Abstract
This article first delineates the reasons why it is difficult to adapt Lovecraft’s fiction to the screen. It then analyses different types of adaptation, either straight or more loose, focusing in particular on the work of Stuart Gordon, one of the main adapters of Lovecraft with films ranging from parody ( Herbert West Reanimator ) to more serious adaptations which however depart in various ways (especially adding women characters and sex) from their source text ( Dagon , The Dreams in the Witch House ). Andrew Leman’s The Call of Cthulhu , a pastiche of early silent films, provides a good example of straight adaptation. It also proves rewarding to compare two different retellings of the same novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , by two directors, Roger Corman ( The Haunted Palace ) and Dan O’Bannon ( The Resurrected ). Corman tends to associate Poesque Gothic and Lovecraft while O’Bannon uses film noir conventions, also setting the story in a contemporary context. Lastly this article analyses the presence of Lovecraftian themes and motifs in films that are not adaptations like Alien or the Quatermass trilogy. A case in point is John Carpenter’s apocalyptic trilogy that provides a convincing re-appropriation of Lovecraft’s fictional universe.
Highlights
This article first delineates the reasons why it is difficult to adapt Lovecraft’s fiction to the screen
HP Lovecraft was not very fond of cinema as testify some remarks in his letters. He shows some contempt for the nascent medium
Gordon manages to convey the mood of the story, in particular images of the sinister harbour, the empty, dirty, squalid streets full of rubble, detritus, the hybrid entities hiding behind closed shutters in decrepit buildings with damp soiled walls and dirty smelly bathrooms as in the hotel where Paul March finds a temporary refuge
Summary
Lovecraft’s fiction offers a rich imaginary world which could provide a good material for filmic transposition: mysterious objects, forbidden secrets, adventurous explorations of the Australian desert or Africa, discovery of horrors at the heart of modern cities, investigative and initiatory quests, metamorphoses, scenes of blasphemous, shocking revelations, questions of identity, blurring of the frontiers between dream and reality, paroxysmic states of consciousness, alien beings, cosmic monsters, etc. Its production design juxtaposes bold, saturated colours with the genre’s typically shadowy, high contrast lighting, most notably in syringes of mad doctor West’s bright yellow-green reagent glowing against black backgrounds, a look that evokes both post-war science-fiction laboratories and four-color comics» (2007: 244) His Herbert West owns all the attributes of the Lovecraftian character: a juvenile, frail physique and an excessive hubris, which urges him to go beyond human limitations and knowledge in order to transgress the frontier between life and death. Gordon manages to convey the mood of the story, in particular images of the sinister harbour, the empty, dirty, squalid streets full of rubble, detritus, the hybrid entities hiding behind closed shutters in decrepit buildings with damp soiled walls and dirty smelly bathrooms as in the hotel where Paul March finds a temporary refuge He discovers his true origin adumbrated in the premonitory dream sequence that opens the film and confirmed by the starting of his transformation, gills opening on his body. In 2005 Gordon directed a one hour adaptation of The Dreams in the Witch House, part of a TV anthology entitled Masters of Horror
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