I want to see this story made into a good movie. With a big budget spent properly, and some decent talent, I think that it could honestly cause the weak-hearted to die of fright. Now that I’ve said this, I know someone will pop up and mention some obscure film treatment that thoroughly mangled the story and effectively ruined it for everyone. Damn, though, I can’t help but think how really great it could be- the story reads to me almost as if it were made for conversion to film. If I could find me an abandoned New England fishing village, I might start writing the blasted screenplay myself.
I’d love to see it. “Shadow” is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. But I’ve been afflicted with this upbeat image since someone suggested “Disney-fying” Lovecraft, and I can’t get the image of Ariel and Triton as the respresentatives of the fish-folk, with their horrible “familiars” Ceh-Bass-chun and Fl’oun-duhrr. And the folks at the dilapidated Innsmouth boarding house singing “Be Our Guest”.
CalMeacham, I now hate you with every fiber of my being. I always had trouble taking Lovecraft seriously, with his “it’s so horrible I can’t describe it” copouts, but you just finished off any chance I ever will.
That was really Lovecraft’s strength. It’s also the hardest thing to translate to a movie. Even the most ernest attempts to film Lovecraft end up bastardized. Just watch The Reanimator, Bride Of The Reanimator, or Necronomicon. Once night falls, Shadow moves pretty quickly. But, until then all people do is talk. How many pages consist entirely of Zadok doing a monologue, telling the town’s history? You and I may love Shadow, but I’m not sure teh average audience has the patience for it.
Frankly, the best adaptation I’ve seen was a puppet show, The Music Of Erich Zahn performed with complex marionettes. In the universe of the Cthulhu Mythos, humans are often merely puppets to otherworldly things. Using actual puppets underlines this point. I think some form of animation would be best for Shadow. This would also lower the special effects budget, allowing for more Deep Ones.
Well, obviously, when you made the movie, you wouldn’t just film Zadok speaking his dialogue; you would use flashbacks to illustrate what he was saying. The problem with that approach is that it would tend to confirm what he is saying was true, whereas the story plays on the tension of whether Innsmouth is really a den of the Deep Ones, or has the narrator simply gone mad and succumbed to the superstitious ramblings Zadok fed him?
Actually, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” could be a great film if handled right – but that’s a big if. Stuart Gordon (REANIMATOR) was supposed to do it in the '90s, but it never happened.
None of the attempts to film Lovecraft have been very good. Part of the reason, I think, is that Lovecraft’s concepts and the backstory in his works are definitely outside the range of expectations of the audiences, Consequently, the studies try to “dumb it down”, because they’re afraid the audience won’t understand horror if it doesn’ty involve a vampire or a ghost or something equally weird but familiar. (An odd concept, that.) Don’t look for The Call of Cthulhu anytime soon.
That said, I think that they could do a decent film of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. There’s a lot of good, filmable buildup, the involvement of the Cthulhu mythos is negligicbly small, and the concepts aren’t too far from those of a horror film – just handled better.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has already been adapted twice. Check this out.
I understand quite well that previous attempts to film Lovecraft have failed or been bastardized. However, I think a properly done film can create an excellent atmosphere. Zadok Allen’s reminscing could be done as a sort of flashback, with bits left out for the protagonist to find, so that it doesn’t take long to flashback. In fact, you might divide the film into two separate stories- the saga of Obed Marsh, offered as a tale by Zadok Allen, and then the action scenes. As in the story, the saga is mostly forboding. I stand by my initial assessment that decent filming could make a spectacularly scary movie.
I know, I’ve seen The Haunted Palace – I even hunted it down to get a copy. Charles Beaumont – * Charles Beaumont* – wrote the screenplay! He wrote lots of wonderful short stories and a lot of the original Twilight Zone episodes, as well as The Circus of Dr. Lao, so I had high hopes. Of course, he also wrote the screenplay for The Queen of Outer Space. The Haunted Palace was obviously written by the guy who did the latter. Even having Vincent Price and Lon Chaney Jr. couldn’t save it.
I didn’t see the other version, but the title doesn’t give me a lot of confidence.
As far as I’m concerned, Lovecraft still hasn’t been properly filmed yet.
Oh, come on. THE HAUNTED PALACE is an entertaining, atmospheric horror film. The script doesn’t really do justice to Lovecraft’s story, but it does contain a lot of Lovecraft elements, and the final result is worthwhile in its own right, even if it doesn’t stand up as a “faithful” adpatation. At any rate, it’s much better than THE RESURRECTED, which has far more of Lovecraft’s plot but which utterly fails to convey the proper atmosphere and sense of cosmic dread.
On the matter of The Resurrected (haven’t seen The Haunted Palace) I would actually place it near the forefront of Lovercraft movies. I haven’t gotten around to reading Dexter yet, so I can’t say for sure how Lovecraft went about narrating the tale, but the use of a noir-esque gumshoe worked pretty well for me as the main character. It wasn’t filmed on that big a budget, and has its flaws, but I’ve enjoyed it each time I’ve seen it. It was probably the best thing Dan O’Bannon did since Alien. And it was a hell of a lot better than the bigger budget, “Lovecraftian” In The Mouth of Madness.
And as I try to explain why I like the film I can’t shake the feeling that this post is going to look like “me like movie!”
Hey mentions on “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath” I think you would probably have to cut it down some but I’ve always thought that that would be the one to do (You would have to have a decent budget) with the battle against the moonbeasts, the decent into Pnoth, and of course Kaddath itself. Of course no studio would probably ever fund it, but one can always dream
I have a feeling this comes under the heading of “De Gustibus non disputandum est”, but I found The Haunted Palace an immense bore, and not a well-made atmospheric horror story at all. That it was shorn of virtually all its Lovecraftian features didn’t help at all.
Die, Monster, Die!, to give this particular devil its due, did have some legitimate atmosphere (it was based on Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, but too much of it was ultimately too silly, and too far removed from L’s work. God knows it was hard to see Lovecraft’s New England under that English countryside, with a bit of gratuitous Satanism thrown in, or his subtle horror under the heavy-handed “science” and laughable dialog (“It’s warm! I wonder if it’s an element?” ).
I really would like to see good Lovecraft, done straight.
I’ve never read Lovecraft and all I know about his work is what I read in the “God, Demigods and Heroes” manual for Dungeons and Dragons (does that make me a bad person?).
What’s the best place to start?
And, is his writing in the public domain yet? That would make it much more attractive to producers, I’d think.
There are several collections of Lovecraft, and you can find a lot of it in used bookseller’s. The man has never been out of print, I think.
I’d suggest staying away from the ones that were “collaborations” with August Derleth – Derleth’s contributions were all after Lovecraft’s death, and they aren’t up to Lovecraft’s standards. I’d also stay away from his “Dream Quest” stuff, at least at first.
The Call of Cthulhu
The Dunwitch Horror
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Colour Out of Space
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Case of Charkles Dexter Ward
Pickman’s Model
The Music of Erich Zann
These are pretty good stories, and good intros to the world of Lovecraft. You might also want to read his essay “Supermatural Fiction in Literature”, published as a book by Dover.
There’s an excellent series of “annotated” Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi (two paperback collections that I know of, plus insividual stories by a small publisher – I’ve got “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by him), but I’d stay away until I read the stories first – the annotations and illustrations give too much away.
Fiver:They’re all stories. Only Charles Dexter Ward has, to my knowledge, been published as a book by itself by a major publisher. Some of the others (The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, The Colour Out Of Space) have been used as titles of the collections that they are in. Lovecraft wasn’t big on long fiction.
