surprise"), as are single-mother situations ("The Aristocrat and the Single Mom"). I even saw one book about an unwed pregnant woman courted by a man who isn't the father of her baby but wants to be. He also happens to be super hot.

3. Be escapists in an emotionally relevant way.

In most of these novels, the heroine is in a position of not really being able to trust the intentions of her love (or lust) object. And although she desperately wants a happily-ever-after with a cardiologist/secretly wealthy ranch hand/oil tycoon/Ralph Fiennes, she can't shake her fear that she's being lied to. And yet she also can't allow herself to believe that her spicy encounters are anything more than a house of cards that will eventually leave her destitute and alone.

You don't have to like romance novels -- or even cardiologists or ranch hands -- to know what that kind of uncertainty feels like. All you have to do is follow the financial news. In fact, given that many Americans are feeling as distrustful of the bank bailout and the economic stimulus package as Harlequin heroines feel about their suitors, maybe the term "escape fantasy" is a misnomer. Maybe these books are recession-proof not because they offer an alternative to uncertainty but because they reflect it back at us -- with a lot of sex thrown in (and a happy ending).

And End with a Big Musical Number

Here's Still Flyin's insanely happy-making "Good Thing It's a Ghost Town Around Here."

News: How the West was won?

According to Comic Book Resources Devil's Due Publishing will be independently distributing issues 16 and 17 of their guilty-pleasure horror hit Hack/Slash as Diamond will no longer touch those two issues. The reason:

The decision follows Diamond’s receipt of a Cease and Desist letter regarding the issues from an unknown, recently registered company, Re-Animator, LLC, in connection with Dynamite Entertainment’s Nick Barrucci.

Hack/Slash is featuring Lovecraft's famed mad scientist, Herbert West, in its latest story arc. Apparently Re-Animator LLC felt this infringed on their ownership of the character.

Re-Animator LLC, a company that seems to exist solely as a Delaware PO Box, was the company that sold the rights to Dynamite Entertainment when Dynamite was featuring West in their Army of Darkness comics. However, R-A LLC seems to have been created solely for the purpose of snatching up what may be a public domain figure, the character of West, and then "selling" it to Dynamite.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to horror director Brian Yuzna, who helmed the second and third installments of the Re-Animator film franchise. Yuzna was pretty sure that he owned the character of Herbert West. Here's an annoyed Yuzna from the article:

"It may seem crazy to Re-Animator fans to think that a company that had nothing to do with the classic films could actually claim ownership of the "Re-Animator" brand and threaten to stop anyone else from creating comics, films or merchandise with the word 'reanimator' or 're-animator' in it- even the actual producer of the films that created the brand—but in this wacky world that is exactly what has happened."

According to CRB, Yuzna has owned the Re-Animator film franchise, on which both comics based their respective Wests, for more than twenty years.

All of this might be moot: various factions of Lovecraft's estate have fought for years to close off his works from the public domain. Many argue that, under existing laws, the various feuding parties claiming to speak officially for the Lovecraft estate have long since blown their chances to keep the famed author's work under copyright. However, this nebulous claim hasn't prevent these groups from behaving as if their ownership was a given. They regular cut deals with publishers, threaten web sites posting Lovecraft's works, and so on. If any of these groups were to somehow gain the force of law for their currently BS claims, then DDP, Dynamite, Yuzna, and the flimsy R-A LLC would all be screwed.

Son of Silent Scream Series: Calamari gods from since before time and space and stuff.

For this final entry in ANTSS's second annual series on silent shockers, I'm throwing you, dear screamers and screamettes, a curve: The Call of Cthulhu, a feature-length silent flick shot in 2005 under the auspices of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Here I was going to bust out the trailer for this flick, because it is so rare to have a trailer for a silent flick that I thought it would be a novelty. But, it occurred to me that it might not be obvious why there are so few trailers for silent era flicks. So, if you'll forgive the tangent, a short explanation of the role of trailers in the silent era:

Many claim that the first trailer ever shown was screened in 1912 at a showing of an episode of action/romance serial "The Adventures of Kathryn." The trailer appeared at the end of the film – as did most trailers in the early years of film, which is why they're still called trailers even though they appear before the film. The trailer was produced by the New York exhibitor showing the film, not the film studio that produced the serial. It consisted of two title cards, the first asking viewers if Kathryn could possibly escape the den of lions she was trapped in. The second told viewers that the answer to that burning question would be answered in the next episode of the serial. (She did.)

The first trailers were mostly homemade title cards. The exhibitors didn't have copies of the films until it was time to show them and they couldn't very well cut up the copies they got. Some historian claim that exhibitors would preview flicks by running the first, and only the first, reel of new films for potential ticket buyers, though how common this was is unclear.

Studios got into the act in 1916. Paramount was the first studio to create a trailer and other studios quickly followed suit. However, because production schedules were insanely tight in the silent era (an individual director might shoot a dozen or more films a year) and footage wouldn't be available in time to cut a trailer, most trailers were slideshows made from production stills. Before the end of the decade, there were enough trailers being made that independent trailer-production companies actually appeared in NYC.

In 1919, three Madison Avenue advertising men formed the National Screen Service, a company that would cut and distribute trailers in exchange for early access to footage. The NSS made money by renting the trailers to exhibitors. Slowly, as NSS obtained contracts throughout the biz, film trailers replaced slide shows. From the late 1920s to the 1970s, NSS was the dominant producer of trailers in the US.

So, that's why trailers for the silent era are rare – there's really only a few years in there when film trailers, rather than ad hoc slideshows, were being made. Studios didn't make them, so they weren't archived. Because exhibitors rented them, they were returned to NSS after they had served their purpose and were therefore unlikely to trickle into a secondary collectors market the way, say, lobby cards did.

And now you know.

Back to Cthulhu. Here's the trailer:



When the HPLHS decided to pool their talents into making a film adaptation of one of Lovecraft's most famous – and least adapted – works, they hit on a truly brilliant concept. Instead of simply shooting a modern adaptation, or even a period piece, they would shoot the film that would have happened had some enterprising studio picked up Lovecraft's story when it was published in 1928. The results are made of awesome.

Plot-wise, the film is extremely faithful to the source text. In fact, Cthulhu might be the most faithful Lovecraft adaptation ever made. The story begins with the now insane Francis relating the discoveries he made in the manuscripts and files of his deceased Uncle George, a professor of Semitic Language at Brown University. Francis relates three major narrative threads culled from the files.

First, viewers get the story of an art student named Wilcox. For nearly a month, Wilcox existed in a delirious sleep-like state. During this time, he was haunted by terrible dreams. Worse, when Wilcox dreamed, his fevered mania seeped into the world: riots and mad outbreaks of random violence occur in various cities around the world. When Wilcox finally roused himself from his nightmares, he created a carving of the vision he saw – a monstrous, tentacled creature called Cthulhu.

The next tale involves a New Orleans police inspector who traces a series of kidnappings and murders to a cannibal cult that hides in the depths of the Louisiana swamps and makes blood sacrifices to unknown gods.

Finally, the third tale involves a ship's crew that discovers and uncharted island that, somewhat predictably, is not much a tropical getaway. Upon landing, the crew discovers an abandoned and rotting ancient city. As they explore the ruins, they unintentionally revive Cthulhu, a squid-headed monster god with little to no sense of hospitality.

With the exception of a few scenes, a viewer could easily mistake this for a genuine product of the silent era. The decision to shoot it as if it were made in 1928 could have simply been used as a clever way to turn technical limitations into period-appropriate details; but the cast and crew actually go all out, drawing inspiration from silent era films. The alien city of Wilcox's dreams and the ruins the sailors of the Alert discover come straight from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Metropolis, and Waxworks. The original score, with instrument produced sound effects, is great (better than many of the soundtracks that have been grafted onto silent restorations by various DVD production houses). The acting incorporates the theatrical flare modern viewers equate with silent era films without lapsing into parody.

Call of Cthulhu is a great Lovecraft adaptation, a testament to the creative possibilities of film as an outsider art, and a wonderful love letter to the innovative geniuses of the silent era. Good stuff.

Stuff: Thinking inside the box.

Artist Alex CF creates amazing mixed media assemblages – part art piece, part play set – that appear to be recovered relics from the darkly fantastic worlds of Stoker, Lovecraft, and others. Above is an image of his brilliant "Werewolf Anatomical Research Case."

To get a better sense of how detailed and interactive these things are, check this video (scroll to the bottom of the page) of Alex CF walking you through the various components of a set he calls "The Henrich Emille Rectangle" – a collection of artifacts detailing researchers into a mysterious and dangerous structure that appears to defy the laws of physical universe.

Vampire hunting kits, a box from the so-called "Mountains of Madness" expedition, ghost traps, and even some props for an upcoming remake of the classic film "Nosferatu;" there's plenty of nifty stuff to check out. Enjoy.

Stuff: "They say that the Coconut Creme Swirl sleeps."

McSweeney’s online auxiliary has a fun spoof for fans of the deeply purple gothic prose of H. P. Lovecraft: Luke Burn’s "Selections from H. P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter."

A couple of quick tastes:

Coconut Creme Swirl

They say that the Coconut Creme Swirl sleeps. But if the dread Coconut Creme Swirl slumbers, surely it must also dream. It is certain that while it dozes the Coconut Creme Swirl is absorbed by terrifying visions of exacting its creamy tropical vengeance upon mankind! Consume the Coconut Creme Swirl before it awakens to consume you!

Caramel Chew

There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.

Toffee Nugget

Few men dare ask the question "What is toffee, exactly?" All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane.

Dig in.

Movies: Jailhouse rot.

Beyond the Re-Animator, the third film in series, trailing Bride of the Re-Animator by more than a decade, seems to split fans of the series into two camps. Migliore and Strysik, in their comprehensive Lurker in the Lobby: a Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, are dismissive of the flick. They call it "a shadow of the gonzo wit of the original" and suggesting that the flick is little more than an exercise in sfx bloodletting that uses the existing series as its excuse. However, if the averaged ratings on IMDB reveal anything, the third film in the series is the fan favorite of the two sequels. Both viewpoints are reasonable. For fans familiar with the original literary source of the series, Beyond Re-Animator is the least Lovecraftian of the series. However, in its over-the-top approach to characterization, plotting, and gore, Beyond is clearly a product of the aforementioned gonzo aesthetic (always the least Lovecraftian element of the previous installments). Put schematically: Beyond is the first film to put extending the franchise before returning to the literary source. The result is the first Re-Animator film that owes more to the Gordon/Yuzna flicks that preceded it than to the Lovecraft story that inspired the franchise.

Yuzna's second film featuring mad scientist Herbert West picks up shortly after the end of Bride. During the carnage at chez West/Cain, one of West's re-animated corpses invades the home of the young Howard Phillips. The corpse overpowers Howie and dispatches his sister before being put down by the Arkham PD. Traumatized, Howard follows the police outside just in time to catch an irate Herbert West being stuffed into a police car. Nearby, Howie finds a glowing syringe full of reagent, apparently left behind by the absurdly sloppy APD.

Flash forward fourteen years.

Young Howie is now Dr. Phillips. Phillips takes his residency at the Arkham prison that now houses West. Obsessed with West's role in the death of his sister, Phillips thinks he can help West complete his research while, in the face of West's amoral indifference, turn West's discoveries towards good. Unfortunately, West's own casually sadistic attitude towards the living isn't the only problem facing Phillips. The prison's warden is tyrannical bully and West has run afoul of one of the prisons gang leaders. Of course, it wouldn't be a Re-Animator film without the doomed love interest: Laura, the attractive young local reporter who is in the prison fishing for the story.

After establishing our primaries, the film spends a short time on the familiar franchise plot. West and Phillips attempt various re-animations while trying to hide their experiments from the prison staff and Laura. But things disintegrate quickly and, before you can say "time off for god behavior," re-animated corpses and rioting inmates are running amuck in the prison. Surrealistic carnage ensues.

Filmed partially on Barcelona film sets and partially on location in the cavernous Prision Modelo in Valencia, the film has a grim and claustrophobic feel, a sort of dark reflection of the well-lit but no less institutional hospital setting of the first film.

The actors turn in functional performances, though it sometimes feels as if not everybody is acting in the same film: some going for the over-the-top vibe of the earlier franchise pieces while others try to hit something more like a conventional drama or horror. This feeling of disconnectedness is compounded by the use of dubbing throughout. Like many Euro films, the dialog in BtR is added post-production. Even when an actor is speaking English, you can tell that his or her dialog has been dubbed. Jeffery Coombs, the franchise's cornerstone, dials down his performance to give us a more controlled, quieter West. Instead of the pompous West of the first flick or the West of the Bride, who seems almost addicted to his power to create life, this West seems to have accepted that his work will always be done in secret and will never, in fact, produce results. He's no longer driven by the need to dominate his colleagues or to feel the rush of defeating death. Instead, he does what he does because that is all he is. He's sly, inventive, and tougher. He less pompous and instead has the wounded hauteur of deposed royalty – he's the elite who refuses to sink to the level of the scum he's now forced to deal with. It might be my favorite version of West. The only thing not to like about this take on West is that he feels underused as Yuzna spends plenty of time on the new characters, a few of which get much more screen time than they really need.

The effects, by deranged surrealistic effects man Screaming Mad George, are noteworthy. Gore hounds will certainly find plenty to keep them amused, but what makes the effects in BtR pop is how far out Screaming Mad George is willing to go on almost any gimmick. In on scene, a still-living junkie shoots several syringes full of reagents. Apparently, it produces a crazy high. It also causes the outer layers of the junkie's body to explode off. But, since the junkie is full of reagent, he doesn't die. Instead, the bloodied corpse, strips of flesh still hanging off him, asks for more hits of reagent, or at least some prescription grade pain-killers to take the edge off. The gory but goofy details of flick put it in the splatter-slapstick tradition of the earlier films, though SMG has a meaner streak in him and there's a bit of an edge here. One imagines that SMG feels his gory set pieces present people as they are, and it is people who don't look as monstrous as they should that are, somehow, the special effect. The gore satirist's misanthropic bent gives this film its less wacky tone, even when it is most trying to be humorous.

How does the parole board find? I'm going to have to side with those who feel Beyond is a worthy addition to franchise. It is interesting that the same director is behind both the "loyalist" Bride and the more revisionist Beyond. Both films pick up threads of the franchise, while managing to focus on two fairly different aspects of the original. The film is a bit darker and meaner, but the core concept is still solid. In fact, in a way, Beyond was the necessary next step. It proves that the franchise can adapt, expand, and carry more than a single creative vision. Plus, you know, there's some T & A, so that's nice.

Music: A song of ol' eldritch Brooklyn.

The California-based Mountain Goats, formed around frontman/guitarist/chief instigator John Darnielle (who thought of the band's name while he was working as a nurse at mental hospital), do a nifty tune about H. P. Lovecraft and his unhappy days in my own beloved Brooklyn. Here's "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" live.



Lovecraft isn't the only the pulp writer to get a shout-out from the boys of Mountain Goat. The man behind Fu Manchu – the evil genius and embodiment of the "Yellow Peril" – also gets a song. Here's the video for the Mountain Goat's "Sax Rohmer #1."

Books: The All of Cthulhu.

Despite the dire abundance of predictions informing us that book-centric literacy is relic of now by-gone technological paradigm, the sub-genre that would seem most likely to suffer extinction when pitted in Darwinian struggle with the Internet – quirky reference tomes on niche topics – still seems quite lively. In this respect, Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft would seem an exemplary book. On glancing the title, I must admit that my first thought was, "Certainly there's a wiki or blog or something out there that does this. Is anybody really going to hand over a Jackson just to get it in dead tree format?" But thumbing through its nearly 350 pages in the shop, I liked the not-always obvious film choices, the co-authors' willingness to give points for earnest (if sometimes amateur) efforts, and the wealth of supplementary materials they packed into their book. So, in answer to my own question, "Yeah, somebody out there will probably drop twenty Washingtons on just such a book."

There's something that borders on the ironic about the fact that there are now enough film adaptations of Lovecraft works to warrant a guide. Lovecraft himself was no fan of the medium. According to the preface by Lovecraft scholar (and editor of the Penguin Lovecraft anthologies) S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft described the art of moving pictures as "utter and unrelieved hokum." Despite the old master's definitive harrumph, co-authors Andrew Migliore and John Strysik have hunted down more than 150 pages worth of adaptations, homages, and shameless rip-offs, both for the big screen and television. In quick-moving, fair, and occasionally humorous one- or two-page reviews, our authors not only run down obvious selections, such as The Re-Animator or Dagon, but they dig up Lovecraftian references in the damnedest places: such as an extended riff off the Old Ones and Cthulhu that appears in an episode of kiddie-anime Pokemon clone Digmon: Digital Monsters. I kid not. In fact, as nice as the reviews of direct adaptations are, Migliore and Strysik's most interesting reviews cover flicks that I suspect even a horror fan with more than a passing interest in Lovecraft may have missed. Their look at international films is especially appreciated. Extending the Digmon example, the guide's author introduce a whole strain of Lovecraft-love to J-horror flicks. Apparently several of the directors and screenwriters behind the J-horror Renaissance are big time Lovecraft fans. Go fig? All told, five different Japanese film and television treatments of Lovercraft's work make the cut. They also include Italian, UK, Mexican, and Chilean films and TV shows. Even when I had heard of these flicks – such as the J-horror Spirals - I often had no idea they were inspired or influenced by Lovecraft. The even include a selection of shorts – often notable fan-flick stuff or film school projects – in a special section.

I also appreciate the tone the authors' take throughout their book. It would be very easy to imagine that a book like this could devolve into an effort to set the "party line" on film adaptations. The reviews would then be little more than exercises in determining who did or did not meet the purity test of the author's self-selected defenders. The fans of other pulp masters – notably Philip K. Dick fans – are notorious for that sort of thing. Instead of putting themselves in the role of "Defenders of the Faith," the authors come off as two guys who dig on Lovecraft and get a really kick out of sharing this pleasure with others. This isn't to say that they're uncritical: if a movie is a stinker, they don't hesitate to let you know. By the same token, they have some strong positive opinions on films genuinely regarded as failures. Migliore and Strysik call them as they see them and make no bones about it. Still, they ultimately seem more interested in seeing what people are doing, how Lovecraft is being reinterpreted, and tracking his influence in unlikely places. I note their generous tone because it is a welcome change from the seemingly universal shrill and grating tone of persecution and superiority that fans of pulp and genre work often adopt when introducing their cult heroes to a wider audience.

The first half of the book is all reviews; the second half is dedicated to a short, but nifty, gallery of production art and other interesting graphics (with several plates in full color) and a series of interviews with directors, actors, and other Lovecraftian filmmakers. The gallery has some boss stuff, including an original painting of Hellboy inserted into the classic story "Mountains of Madness" and stills from the fabulous opening credit sequence from Beyond Re-Animator. Fans of horror comics will also find top-notch stuff from Richard Corbin and a whole set of conceptual art for "Shadow Over Innsmouth" by Bernie Wrightson. The interviews include both obvious choices, such as go-to Lovecraft adaptor director/writer Stuart Gordon, with more obscure, but still entertaining selections, such Tom Sullivan, the artist behind the covers of the Cry of Cthulhu role-playing game who went on to work on the 2005 retro-silent Call of Cthulhu flick.

I really only have one complaint – the editing of the edition I have is spotty. Now, I'm well aware that my own editorial practices here at ANTSS leave much to be desired. My defense is that I'm not charging you for the privilege of putting up with my editorial blunders. Furthermore, we're not talking grammar-geek quibbles here: for example, the review of Hellboy is cut off mid-sentence and hangs unresolved. Should the book head into another printing, these could be cleaned up easily, I think.

For the person who could take or leave Lovecraft, this book is not going to turn you into a true believer. However, for fans of the man, Migliore and Strysik have produced a real treat. The guide is well worth checking out.

Movies: Here comes the bride.

With all apologies to Jane Austen: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mad scientist in possession of the secrets of life and death must be in want of a bride. This is the very position that Herbert West and his perpetually unsure assistant, Dan Cain, find themselves in at the open of Bride of Re-Animator, second flick in the Re-Animator series.

After the bloodbath in the Miskatonic Uni hospital that closed the last flick, West and Cain have become Doctors Without Frontier-style volunteers helping patch up the wounded members of a disorganized and badly whipped rebel army in some third world Latin American jungle nation. We quickly learn that the good doctors are not motivated entirely by the better angels of their nature. The surrounding jungles are home to a lizard that produces a chemical that will help West perfect his frustratingly imprecise re-animating agent. Plus, living in a war-zone insures that you get plenty of access to fresh people meat for you experiments. But all good things come to an end and the good doctors are forced to scoot when government soldiers overrun the rebels' hospital. The doctors return to the MU hospital and move into an old caretakers house on the edge of a graveyard – a convenient location as West's need to re-animate dead tissue is becoming increasing like a junkie's need to hit a crack pipe. His new formula re-animating agent means he can now bring individual parts to life and West begins to express his artistic side by creating freakish beasts out of random parts and giving them life. Eventually West and Cain hit upon the scheme of creating an entirely new person out of carefully selected parts. Set against them are a Arkham PD detective who has an axe to grind with West and the still not entirely dead disembodied head of Dr. Carl Hill, West's nemesis from the first film. If that's not enough for you, we also get a new love interest for Cain.

And they pack it all into a slender 93 minutes.

Not unlike the first two flicks in the classic Universal Frankenstein series, Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator are interesting in so much as, despite the continuity of story and crew (the producer of the first flick in now the director of the second flick), the films have really different moods and styles. The first Re-Animator focused heavily on the seething creepiness of Herbert West. The plot was a slow build punctuated by ever nastier and more tasteless scenes of gross-out humor. In contrast, the second film is a demolition derby of subplots and surreal scenes. Incidents and plot points pile up willy-nilly as the flick barrels towards its conclusion. The director of the first flick, horror film's go-to Lovecraft adaptor Stuart Gordon, is a more capable and careful director. Brian Yuzna, who helms the second film, takes a more stylish and kinetic approach. Where Gordon used the clean polished surfaces and monotonous florescent lighting of MU Hospital as a counterpoint to the typical gothic trappings of a standard mad scientist flick, Yuzna throws shadows everywhere and loves packing scenes full of grisly details. In the first film, every character seemed caught up in the gravitational pull of West's barely contained insanity. Here, everybody seems to have lost it a little bit, become a little unhinged. All except for West, who comes of as a more boyish and petulant character. Viewers will get more of the bizarre effects from the first one. The gore-level is upped, West's re-animated freaks show some inventive monster design, and the bride creature is wonderfully horrific and pathetic at the same time. In only one instance are the effects not up to the task and hand: the flying head Carl Hill, which has been stitched to a pair bat wings, long pretty bad. (And this is a shame because a maniac head flapping around on bat wings is an almost perfect summary of the surreal aesthetic of this film – if only it had looked better.)

All and all, Bride is an excellent sequel. It extends the story of the first film in a logical way, but is stylistically unique enough to not feel like a retread. Is madcap pacing is a bit sloppy, but it ensures that the viewer is never bored.

Movies: Bird is the word.

When I first moved to New York City, I thought the Town That Never Weeps would be filled with hidden pockets of eccentric coolness. You know, tiny little restaurants ain't nobody heard of, bars that only a select group of regulars frequent, small parks forgotten by the baby-stroller pushing hordes and radio-blasting juvies – places to discover for yourself. It did take long to realize that, for the most part, the city is pretty frontier-less. Especially in the age of blogs and user-driven regional web sites, no patch of land remains unexplored, reviewed, and assigned a one- to five-star rating.

There are exceptions, sure. But they're few and far between. There was the old dive bar Siberia, for example. This place was well-known, but I found that very few of the many of the folks who had heard of the joint had ever actually visited. It was genuine hole being situated as it was in a subway stop – the 51st station on what was the old 1 and 9 line. Not that Siberia was the world's greatest bar or anything. It was actually pretty scruffy. The ambiance was heavily Gitmo, the furniture looked like it had been thrown on the street and the street threw it right back, the beer selection was strictly utilitarian, and the bathrooms were so ill-lit that you were forced to make a choice: either pee in the dark with the door closed for privacy or leave the door wide open so you could actually aim. I should add that both bathrooms had several fist sized holes in the wall, entry points for things that lived behind the walls of 51st Street stop. If you were gutsy enough to pee in the dark, you'd get treated to the sound of things creeping out of their lair to see what you were and to guess at whether or not you were edible.

Despite how dismal the joint could be, it attracted loyalists. Some of the regulars were simply maintenance alcoholics from the office building above the station. They were grabbing a bit of Dutch courage to steel themselves for the transition between grinding work drudgery and soul-destroying suburban home hell. But, aside from the chemically dependent boozers, there were people that could have easily gone anywhere and chose to be in the dungeon-like Siberia,

I can't speak for everybody, but part of the charm of the place for me was that it was a find. It was exactly that sort of word-of-mouth hideaway that rewarded a the adventurous with a story; it was in and of itself a prize for folks who would go a little out of their way for something unique or unusual.

I bring this up because genre entertainment often plays the same game: you think you're going to run into diamonds in the rough all over the place. You imagine that you'll stumble across that curious flick or forgotten book or what-have-you. The truth is that the field as a whole seems heavily weighted towards junk and what isn't crappola is usually thoroughly documented, reviewed, and rated.

So, imagine my surprise when, reading the reviews of horror-blogger Mermaid Heather (see sidebar), she gave a five-out-of-five review to a flick I've never heard of before. This lady has reviewed what must amount to a couple hundred flicks by now, and you can count the number of fives she's give on your fingers. And here's a complete unknown grabbing a five. Was this one of those elusive gems? A genuine find?

The flick in question is the somewhat cryptically titled 2004 film Dead Birds: a semi-Lovecraftian dark house horror set in the latter years of the Civil War. The movie begins with a bloody bank robbery. The perpetrators – a group of Confederate deserters, a freedman, and a nurse – take their loot and head of to a plantation their leader knows to be deserted. On finding their way to the old house, the gang finds themselves dragged in the supernatural carnage left there when the mansion's previous owner accidentally-on-purpose tore open a hole between this universe and the next, letting all sorts of otherworldly nastiness pour through. Ultimately, the flicks boils down to a simple main conflict: can this armed gang keep their crap together long enough to make it through a single night on the plantation?

I was not disappointed by Dead Birds (the title, according to the director, refers to a dead bird that appears in the yard of the plantation, evidence that suggests nothing can survive the curse of the plantation). The first feature-length flicker from director Alex Turner (son of famed jazz album cover photographer Pete Turner) plays like the work of comfortably established director. It looks polished, achieves a level of tension that threatens to leave the viewer physically spent at times, and is confident enough with its elliptical plot that it makes demands of it viewers without lapsing into lazy storytelling or easy explanations. Shot on location at an actual decaying plantation house, Turner and his crew make the most of the dim period lighting, achieving some set-ups that would be the envy of directors working with much bigger budgets.

There are some flaws in the flick. The period setting is essential to the story, which makes the occasional anachronisms all the more jarring – apparently the nurse in this gang has figured out the importance of sterilization well in advance of the rest of the medical establishment. Also, despite a pretty nifty creature design, the CGI effects distance the viewer rather than pull them in.

These don't take away from the fact DB is a genuinely good flick. I'm somewhat baffled as to how this movie didn’t garner more attention on its initial release. With so much substandard junk littering the low-budget field, DB stands head-and-shoulders above most of its b-flick kin. The flick is the most promising debut I've seen in awhile and well worth checking out.

As an aside, the film also got me thinking about how odd it is that slavery doesn't play a significant role in the collective imagination of horror cinema. Our various modern wars, from WW I to the current war, have given us all manner of monstrosity. The various nightmares of the Western expansion have resurfaced in the form of cannibal flicks, sundry Native American tropes (from wendigos to that ever-popular cause of trouble: the Indian burial ground), and even camp mash-ups (see Billy the Kid versus Dracula). The Civil War makes its appearance, but most often in the form of weird Southern revenge flicks like 2,000 Maniacs and it re-makes and their sequels. Even the American Revolution has given us a single well-known icon: the Headless Horseman.

But slavery – a 400-year-old display of horror and human cruelty played out on an unimaginable scale – seems to have inspired very little in the way of horror flicks. Slavery played minor part in the Candyman franchise and I can think of minor a reference to it in I Walked with a Zombie, but otherwise it seems remarkably absent as a topic in horror cinema. This strikes me as curious. Horror often finds its greatest traction in the stresses and anxieties of a culture and I submit to you that the legacy of slavery remains one of the greatest sources of anxiety in our culture. Even from a strictly thematic standpoint, you'd think it would come up more. One of the most shopworn narrative devices in horror cinema is that the deeply wronged seek revenge in horrific ways. What group of people were ever so deeply wronged as the victims of slavery? And yet, even in Dead Birds, the fact that our ill-fated plantation owning necromancer owned slaves is a fairly minor plot point. He's cursed not by the fact that he systematically visited the results of the one of most brutal system of de-humanization ever devised upon a group of innocents, but by the considerably more spookshow idea that he dabbled forbidden magic – the latter apparently being the more sinister crime.

Perhaps the issue's too sensitive even for horror folk to touch. Perhaps people are afraid to drive off white audiences. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it seems like a conspicuous absence.

Movies: Secret re-agent man.

Before we get into the review of The Re-animator, indulge me in some chatter about H. P. Lovecraft, whose "Herbert West – Reainmator" serves as the basis for the film.

I think I stated this before, but I think it’s worth repeating: the work of H. P. Lovecraft is deceptively attractive for cinematic adapters, though it is, if you think about, remarkably resistant to visual representation. There are several reasons for this.

First and foremost, Lovecraft's baroque style puts some bizarre demands on the visual form. Whatever the plot of a Lovecraft story, it is his style that is his most distinctive marker. In fact, fans and detractors alike tend to overstate just how precious and purple his prose gets. This is because it is the flights of fancy - those weird spills of archaic and awkward description – that stick in the mind. We can argue why Lovecraft was so quick to lapse in this rich and pulpy prose, and whether this tendency was good or bad for his writing, but these debates would just underscore how central his unique style was to everything he wrote. I've yet to see a Lovecraft adaptation that is as visually lavish and weird as Lovecraft's writing is linguistically overwrought and strange.

Second is Lovecraft's disdain for characterization in a traditional sense. Lovecraft's characters are either 1) intentional ciphers (see Herbert West), 2) humans that exist solely to get wiped out by forces beyond their control (see the farm family from "Color Out of Space"), or 3) shattered minds contemplating their own dissolution (see "The Tomb"), that last being a writing trick that gives them an illusory depth not unlike the vertigo-inducing suggestion of depth you get when you looking at your reflection as it is bounced back and forth between two mirrors. At his best, Lovecraft doesn't waste time with love interests, the bonds of friendship, emotional developments, and so on. His characters don't have the time or resources to handle any of that common human stuff. When you're being crushed by your maddening knowledge of the unfathomable and infinite evil that forms the very fabric of this fragile and indifferent universe, who's got time to call their girlfriend?

There is a single relationship that shows up again and again in Lovecraft's work. We'll call this relationship the "um friends." In several stories, Lovecraft pairs two gents together. One of them is the protagonist and the other is the narrator. It is not totally unlike the Holmes/Watson thing, only, instead of solving crimes, our duo shut themselves into castle-like mansions and perform "unspeakable rites to eldritch gods." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. These pairs are always old friends, the only close friends either of them seem to have. One is always the dominant friend, usually the one who lures our narrator into an "appreciation of the occult." And the narrator is always vague about just how they spent their time, supposedly because their sanity is shattered or they've seen things to monstrous to describe.

Here's Randolph Carter, from "The Statement of Randolph Carter":

As I Have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me . . . As to the nature of our studies – must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? . . . Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him . . .

The narrator of "The Hound" discussing his friend:

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui . . . I cannot reveal the shocking expeditions . . .

Again, from "Thing on the Doorstep":

I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life . . . I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit . . . what lay behind our joint love of shadows . . ."

I should point out that, despite the general grotesque cast of Lovecraft's world, the narrator's male friends are, when Lovecraft bothers to give them a physical description, usually quite lovely, and almost always in a frail and boyish sort of way. Derby, from the example above, is described as handsome in a soft and boyish way. Herbert West is described in terms Oscar Wilde might have used for a nerdy version of Dorian Gray: "a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice."

I'm not going to go so far as to come and say that Lovecraft's "um friends" are gay lovers. Actually, I'm don't think the idea would have occurred to Lovecraft. Instead, let's just say that hyper-intense secretive same-sex social bonds are frequently at the center of Lovecraft's stories and that these relationships occasionally suggest more than friendship.

I bring all this up, because it is yet another aspect of Lovecraft's work that might make filmmakers gun-shy about trying to adapt his stories.

Stuart Gordon's 1985 film, H. P. Lovecraft's The Re-animator is an interesting study on how one filmmaker tackles the issues presented above.

Gordon handles the problem of Lovecraft's unique and bizarre tone by simply shifting the mood of the entire story. What was surreal in Lovecraft's original becomes farce in Gordon's film.

The shift doesn't damage the plot all that much. After failing to bring back his mentor in an Austria medical school, Herbert West (played with wonderfully creepy intensity by Jeffrey Combs) transfers to good Miskatonic U. in Arkham, Mass. There he rooms with Dan, a fellow med student who just happens to be bumpin' uglies with Megan, the dean's daughter and another med student at Ol' Misk. West comes into immediate conflict with Dr. Hill, a famous professor who has a secret creepy crush on the dean's daughter. West eventually drags Dan into his experiments, the dubious and illegal nature of which is revealed to the dean and which leads to the expulsion of West and the withdrawal of Dan's financial support.

Of course, these punishments don't stop West and Dan. Mad science types so rarely just shrug their shoulders, bemoan the lack of funding, and then start up new projects in more secure and better-funded fields. Instead they bust into the school hospital and attempt to revive one of the bodies in the morgue. Things go all pear-shaped on them when the dean comes in and their recently revived subject offs him. Oops. They off subject one and decide to use the re-agent to safe the dean. Things just get worse from there.

Besides updating the story for the 20th century, Gordon condenses what is decades of action into what is maybe a week of plot. He also ups the gore, replacing Lovecraft's precious gothic dread for outright splatter. Finally, the whole thing is given an almost slapstick, over-the-top feel. Not that this is a bad thing. Gordon gets the mix of shudders and scares down pretty well and the result will appeal to those who enjoy horror-comedy flicks like the later Evil Dead 2.

As for the second problem, Gordon does here what he'll do with nearly every Lovecraft adaptation he helms: he'll add a love interest. What better way to give the characters a little development and avoid that pesky insinuation of homosexuality than to add a chick to the flick? In The Re-animator Megan is on-hand with some screaming and some full frontal nudity to ensure the characters are properly motivated and secure Dan's hetero bonifieds. In fact, the movie most diverges from the original story in the last quarter, when Hill develops into the flicks clearest villain and he and Dan struggle over Megan (who, distressingly, also ends up on the business end of the most out of place and disturbing sexual since the tree assault of the Evil Dead series).

The Re-animator, despite the claims of the full title, is not a great Lovecraft adaptation, but is a stand-out in the subgenre of gross-out horror/comedy. Gordon's done better adaptations, but few of those have the sort of anarchic energy and splatter thrills of this flick. Using my top secret Impact Crater on the Anti-Saturn Hemisphere of Saturn's Moon Enceladus Movie Rating System, I'm giving this flick a solid Shakashik. Sure, the thing would probably give Lovecraft a heart attack, but he's already dead so don't worry about it.

Stuff: Happy Birthday, Howie.

So, if he had actually made a dark deal with eldritch powers beyond the kin of mortals, H. P. Lovecraft would be 117 today.

In tribute, here's the complete episode of The Real Ghostbusters in which our boys in gray cross proton beams with Cthulhu.

Here's part 1: "Your precious book of spells will be quite safe here."



And here's part 2: "The most opportune place for the cult to perform the ceremony is the southern tip of Brooklyn: Coney Island, to be exact."

News: President denies rumors that Russia is developing giant robots to defend itself from eldritch horrors.

There are many burning issues that President Vladimir Putin must deal with: tensions over the United States proposed missile defense system; continuing political strife with various breakaway republics; the fallout from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; and, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the military deployment of giant robots and the awakening of Cthulhu.

In a recent press conference, President Putin agreed to answer questions submitted to him via the Internet. Here's an excerpt from the short article about the conference:

“Yes, we will use the latest technical devices. Already now they are being stationed, for example, in the southern parts of our country,” Putin said when reporters asked him after the conference whether Russia planned to use “gigantic, humanoid war robots” to defend itself.

Asked to elaborate about what he meant, Putin said: “These are unmanned aerial vehicles. And maybe the time will come for gigantic robots. However, so far we have put our main hope on people — namely border guards,” Putin said, Kommersant reported.

Asked about the possible awakening of the giant mythical octopus Cthulhu, the fourth-most popular question among the more than 150,000 sent to Putin, he said that he believed something more serious was behind the question. Cthulhu was invented by novelist H.P. Lovecraft and was said to be sleeping beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Putin said he viewed mysterious forces with suspicion and advised those who took them seriously to read the Bible, Koran or other religious books.

Thanks to Dave over at Digital Download for the heads up on this story.

Stuff: If I do not survive this [noun], my executors may put caution before [mental state] and [verb] that it meets no other [body part, plural].

For a little fun on Thursday, here's a site where you can play with H. P. Lovecraft "Mad Libs." You fill out a list of animals, body parts, adjectives, and so on. You know the drill. Punch in your words and hit the submit button. The site will then plug your words into a template built from Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

And yet I saw them in a dinnerless stream -- maximizing, hopping, productizing, bleating -- surging inhumanly through the amorphous moonlight in a grotesque, giddy pants of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had wimpy tiaras of that nameless eggshellish-gold metal ... and some were strangely monocle'd ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly actionable khaki wrist watch and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thimble that answered for a ear lobe.

I think their predominant colour was a hot pinkish-green, though they had white nostrils. They were mostly gregarious and illict, but the ridges of their backs were plantagenet. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of baby rhinos, with prodigious jaded colons that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating kittens, and their long hedges were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on four legs and sometimes on one hundred. I was somehow glad that they had no more than elevteenth limbs. Their litigating, baying voices, clearly used for popular testicles, held all the actionable shades of expression which their stuffy faces lacked.

But for all their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be -- for was not the memory of the fastidious tiara at The Dome at the 1936 World's Fair still fresh? They were the blasphemous owl-frogs of the nameless design. . .

Movies: Worst. Roommate. Ever.

Now that they're on DVD, I'm finally catching up with the first season of Showtime's Masters of Horror series. I know, I know. Dude, look: I've got a full time job, okay? I get to stuff when I get to it. Last night, I got to Stuart Gordon's Dreams in the Witch-House.

The short stories of H. P. Lovecraft are perversely unsuited to film adaptation. I say perversely in the sense that Lovecraft almost seems to have created them a trap for the incautious filmmaker. On one hand, their pulpy origins, genre importance, and seemingly built-in cult audience makes them look like prime material for filming. But the stories are the product of a talent so radically lonely in outlook and essentially literary in bent that the material is almost inherently resistant to visual storytelling.

The world of H. P. Lovecraft is built almost entirely out of isolated and profoundly alone people – they are usually decadent shut-ins, solitary researchers into the mysteries of the unknown, lonely dwellers in ancient houses, and people trapped, sometimes literally, within worlds of their own creation. Those who are not alone are either paired with some near mirror image of themselves (the pair at the center of "The Hound"), keep the company of a inscrutable ciphers (in the case of the Dorian Grey-like Herbert West or the strangely personality-free farm family in "The Color Out of Space"), or they are quickly cut off from their fellows (I'm thinking here of "Mountains of Madness"). To frame it in cinematic terms, Lovecraft's works always have a cast of one. Consequently, they rarely feature any significant human interaction; which is to say they contain conversations and the like, but character development is usually restricted to the main character and his relationship to one of those eternal, unspeakable, and eldritch things that exist in every corner of Lovecraft's world. Furthermore, the stories are really stories that exist entirely inside the head of a single character. And, as they are almost always the stories of a mentality shattered by the infinitely inexplicable, the real meat of the plot is in the relation of the mental state of fear. Lovecraft can only depict this state though a sort of madly tangled language that always seems on the verge of bursting at the seams. It is that beyond-purple prose that is Lovecraft's most distinctive trademark and, without the actual prose itself, without Lovecraft's distinctly off-kilter language, you really aren't left with much. A "literal" adaptation of Lovecraft stories would be a single long-take of some wide-eyed crazy man ranting at the camera for a couple hours.

This makes the career of Stuart Gordon, the go-to Lovecraft adapter, something of a minor cinematic miracle. Dreams in the Witch-House is a fine adaptation of the short story of the same name, and it joins the famed Re-Animator and the unjustly dismissed Dagon, both helmed by Gordon, in the select category of Lovecraft adaptations worth checking out. Gordon has managed this trick by balancing two seemly antithetical approaches: respect for the original mixed with little loyalty to the letter of the piece. Gordon knows that the originals, as written, would make bad movies. They are meant to be short stories and not scripts. So Gordon takes the original and reinvents it, keeping Lovecraft's details, but making a viable film out it. Witch-House is a perfect example of this approach.

A typical of Lovecraft's hero, Gilman, who in the original short story is one of those obsessive hunters of dark mysteries, takes up residence in the cursed home precisely because of its witch-haunted past. He is looking for trouble and finds it. In the film, Gordon makes Gilman a likeable student who is just looking for a cheap and quiet place to finish off his dissertation. He's a point of identification for us who might not spend all our time searching out eldritch things best left undisturbed.

As luck would have it, he finds a cheap room in a rundown house not far from Miskatonic University, where he's doing post-grad work in physics. Shortly after moving in, Gilman notices an odd architectural detail in the home, a series of corners that seem to reproduce a theoretical multidimensional crossing that Gilman has hypothesized as part of his research. He also becomes acquainted with the other residents of the boarding house: a slimy manager, a religiously fanatical old man who divides his time between hard liquor and flagellant-style holy self-torture, and the cute red-headed single mother across the hall. This woman serves as the love interest. My normal reaction to the addition of love interests is a groaning comment about bad Hollywood habits. But, in this case, it works. For viewers to care about Gilman, he cannot be the single-minded, somewhat creepy character Lovecraft created. He needs to be human.

Unfortunately, there isn't much peace and quiet at the ol' Witch-House. Shortly after arriving, Gilman notices the odd architecture of his room resembles a theoretical dimensional cross-over that he's been studying for his dissertation. And, the way food left out means mice, inter-dimensional rifts mean Satantic witches. Before you can say "string theory," Gilman's sleep is being disturbed by visions of a rat with a human face and worse. Before long, the house's resident witch is making a bid for Gilman's soul and ripping the flesh off his back with her talon-like finger nails. As the story progresses, we find out the witch likes child sacrifices (who doesn't?) but needs a human to does the actual dirty work for her. She's got her eye on the infant son of Gilman's new love interest and she wants Gilman to do the stabbing. What's a guy to do?

Like Lovecraft's work, Gordon's film skits goofiness at several points, but ultimately finds its groove and starts chugging along. The effects are fine. Gordon was working with television-sized budgets, and he's got to make do with what he's got. For the most part, the visuals are effective but nothing show-stopping. The major exception to this is the witch's human-faced rat familiar. This character never rises above the level of silly. The acting was better than it probably needed to be. The tension between Gilman and Frances is charming and feels genuine and Godden (a veteran of Gordon's Lovecraft adaptation Dagon) plays Gilman in a naturalistic manner, letting us believe his slide from mild-mannered student to unhinged victim of the unexplained.

All and all, Witch-House is an entertaining, but slight flick that is more Twilight Zone uncanny than genuinely frightening. It fills its hour-long runtime with enough fun to never drag, but you won't spend much time thinking on it afterward. On the lab-tested and mom-approved Canadian Stamps Featuring Fish film rating system, I give this flick a respectable 1980 17-cent Atlantic Whitefish.