1000 Ögon: Lovecraft (2014) by Jonas Anderson & Daniel Thollin

Tänk om H.P. Lovecraft hade levt idag och bott i Uppsala! Hur hade hans berättelser sett ut då? Vår bok heter helt enkelt 1000 Ögon: Lovecraft och är vår hyllning till denna skräckens mästare. Vi tolkar några av hans berättelser och placerar dem i vårt 1000 Ögon-universum.	What if H.P. Lovecraft was alive today and lived in Uppsala! What would his stories look like then? Our book is simply called 1000 Eyes: Lovecraft and is our tribute to this master of horror. We interpret some of his stories and place them in our 1000 Eyes universe.
Swedish pitch on Indiegogo	English translation

1000 Ögon (1000 Eyes) is the label for a contemporary Swedish-language series of horror graphic novels (really, thin bandes dessinée-style hardbacks) by the creative team of Jonas Anderson, Anders Björkelid, and Daniel Thollin, the last three published by Albumförlaget. Several of these have Lovecraftian influences, notably Filgia (2013), Lovecraft (2014), and Cthulhu (2015), but like a lot of non-English language publications that don’t make it into translation, they tend to get overlooked by English-reading audiences. The name “1000 ögon” is presumably a reference to the Swedish horror film Skräcken har 1000 ögon (“Fear has 1000 Eyes,” 1970).

This is a bit of a shame because Lovecraft has an interesting basic premise: taking the core of four of Lovecraft’s stories (“The Hound,” “The Shunned House,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”), and reworking them in a shared, contemporary setting, keeping what they feel is the essence of Lovecraft’s stories while freely altering the trappings and settings. In this way, the two graverobbing aesthetes of “The Hound” become more notably occult in their predilections (and apparently drive a Citroën GS); the protagonist of “The Shunned House” is a young woman named Cecilia dealing with something more than the standard mildew and black mold in the house, “The Statement of Randolph Carter” involves facetime over a smartphone rather than a field telephone, and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” takes some specific visual cues from the buildings of Uppsala and the Swedish fishing industry.

Like many contemporary takes on the Mythos, Thollin and Anderson each work in references to the Cthulhu Mythos in these stories, even if there were none before. As each one writes and draws their respective episodes independently (“The Shunned House” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” for Daniel Thollin and “The Hound” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for Jonas Anderson), this provides a degree of narrative continuity that might otherwise be lacking. Readers get the sense that these stories are connected, expressions of some common threat or body of myth, in a way that might not be obvious otherwise.

For those at least passingly familiar with Swedish architecture or Uppsala in particular, the connectivity of the stories is also geographic and cultural. Which is rather the entire point of this exercise. While Lovecraft never weighed in on localization per se, he did famously note:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Picture in the House”

Which is to say: horror can be found closer to home than you think. Forget for a moment all those Hollywood horrors set in the United States, don’t think yourself safe just because Lovecraft restricted himself primarily to New England. Horror can be anywhere, closer than you would like…you may be in some corner of Lovecraft Country already and not even know it.

Visually, Thollin’s style is “cleaner” and closer to American-style comic figuring, while Anderson’s is a little scratchier and closer to the Franco-Belgian school, and the digital coloring on Anderson’s work in particular can look a little muddy at times. While it wouldn’t be correct to say that none of the stories being adapted lend themselves to grand visuals, it seems both Thollin and Anderson lean into a more subdued approach, focusing on the human characters and generally keeping things at their scale. So there are few grand visuals, but several clever and well-designed elements, like the stark outcropping of Devil’s Reef, which really stands out when compared to how it is normally portrayed, as barely a bump above the waterline.

Lovecraft was followed up by a sequel titled Cthulhu. Whereas Lovecraft consists of four adaptations, Cthulhu is made up of two original works, both set in Uppsala, before and after the stars are right. The stories maintain much of the same artistic style and themes of the Lovecraft adaptations, but the creators have a little more free play to indulge their imaginations. Readers who dig the style and want to see what happens what Thollin and Anderson move beyond adaptation to pastiche won’t be disappointed.

While you might find Filgia, Lovecraft, and Cthulhu available online in some second-hand bookstores, the best way to order them is probably direct from Albumförlaget.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017) by Henrik Möller & Lars Krantz

After Lars’ and my collaboration on the book CREATION OF A GOD [ATT BYGGA EN GUD, 2015], the plans of a trilogy began to take shape. While CREATION OF A GOD was a cross between the works of Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, the second book, CREATION OF THE NECRONOMICON, was pure Lovecraftian fan fiction. The third will be a kind of Clark Ashton Smith-inspired postapocalyptic dark fantasy about three pregnant outlaws running from the law after a trainrobbery [SKAPANDET AV EN MYT —CREATION OF A MYTH, 2018].
Henrik Möller, introduction to Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

The middle of a trilogy of illustrated books, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017) consists of a text in Swedish and English by Henrik Möller, and black-and-white illustrations by Lars Krantz. While some sellers have categorized this book as a graphic novel, it would probably be more correct to label this an illustrated novel; text and image stand in contrast to one another, complementing one another: where one is sparse, the other is detailed; when one is subdued, the other is vivid. The result is as effective a work of graphic fiction as has yet been produced.

Möller’s description of the work as “fanfiction” is accurate, although that doesn’t quite do it justice. The story is an expansion of Lovecraft’s “The History of the Necronomicon,” retaining the essential elements of the story but expanding the narrative of Abdul Alhazred, adding a Vathek– or 1,001 Nights-style doomed romance. However, like many fans Möller and Krantz chose to weave fact with fiction, and the story has a framing narrative: one night in Providence, H. P. Lovecraft is out in a walk and finds his mind cast back a thousand years.

This is a not-uncommon device, the idea that Lovecraft and his fictional creation were both real, that the Mythos he created was real, at least to him—that the stories he told are occult truth, or even that he found or inherited a copy of the Necronomicon, from which he learned all this eldritch lore. The idea tends to rob Lovecraft of a certain genius, or at least agency; it makes him from a master storyteller to a kind of pulp journalist or cryptic occultist.

However, when carried out with sufficient style, the narrative convention of “the real Necronomicon!” still holds a bit of cachet. The tome, and its creators real and fiction, have achieved that legendary status where fact and fiction easily flow together. There are dozens of Necronomicons in the world today, from comic books to grimoires like Magic of Atlantis: Sauthenerom: The Real Source of the Necronomicon (1985) by Frank G. Ripel & Necronomicon: Il Libro Proibito di Abdul Alhazred (2022) by Mirando Gurzo, long novels to pillowbooks. All variations on the idea of the terrible book whose secrets are so terrible they make the skin crawl and the bright light of day a bit dimmer.

The Necronomicon is a sourcebook of horror. So it should come as no surprise that parts of Möller and Krantz’ book are appropriately horrible.

He fought bravely until the caliph revealed what it was Alhazred had been fed the last three days, holding up the mangled remains of his newborn son. FInally, Alhazred screamed out, a mutes [sic], muffled cry of the soul. The small insect was hiding in his throat. Waiting… Waiting.
Henrik Möller, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

This motif of the insect comes from a very small, often overlooked detail about the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft had borrowed from another source:

Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The History of the Necronomicon“

It is a small detail, often overlooked. Some authors credit Alhazred as an arch-cultist, heretic, and magician; others a hero whose dire warnings are often misinterpreted and abused; or a prophet, puppeted about by unseen powers. His life is a function with a single output: the Necronomicon. It is often the book that matters, the text itself, not necessarily where it came from or how it got into its current form.

Yet for Lovecraft, the whole point of “The History of the Necronomicon” is that the story of the text was what was important. The contents could never match the darkest depths of the readers’ imagination. Alhazred is integral to the story; it was the first such book to have a proper author and history, to be more than a strange and terrible name on the shelf in the secret library of some cultist. The story of the Necronomicon is important, because without that story, it is just another odd tome, no more special than the rest.

It is a book born in blood and mystery.

There is an epilogue. The narrative returns to the frame-story. Lovecraft at his typewriter. The temporal loop is closed. In the final pages, the story comes to a bit of an ugly and unsettling close, weaving fact and fiction again:

Finally, on his deathbed, he wrote down all of Alhazred’s writings from memory into what he called his death diary and bequeathed it to his friend Robert Barlow.

After Lovecraft’s death, Barlow took the book to Mexico where he eventually committed suicide. The book is, as of today, still missing.
Henrik Möller, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

The truth of Lovecraft’s “death diary” is more prosaic, and perhaps more terrible for that. It was a minute record of Lovecraft’s final, fatal illness and last days, beginning 1 January 1937. While the actual diary is missing, Barlow copied and condensed some entries, which are reproduced in Lovecraft’s Collected Essays volume 5. The entry for March 7th simply reads “hideous pain.”

The reality of the death diary puts the Necronomicon in context. We may fill it with whatever terrible cruelties and eldritch lore we may dream up. The Necronomicon Files by Daniel harms & John Wisdom Gonce III has a list; everything from the secret of telepathy to how to breed worms in the carcasses of camels. The real world is often more prosaic, but no less horrible. Lovecraft’s death diary is an account of adult fears, the yawning death in hospital beds as cancer gnaws at our bowels. A death by inches, punctuated by a thousand indignities, and then…nonexistence. Throwing the gates wide to let the Old Ones come again would at least be a choice.

Henrik Möller is also a filmmaker, and to accompany the publication of Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017), he also released a short video adaptation of the work, which is still available on Youtube. The film in narrated by Möller in Swedish and English, to Krantz’ illustrations, with a soundtrack by Möller. If you cannot get the book, it is a good way to experience their story.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Rhinebeck Gazette • 28 June 1945

In the aftermath of the deep cut on “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach, Bill Plott revealed that Wilstach and Lovecraft had been mentioned together before, in a brief news item in The Rhinebeck Gazette, the local newspaper of Rhinebeck, New York, dated 28 June 1945. Armed with this information, the appropriate page was found at the online newspaper archive of the Fulton County History website.

*The Rhinebeck Gazette*, Rhinebeck, NY, 28 June 1945, p4

“Long Pond” is a shallow lake in New York state, located a little over five miles south of Rhinebeck, which itself lies on the east bank of the Hudson River. The 1930 U. S. Census put John Wilstach and his wife at Long Pond Road, which encircles the lake. So we can definitely say that John Wilstach was at Long Pond at the time. What about Lovecraft?

As it happens, we know Lovecraft visited the area twice. The first trip came in May 1929; Lovecraft had taken his first serious trip to the Southern United States via bus, and in New York City he met his friend and fellow pulp-writer Frank Belknap Long, Jr:

From Philadelphia I proceeded to New York, where my young grandchild Frank B. Long & his parents gave me a motor lift up the Hudson shore to Kingston—the ancient town harbouring my artist-fantaisiste friend Bernard Austin Dwyer, whom neither Long nor I had ever met in person before, despite long & interesting correspondence. Dwyer turned out to be as genial & pleasant in person as on paper, & I stayed at his house several days—though Long had to move on & collaborate with his father in a trout-fishing excursion (which turned out absolutely fruitless!). Kingston itself interested me prodigiously, for it is a highly venerable & historical place ful of reliques of the past. The present city is a fusion of two once separate villages—Kingston proper, where my host lives & which is about a mild infland from the Hudson’s west bank, & the river-port of Rondout on the hilly bank itself, where the ferry from Rhinebeck lands & which is now a somewhat picturesque slum.
H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, 29 May 1929, Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge 64

The Longs and Lovecraft would have taken the car up the east bank of the Hudson to Rhinebeck, and then the ferry over to the west bank to Kingston (as Rhinebeck is situated some ways from the river, it’s possible the actual drop-off was at Rhinecliff on the river, or that a bus from Rhinebeck took Lovecraft to the ferry). While he was in Kingston with Bernard Austin Dwyer, Lovecraft visited the nearby communities of Hurley (“abt. 3 m. N W of Kingston”) and New Paltz (“16 m. S.”), both on the western side of the river. Lovecraft would then have continued north to Albany, N.Y., and then east to Massachusetts to meet another friend, the printer W. Paul Cook.

Lovecraft mentions this leg of his 1929 trip in varying detail in a number of letters, and the whole trip was recorded in an extensive travelogue, “Travels in the Provinces of America” (Collected Essays 4.32-61). None of these letters or the travelogue mention Wilstach, Long Pond, or any extended stay or exploration of Rhinebeck, though the travelogue mentions the ferry. To give an idea of the scope of the 1929 trip:

I surely had a great trip—over 2 weeks with [Vrest] Orton, over a week more with Long, & then the open road. Richmond—childhood home & favoured haunt of Poe—Williamsburg, 17th century survival & colonial capital of Virginia; Jamestown, birthplace of our culture on this continent; Yorktown, typical Southern colonial village; Fredericksburg, boyhood environment of Genl. Washington; Washington [D. C.]—where I saw the Easter Island images (shades of Lemuria!) in the Smithsonian—Philadelphia, whose new art museum is a breath-taking Greek Acropolis; Kingston, whose ancient stone houses bespeak another culture & another day; Hurley, which a Dutch diplomat has called more Dutch than anything left in Holand; New Paltz, home of the Huguenots; Albany & the Berkshires; good old Athol; Brattleboro & the vivid Vermont hills; & finally home again—best place of all!
H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 5 Jun 1929, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 175

In June 1930, Lovecraft returned to Kingston, N.Y. to visit Dwyer again. There is much less about this trip in Lovecraft’s letters, presumably because he had covered so much of antiquarian interest the year before. A good idea of the trip from one letter is:

My visit with Dwyer in ancient Kingston was extremely delightful. Every clear day we fared forth to the wild and beautiful countryside, & I enjoyed the conversation of one who is in many respects the most spontaneous & [Algernon] Blackwood-like fantaisiste I know.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 30 Jun 1930, Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei 243

This is the last account we have in Lovecraft’s published letters to any visit to the Kingston/Rhinebeck region. Again, no mention of Wilstach or Long Pond. The reason that Lovecraft did not venture up into that part of New York in later trips is given in 1931:

Finally I shall spend a week or two with Belknap in New York & then probably go home at last, since I doubt if I’ll have the cash to visit Dwyer. He has, by the way, returned to his paternal acres in the hinterland; hence is to be addressed no more at Kingston, but at Box 43, West Shokan, N.Y.
H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 25 Jun 1931, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 313

Without a friend in the region to visit, Lovecraft apparently had no reason to visit Kingston.

Just because there is no corroborating record in Lovecraft’s letters of the weird fictionist visiting the Rhinebeck region in the mid-30s, or any mention of John Wilstach at all, does not immediately invalidate the anecdote in the Rhinebeck Gazette, though it may cast a bit of doubt on the account of Lovecraft’s visit. After a decade or so, memories can grow a little fuzzy; possibly Wilstach met the Longs on their fishing trip in 1929 and misremembered Lovecraft as staying with them for the weekend. Possibly Lovecraft did have a lost weekend in New York State and the references were in letters that haven’t survived. Or maybe Wilstach invented the episode, although that would beg the question of why.

If the account of Lovecraft’s visit to Long Pond has to be judged apocryphal until further evidence emerges, the note at the beginning of the article that Wilstach had just sold an article about Lovecraft to Esquire named “An American Eccentric” is interesting. If this was the original title of “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower,” it means that the article took about six months from submission to publication, and faced at least a few editorial changes during that time, perhaps resulting in some of the oddities in that article. It is notable that this anecdote did not make it into the published Esquire piece, suggesting he either left it out or it was edited out.

While this piece in the Rhinebeck Gazette neither proves or disproves whether Wilstach actually knew Lovecraft in any capacity, it is an interesting addendum to what we know about their potential friendship.

Thanks again to Bill Plott for bringing this to my attention.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Peace Advocate” (1917) by Elizabeth Berkeley

It is true that I once used the pseudonym of “Elizabeth Berkeley” in conjunction with its more rightful owner W. V. J.—in 1916 the name covered certain verses by both authors, in an effort to mystify the public by having widely dissmilar work form the same nominal hand.
H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 12 Sep 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 121

Winifred Virginia Jackson was the normal owner of the pseudonym “Elizabeth Berkeley,” but Lovecraft borrowed it from his collaborator for two poems: “The Unknown” (1916) and “The Peace Advocate” which was published in the May 1917 issue of The Tryout.

*H. P. Lovecraft: Writings in the Tryout* (1977)

On 4 April 1917, the U. S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany. Like many Americans, Lovecraft had followed news of the unfolding Great War since its opening stages. Lovecraft was firmly on the side of the Allies, no surprise given his ancestral affinity for the United Kingdom. Having joined amateur journalism in 1914 near the start of the war, Lovecraft found the amateur press an outlet for his thoughts and feelings with essays such as “The Crime of the Century” (The Conservative Apr 1915) and “The Renaissance of Manhood” (The Conservative Oct 1915), and once war was declared, poems such as “The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania 1915” (Interesting Items Jul 1915), “The Volunteer” (Providence Evening News 1 Feb 1918), and “To the Nurses of the Red Cross” (1917).

Lovecraft’s position with regard to the war was complicated. He was not in a normal sense an American patriot, reserving his greatest affinity for England and the British monarchy. His support for the British Empire meant his opposition to the Irish home rule movement and Irish nationalism; Lovecraft’s bitterest anti-Irish statements date from around the period of the Easter Rising in 1916 and its aftermath. Racial hierarchies and white supremacist doctrine in the early 20th century lauded the “Teutonic race,” to which the “Anglo-Saxons” of Britain were either a part or close cousins; which is why Lovecraft decried the war as “The Crime of Crimes”—because white people were fighting white people.

It should come as no surprise that Lovecraft was, once hostilities broke out, in favor of war with Germany, yet Lovecraft was not a war-hawk in the normal sense, later writing:

No—we can’t justly endorse any sort of killing except in defence of oneself, or of some racial or national fabric representing one’s larger self.
H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 7 May 1936, A Means to Freedom 2.929

This is to say, Lovecraft did not advocate wars of aggression, but was impassioned in his support for defensive wars, especially when it was his beloved England and its allies (and later, fellow Americans) who were attacked. The initial neutrality of the United States to the war in Europe incensed Lovecraft, who bitterly attacked Woodrow Wilson’s position, and wrote in letters and essays passages like this:

This neutrality hath been a source of the keenest distress and humiliation to me ever since the war began, since I believe that the rightful place of America is at the side of her mother nation, defending the Anglo-Saxon civilisation and ideals which both countries hold in common. In fact, I have more than once blushed at the base and selfish attitude of the States at a time when all the forces of humanity should be engaged in warding off the Hun. Never before was I more disposed to make ostentation of the legal provision which makes me still able, as the grandson in direct male line of a true-born Englishman, to call myself a rightful British subject. England is my country as well as America—let those call me “hyphenate” who so desire!
H. P. Lovecraft to the Kleikomolo, Oct 1916, Miscellaneous Letters 28

Lovecraft’s dislike of neutrality also found expression in his personal discontent with pacifists and anti-war protestors; those who argued either for concessions to the Central Powers to buy peace, or simply opposed the United States sending troops to join a foreign war, or selling weapons and materiel to the Allies, which would only extend the war and its suffering—or as in the case of the Irish-American John T. Dunn, who opposed aiding Britain because he supported Irish nationalism. Dunn would later be drafted, refused to serve, and was sentenced to prison.

When Lovecraft’s Jewish friend Samuel Loveman faced the draft, the man from Providence had no sympathy:

By the way—our mutual friend & fellow-bard Samuel Loveman is in CLass I Div. A, expecting to be called for active duty. In the first draft he was exempted for poor vision, but the requirements are now less strict. If I were Loveman I should enlist. I have no patience at all with a strong man sans dependents who deliberately stays home till dragged out from under the bed. Loveman admts he is “unpoetically robust” & that his sight is not at all seriously impaired. But Jews will be Jews, & I will judge neither harshly nor hastily. He is certainly a very pelasant & exceedingly gifted person, & now that he is subject to call, shews no sign of timidity or unrest. I trust his career may be honourable, & tht he will meet with an easier fate than the other soldier-poets, Brooke, Seeger, Ledwidge, et al.
H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 Feb 1918, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 103-104

As it happened, Loveman spent most of his military service 1918-1919 at Camp Gordon in Georgia, and did not serve overseas.

A recurring theme in Lovecraft’s war-poems, essays, and letters is masculine identity and its ties with white supremacist national identity. Anglo-Saxons and Teutons were in the racial rhetoric of the day supposed to be warriors and conquerors who had dominated the globe because racial superiority was synonymous with martial superiority. It was a white man’s place to show courage and gladly answer the call. For Lovecraft, these were not just armchair ideals: not long after “The Peace Advocate” was published he attempted to enlist.

Some time ago, impressed by my entire uselessness in the world, I resolved to attempt enlistment despite my almost invalid condition. I argued that if I chose a regiment soon to depart for France; my shear nervous force, which is not inconsiderable, might sustain me till a bullet or piece of shrapnel could more conclusively & effectively dispose of me. Accordingly I presented myself at the recruiting station of the R. I. National Guard & applied for entry into whichever unit should first proceed to the front. On account of my lack of technical or special training, I was told that I could not enter the Field Artillery, which leaves first; but was given a blank of application for the Coast Artillery, which will go after a short preliminary period of defence service at one of the forts of Narragansett Bay. The questions asked me were childishly inadequate, & so far as physical requirements are concerned, would have admitted a chronic invalid. The only diseases brought into discussion were specific ailments from which I had never suffered, & of some of which I had scarce ever heard. The medical examination related only to major organic troubles, of which I have none, & I soon found myself (as I thought) a duly enrolled private in the 9th Co. R.I.N.G.! As you may have deduced, I embarked upon this desperate venture without informing my mother; & as you may also have deduced, the sensation created at home was far from slight. In fact, my mother was almost prostrated with the news, since she knew that only by rare chance could a weakling like myself survive the rigorous routine of camp life. Her activities soon brought my military career to a close for the present. It required but a few words from our family physician regarding my nervous condition to annul the enlistment, though the army surgeon declared that such an annulment was highly unusual & almost against the regulations of the service. The fact is, I had really gotten the best of that astute medicus; for without making a single positive misstatement I had effectively concealed the many & varied weaknesses which have virtually blasted my career. Fortune had sided with me in causing no attack of blurred eyesight to come upon me during the physical examination. But my final status is that of a man “Rejected for physical disability.” On the appointed day I shall register for conscription, but I presume my services will not be desired. My mother has threatened to go to any lengths, legal or otherwise, if I do not reveal all the ills which unfit me for the army. If I had realised to the full how much she would suffer through my enlistment, I should have been less eager to attempt it; but being of no use to myself it was hard for me to believe I am of use to anyone else. […] And so I am still in civil life, scribbling as of old, & looking with envious eye upon the Khaki-clad men who are now so frequently seen upon the streets of the business section & in the cars everywhere. […] Had my enlistment matured successfully, I wonder how I should have kept up! And yet—I will wager that I would have kept up some way or other. Now that death is about to become the fashion, I wish that I might meet it in the most approved way, “Somewhere in France”.
H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 May 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 83-84

The effect on Lovecraft was dejection. While readers today might be glad that Lovecraft did not die as part of the American Expeditionary Force, for Lovecraft it was as those who hold their manhood cheap on St. Crispin’s Day. In a subsequent letter, he lamented:

I am feeling desolate & lonely indeed as a civilian. Practically all my personal acquaintances are now in some branch of the service, mostly Plattsburg or R.I.N.G. Yesterday one of my closest friends entered the Medical (not as a doctor, but as an assistant—carrying stretchers, driving ambulances, &c. &c.) Corps of the regular army. The physical tests for this corps are very light, & in spite of my previous rejection for Coast Artillery I would try to enter, were it not for the almost frantic attitude of my mother; who makes me promise every time I leave the house that I will not make another attempt at enlistment! But it is disheartening to be the one non-combatant among a profusion of proud recruits.
H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 22 Jun 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 85

As it was, Lovecraft had to content himself by offering what moral support he could, in the form of poems in praise of those who could serve. This is the context we must imagine for when Lovecraft was writing “The Peace Advocate”: fighting had been going on for almost three years, yet the United States retained its stubborn neutrality as the Allies and the Central Powers engaged in bloody trench warfare in Europe, allied shipping faced German submarines, Britain itself was bombed from the air by zeppelins, and around the world the colonies and allies of the two sides clashed in a truly global conflict.

“The Peace Advocate” is a narrative poem about a conscientious vicar who opposes war (implicitly on religious grounds), even as his son goes off to fight, until the invaders literally land on his doorstep, destroying his church. The vicar regains his masculine ferocity (“manhood’s thought,” “with the manhood he had found,” “wak’d to man’s estate”) and fights to defend his home—too late, for his wife and daughter both die in the fray.

The politics and philosophy are not complex, and would be counted as propaganda if published by some government outlet. The fore are faceless, the reasons and causes of the war utterly unknown and opaque. It’s enough that they are the invaders in the universe of the poem. Lovecraft makes no effort to understand the peace advocate’s position or give them any arguments for opposing war; the combat and loss, on the other hand, are effective and brutal to support the moral. In failing to join the fight in time, the vicar has failed as a husband and father…and perhaps importantly, burns his book.

Prieſt. Give peace in our time, O Lord;
Anſw. Becauſe there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.
1662 Book of Common Prayer

Lovecraft was a materialist and atheist; while not militantly anti-Christian, he did oppose the passivity and turn-the-other-cheek theology as counter to his ideas of the natural character of white people. Influenced by Nietzsche and similar thinkers, Lovecraft attributed this attitude to the Jewish origin of Christianity. As he would put it after the war:

Semiticism has never done anything save harm when forced upon us or adopted by accident. It gave us the puling hypocrises of the Christian doctrine—us, who by every law of Nature are virile, warlike, and beauty-loving pagans and Northern polytheists!
H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 21 Aug 1926, Selected Letters 2.67

It is a rhetorical trick to make the subject of the poem a Christian priest, because Lovecraft can imply a religious motivation for antiwar sentiment without actually engaging with any religious arguments.

Of all the stanzas in the poem, one in particular stands out in its imagery as possibly being inspired by another poem:

His son had buckled on his sword,
The first at the front was he;
But the vicar his valiant child ignor’d,
And his noble deeds in the field deplor’d,
For he knew not bravery.

While “buckled on his sword” could be a metaphor for joining the Army and taking up arms against the foe, there is a parallel with another very well-known war song:

The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you’ll find him;
His father’s sword he has girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him.
“Land of song!” said the warrior-bard,
“Tho’ all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!”
Thomas Moore, “The Minstrel Boy”

This could be simply parallel imagery: Moore was after all writing specifically from an Irish nationalist perspective, while Lovecraft was in the midst of his anti-Irish period, and there wasn’t much common purpose there. On the other hand, there would be a certain irony in appropriating the image of the boy who clads on his father’s sword to go to war, when the father himself stays home as a take-that to Irish nationalists who refused to fight in Britain’s aid. Lovecraft’s letters are silent on the subject, no doubt to maintain the illusion that “Elizabeth Berkeley” had written the verses.

Lovecraft’s motivations and ideology in writing this piece were wrapped up in contemporary politics and ideas of masculinity, national identity, and racial identity; he failed to attempt to accurately understand or present anti-war arguments in his letters, essays, and poems, because his rhetorical purpose was in support of the side of the conflict he identified with. It is one thing to understand, from an intellectual standpoint and the distance of years, how Lovecraft’s ideas and rhetoric were shaped by the forces of his life…and there are flaws in both.

Yet how would “The Peace Advocate” be received in Ukraine if it was published in 2023? As the men and women of that nation strive to defend their people, their culture, and their borders from the invading military forces of the Russian Federation? Would they not see parallels between the parable of “Elizabeth Berkeley” and Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa?

While Lovecraft’s ideology is flawed and his rhetoric ignores real tenets of and arguments for pacifism, or conscientious objection, there is an argument to be made that in the face of unprovoked aggression, there exists a moral justification to take up arms and resist. Every individual, and nation, has the right to self-defense—and if necessary, to meet deadly force with deadly force. Slava Ukraini.

“The Peace Advocate” is not one of Lovecraft’s more influential works, in part because he never openly acknowledged authorship and it has seldom been reprinted. There is nothing weird or supernatural about it, there are no connections to the Mythos, and it was written years before Weird Tales first hit the stands or Cthulhu was conceived. That it holds any resonance to events in 2023, over a century after it was first published, is due only to the fact that war is as much a reality today as it was then. In that respect at least, less has changed than we might have hoped.

“The Peace Advocate” may be read in its entirety at https://hplovecraft.com.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (1960)

It is the same tale in all the arts: the low comedian was always sure of a laugh if he cared to tumble over a pin; and the weakest murderer is sure of a certain amount of respectful attention if he will take the trouble to dismember his subject.
Arthur Machen, “The Islington Mystery” (1927)

While Welsh author and newspaperman Arthur Machen is best known today for his weird and fantastic fiction, during his life he never restricted himself to any one narrow genre. A particular focus of his during the early-mid 1920s was true crime, which resulted in the publication of The Canning Wonder in 1925—a book-length non-fiction study of the disappearance of Elizabeth Canning in 1753. True crime inspired crime fiction, most notably “The Islington Mystery” (1927), which references the infamous case of “Dr.” Crippen‘s murder of his wife. Machen’s style in “The Islington Mystery” is not that of a thriller or a melodrama; it is told with sly humor and a certain jaded recognition as to what the public is looking for when it comes to crimes—lurid details, tawdry affairs, courtroom dramatics.

In 1958, “The Islington Mystery” was published in Spanish translation (as “El misterio de Islington”) within the pages of the Antología de cuentos de misterio y terror. The story was adapted into a screenplay by Luis Alcoriza de la Vega, who effectively localized the story: transposing the setting from London to Mexico, changing Mr. & Mrs. Boales to Señor and Señora Morales (played by Arturo de Córdova and Amparo Rivelles), and adding as elements and motivation the religiosity of Señora Morales and her denial of the sexual advances of her husband. Directed by Rogelio A. González, the result was the black-and-white masterpiece of Mexican cinema El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (“The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales,” 1960).

“The Islington Mystery” is a sketch of a story, with the kind of dark humor and subtle suggestion of terrible things that Machen was known for; in the film adaptation, it becomes something else. Machen’s rather meandering opening is swept aside and two lives are put under the microscope. Machen’s original story is genially sardonic; written so that readers might sympathize with the murderer, to recognize and admire the tropes of the evidence being presented and disproved.

In the adaptation, the film is more dramatic, and a visual feast for the eyes, lingering on the skeletons and taxidermied animals for the morbid aspect they lend to the film. Raul Lavista’s score is likewise dramatic, with musical stingers like punctuation, yet here and there touched with the eerie. There is some wonderful cinematography, and unusual shots that are very Hitchcockian, making excellent play of light and shadow and unusual angles. While not a horror film or thriller, it borrows many of the tropes of such films, and the scene with a real animal carcass being processed, and the carefully-shot scene where he goes to work on her corpse are incredibly effective.

Where Machen can tell in a few words that “Mrs Boale was a tartar and a scold,” in the film they have to show it—and in doing so they add depth to the relationship, and to the character of Mrs. Morales, though she still does not come across as sympathetic. Quite the opposite; the leads have a wonderful chemistry, with Arturo de Córdova suffering with every smile, and Amparo Rivelles playing the cruel bitch, the prude, gossip, scold, and martyr-in-her-own-mind to the hilt. It is not a feminist portrayal by any stretch, and a contemporary remake might give Señor Morales more obvious flaws, but it is true to Machen’s intent: the audience is meant to sympathize with the long-suffering husband who is tortured and embarrassed by his wife in any number of ways, rather than the long-suffering wife whose troubles seem to be mostly in her head or of her own making.

Women have died for far less in films, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that for all that Señor Morales was put upon by his wife, she was ultimately the victim and he the murderer. Divorce or abandonment might not have been options that she sanctioned, but they were at least options. Nor was it a crime of passion, but a coldly deliberate and calculated affair—right down to the disposal of her corpse.

There is a great deal of dark humor in the script, but also deeper psychology than in Machen’s book. Señor Morales’ soliloquy to the skeleton could have made a fantastic scene on stage, as would his final confession, with him savoring every word as the priest chokes on his own bile. If it isn’t Shakespeare, it is as revealing and self-serving as any murderer’s speech, blaming the victim for driving him to do it, and turning the sanctimoniousness of his tormentor, the priest, against himself. The latter part of the film is a courtroom drama, and the minor character actors, each with their brief parts to play, are fantastic.

In Machen’s story, the guilt of Mr. Boales is never expressed explicitly, it is left as an open question—the “mystery” of “The Islington Mystery”—and Boales goes on to what may be a happier marriage. In El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales the guilt is explicit, and the film ends in a flourish with a final dramatic irony.

There are painfully few adaptations of Machen’s fiction to film, but it cannot be argued that El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales is the best so far, if not in absolute accuracy, then in being a wonderful film as enjoyable today as it was when it was released.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Rise of the Great Old One (2020) by Jasmine Jarvis

What if I told you that the creatures from Lovecraft’s stories are real?
Back cover copy of The Rise of the Great Old One (2020) by Jasmine Jarvis

It is an open secret that H. P. Lovecraft created the Mythos as a kind of literary game. Alongside the artificial mythology and geography he developed, Lovecraft would work in references to friends like Clark Ashton Smith and his creations of Tsathoggua and the Book of Eibon. In turn, Smith & others at Weird Tales would start to play the same game, working references to the Lovecraft Mythos into their own stories. Frank Belknap Long, Jr. and Robert Bloch would even include fictional representations of Lovecraft himself into the Mythos, as an in-joke. Writers like August Derleth and Manly Wade Wellman would go a step further—putting Lovecraft himself into their stories, alongside his fictional creations.

He wished that Lovecraft were alive to see and hear—Lovecraft knew so much about the legend of Other-People, from before human times, and how their behaviors and speech had trickled a little into the ken of the civilization known to the wakeaday world. De Grandin, too—a Frenchman, a scientist, and with the double practicality of his race and education. De Grandin would be interested to hear of all this later. Thunstone had no doubt that he would survive to tell de Grandin about it, over a bottle of wine at Huntington, New Jersey.
Manly Wade Wellman, “Shonokin Town” in Weird Tales (July 1946)

The idea had a bit of cachet in the 1940s, but in the ensuing six decades the idea that Lovecraft was really writing the truth and existed in the same continuity as his own fictional creations has become cliché. Yet part of the reason the idea remains so popular after so many decades is that Lovecraft’s own mythic image has become intimately entwined with his Mythos. The Old Gent from Providence has engrossed decades of fans and scholars, and his image—typically a somber face with a prognathous jaw, in a plain and unassuming dark suit without ornament, a bit like an undertaker—has become as indelible to Mythos-art as Cthulhu or the Necronomicon. Lovecraft is still in many ways the face of the Mythos, and as a character in his own right has appeared in many media, from fiction and poetry to comic books and film.

Leeman Kessler as H. P. Lovecraft in “Ask Lovecraft”
Source: “Depicting Lovecraft” by Leeman Kessler

It is important to emphasize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with having H. P. Lovecraft as a character in a Mythos story, or pursuing the idea that Lovecraft was writing the truth as fiction. Many writers have done it, from Robert Bloch in his novel Strange Eons (1978) to Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows in Providence (2015). A cliché is not bad by itself, but with so many other examples to compare it against, the execution becomes all-important—does the author do anything new? Do they do it well?

In the case of Jasmine Jarvis and The Rise of the Great Old One, there are a couple of good ideas buried in the narrative, but the execution doesn’t really give them time to develop. The style of the story is very reminiscent of a creepypasta: short, unadorned, straightforward, largely a first-person narrative, and set in the contemporary period. There isn’t a lot of character development or a lot of characters; the lore isn’t especially deep, there is a strong element of random weirdness, and the Lovecraftian element is most strongly represented by a kind of general aesthetic of crawling tentacles and fish-faced cultists. This isn’t a sequel to any specific Mythos story as much as a story inspired by the very existence of Lovecraft and the Mythos.

So what kind of ideas are buried in there?

One evening, whilst browsing the Internet and flicking through HP Lovecraft books I had obtained from the local library, I noticed that Lovecraft had stopped writing for a period of about twelve months. My interest was piqued—why? No one can account for his whereabouts during this time,and when he finally returned to writing, it seemed he struggled to put his stories together.
Jasmine Jarvis, The Rise of the Great Old One (2020) 15

In real life, Lovecraft’s letters provide an incredible record of his life and it’s unlikely you could squeeze a gap year in there. Of course, this isn’t real life, so that offers some interesting possibilities: if Lovecraft was recording truth as fiction, and if there was a missing year in his life, what was he up to during that chunk of missing time?

Unfortunately, length and format don’t really give The Rise of the Great Old One a chance to explore this fully. While the conceit of the plot is that Lovecraft was onto something, the point of view character is an unreliable narrator named Angus who is spilling his guts to a psychiatrist. The result is a story that feels more like a sketch of what could have been, with more evolution, an interesting novella. What we get instead is a narrative that is very full of Lovecraftian clichés, but doesn’t do enough new and interesting with those clichés to really elicit interest. It is a little too generically Lovecraftian, more devoted to the pop culture idea of what Lovecraftian is rather than in the sense of how Lovecraft and his contemporaries wrote it.

This is something that you tend to see a lot of these days, especially in relatively low-budget Lovecraftian cinema like H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021) or H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020). Stories that are trying to invoke a Lovecraft, but what they’re aiming for is less the careful development of mood and ideas of cosmic insignificance and biological determinism that Lovecraft wrote, and more a generic idea of robed cultists, old grimoires, and tentacle monsters—the elements that were so easy to pastiche and have thus become synonymous with the Mythos for a lot of people who have absorbed their idea of what the Mythos is through other media instead of reading his stories and letters.

The Rise of the Great Old One by Jasmine Jarvis was published in 2020 by Black Hare Press.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The One That Got Away” (2011) by Esther M. Friesner

The horror crossover is a fine art. Beyond the mere marketing-stunt spectacle that such ventures often are, from Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1961) to Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys (2004), and Alien vs. Predator (2004), there is more to these films than just a howling of werewolves and a trample of kaiju. There is a genuine sense of clashing mythos—how do you reconcile the mad science of Frankenstein’s Monster with lycanthropy and vampirism?

When you look at what world can accommodate not just the individual narratives of each weird entity, but all of them together, you’re moving past the stage of passive consumption. Like the ancient citizens on the streets of Rome, facing a bewildering array of divinities from across the known world with all of their stories and attributes, some conflicting, some paralleling one another closely…the shared universe can become richer, tying together disparate elements of their backstories, hinting at a more complex relationship with more stories waiting to be told. Then you get films like The Monster Squad (1987) and comics like Screamland (2008), works powered by something more than nostalgia and replaying the same classics.

While all the individual elements might be familiar, when you play them off against each other, something new emerges.

The Cthulhu Mythos already exists as a shared universe, and it has been remixed and crossed over with more traditional horror franchises and creations dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. Aquaman has fought Cthulhu. Sherlock Holmes has interacted the Mythos in dozens of stories and novels, including “A Study in Emerald” (1993) by Neil Gaiman. A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) by Roger Zelazny sees Holmes, the Cthulhu Mythos, and various Universal monsters play off against each other in the Game. In “From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6” (2005) by Caitlín R. Kiernan revisits “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by way of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Whether or not a horror/Mythos crossover succeeds is whether it transcends the formula of “X vs. Y”; whether it builds on its constituent elements to create something new and distinct.

“The One That Got Away” (2011) by Esther M. Friesner is that kind of story.

Damn it, it wasn’t fair! I went through just as much as that little blond chippie, and her big-shot showbiz pals knew it. Sure, they lost their star attraction, but what was stopping them from salvaging something from their losses by giving me a chance at the spitlight? I would’ve worn my native costume. I would’ve acted like I couldn’t speak a word of English so someone could pretend to translate while I recounted my terrible ordeal in his hairy clutches—even though I’d dodged those cltches pretty slickly, if I do say so myself. And if one of those puffed-up producers would’ve thought to scrape the pavement, salvage what was left of him, hire an army of taxidermists to pretty up the remains a bit, and stuck him back on stage, I would’ve screamed on cue like a champ at the results. Hell, I’ll bet I could’ve shrieked loud enough to make the audience believe—just for a moment—that he was still alive!
Esther M. Friesner, “The One That Got Away,” Asimov’s Science Fiction Apr/May 2011, 136

Friesner can’t come out and say things explicitly, because copyrights and trademarks are still owned by others, but the waltzing-around the subject is part of the charm of the narrative. The crossover is the premise; a nigh-forgotten character from a classic story dropped into an encounter with some Innsmouth sailors. What makes it work is the telling, and how Friesner develops the story. A young woman, late of Skull Island, left to her own devices in the United States of America during the Great Depression and Jim Crow has turned into a hardboiled woman of the world—and a surprisingly open-minded one.

Bat-winged and taloned, with what looked like an octopus boquet for a mouth, the creature reared out of the depths and strode toward me with eldritch lust in his fiery eyes.

Eh. I’d seen worse.
Esther M. Friesner, “The One That Got Away,” Asimov’s Science Fiction Apr/May 2011, 144

The tone is flippant, and the story is a play on wits worthy of the fast-talking repartee in a noir film. It is the unexpected (one might say sacrilegious if either Lovecraft or King Kong is one of your sacred cows) lightness that makes the story work. There is a darkly comic Pollyanna aspect of the narrator as she compares the cultural rituals of Innsmouth and Skull Island with gallows humor and no hard feelings.

Two mythologies meeting in unexpected ways…but also ways that are oddly fitting. For those who like to explore the culture of Innsmouth, in works like Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James, it’s nice to see what happens when the sailors get out into the wider world and encounter folks from other cultures. It is all good fun.

“The One That Got Away” by Esther Mr. Friesner was published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Apr/May 2011. It has not been reprinted.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe

up 8 p.m.—Read Mysteries of Udolpho—retire 9 a.m. Friday
H. P. Lovecraft’s 1925 diary, entry for 3 December, Collected Essays 5.173

Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns,
And, as the portals open to receive me,
Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts,
Tells of a nameless deed.
Epigraph to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

In 1764, Horace Walpole kicked off the Gothic novel craze with The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Thirty years later, Otranto would serve as the blueprint for Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance (1794). Radcliffe had begun her literary career in 1789 at age 25, first publishing anonymously, and then eventually using her own name as her novels grew in popularity and commanded higher prices from publishers. Immensely popular during her own life despite only publishing five novels in that time, Udolpho which would go on to rival Otranto as the archetypical Gothic novel, to the point of being satirized in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817).

To H. P. Lovecraft, Radcliffe was essential reading in the history of horror literature; although he did not first encounter her by reading the whole novel:

Belknap, having sharper eyes than his old Grandpa, picked up a book which I would have given much to have seen first—”Tales of Mystery”, composed of extracts from the most celebrated horror novelists of the 18th century—Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, &c. He will later lend his prize to me—just as I am lending him my own prizes.
H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 29 Sep 1922, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.80

Tales of Mystery (1891) was an anthology edited by George Saintsbury collecting excerpts from the Gothic romances of Radcliffe (including bits of Udolpho), Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin. Frank Belknap Long, Jr., who had spied the book first at a bookstall during Lovecraft’s trip to New York, would later gift it to his friend as at Christmas 1922:

I’ve been eating up Gothick stuff lately—all the posterity of “Otranto”. Miss Reeves’ “Old English Baron” (1777) is infernally tame, but in damned good Georgian English. Radcliffe stuff is vastly—immeasurably—superior in interest & atmosphere, though the language is more stilted. (And yet beats Reynolds by a mile!) I’m reading that volume of selections which Little Belknap picked up right under his Old Grandpa’s nose at the shop in Vesey-Street, & which he magnanimously gave the poor old gentleman as a Christmas gift.
H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 5 Apr 1923, Letters to James F. Morton 35

In 1925, now living in New York, Lovecraft was asked by W. Paul Cook to write the article that would become “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” While Lovecraft would learn relatively heavily on The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead for his section on Gothic novels, among the books we know he read was The Mysteries of Udolpho. He later noted that his friend, the bookseller Goerge Kirk, gave him a copy of Udolpho (LWP 180), and his diary entry for 9 May 1925includes the notation “GK call—Udolpho” (CE 5.158), which may be when he received his copy, although he didn’t devour the novel until December:

I waded through the whole of “Udolpho” last week, & am now on the hunt for Maturin’s “Melmoth”.
H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 12 Dec 1925, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 92

From this reading, Lovecraft would write:

[…] all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe’s visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches—always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail—as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.

Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle—the scheming nobleman Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors—the abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall—but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiar material re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe’s characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those of her time.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

It is easy to see both what Lovecraft would have enjoyed and deplored in Radcliffe’s Udolpho, which was the only complete novel of hers he had read at the time of writing. The moralistic tone of the story with its sappy ending and romances were largely anathema to his aesthetic style. Many characters, not least of them the heroine Emily, are prone to fainting and melodramatics, the story is peppered with bits of verse, quotes from Milton and Shakespeare, and some convoluted linguistic expressions typical of the period which probably earned a bemused smile from Lovecraft. Yet there are also many vivid descriptions hinting of terrible horrors and revelations to be made, of castles and battlements, and old family histories with their buried secrets.

For critical analysis, Lovecraft would have had The Tale of Terror, and it was from Birkhead that he probably drew his facts about Radcliffe’s life and her other novels, but his impressions appear to be his own. The note about her “insipid little poems” is interesting in particular because Radcliffe later wrote an essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), which Lovecraft apparently never read, where she wrote:

The wild attire, the look not of this earth, are essential traits of supernatural agents, working evil in the darkness of mystery. Whenever the poet’s witch condescends, according to the vulgar notion, to mingle mere ordinary mischief with her malignity, and to become familiar, she is ludicrous, and loses her power over the imagination; the illusion vanishes.

A sentiment that echoes some of Lovecraft’s sentiments in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and which he might well have appreciated. As it was, at the time Lovecraft had read only Udolpho and some excerpts from Radcliffe’s other novels, and his literary opinion was set on that…although it was sufficient that when August Derleth was looking for recommendations, he would write:

Incidentally—have you read other early horror work? If not, let me advise the following as worthy ingredients (if only for historical reasons) for any fantaisiste’s library:

Mysteries of Udolpho (1793) by Anne Radcliffe
The Monk (1795) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 2 Sep 1926, Essential Solitude 1.34

In other letters, Lovecraft gives a few more details on his private thoughts on Radcliffe and Udolpho, spurred in large part by a course on Gothic fiction that Donald Wandrei was taking:

As to “Melmoth”—of course it dags in places, like all the interminable novels of its time; but it seems to me to hold a certain convincing kinship with horrors beyond the veil which we find lacking in its predecessors—such as “Udolpho”, “The Monk”, &c.
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 7 Nov 1926, Essential Solitude 1.47

You’re lucky to get hold of “The Romance of the Forest”—the only Radcliffian oeuvre which I’ve ever seen in toto is “Udolpho”, now being lent to Dwyer. Yes—her gentle melancholy is certainly both romantic & hydraulic!
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 22 Oct 1927, Letters wth Donald and Howard Wandrei 172

Of the Goths, only Maturin had the sense of unholy outsideness developed to any considerable degree—you couldn’t bribe me to swallow all the sobbing Radcliffery which your course is forcing upon you. The few selections in an anthology by George Sainstbury are all I want—though I have read Udolpho through. (Just now, by the way, I’ve lent it to Dwyer.)
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 3 Nov 1927, Letters wth Donald and Howard Wandrei 179-180

Dwyer is just forming the acquaintance of our gushing friend Mrs. Radcliffe through my copy of “Udolpho”, & expresses the opinion that she is unsurpassed in imparting horror to a frowning castle landscape. Cook is going to lend me “The Italian” shortly.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 25 Nov 1927, Letters wth Donald and Howard Wandrei 184

Your Radcliffian satiation is scarcely an encouraging emotion to confront me as I stand on the brink of “The Italian” & “The Romance of the Forest”—lent me by Cook—but I do not think I shall let it deter me from at least a skimming. The author of a standard treatise on supernatural horror in literature ought to read—as a matter of duty—one or two of the volumes he has analysed & appraised so sagely. You & Dwyer can work up an interesting controversy about the sombre & sentimental Mother Anne, for “Udolpho” had made him a shouting Radcliffe-fan of the first & foremost order. He is, of course, right so far as the sheer weaving of vague, terrible impressions of cyclopean mystery & imminent nightmare is concerned; & we ought not to let the peterings-out or the salt lakes of “poetic” sensibility deter us from giving credit where credit is due.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 19 Dec 1927, Letters wth Donald and Howard Wandrei 189

Lafcadio Hearn averred that Gothic cathedrals frightened him with their bulk and mystical design. They seemed to him about to rise from the ground. Of this quality of size-terror I fancy Mrs. Radcliffe is, as you say, the chief exponent. Certainly, it recurs throughout her work.
H. P. Lovecraft to Bernard Austin Dwyer, 14 Feb 1928, Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others 469

Lovecraft did eventually read Radcliffe’s novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian (1797), which were lent to him by W. Paul Cook in 1928, noting:

I have also read lately those old Radcliffe standbys—”The Italian” & “The Romance of the Forest”—neither of which is really weird according to my standard.
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 20 Aug 1928, Essential Solitude 1.153

In truth, the supernatural element in Radcliffe’s novels was always a false one, like the ghosts and ghouls in the typical Scooby Doo episode, at the end the mask will come off and a rational explanation offered. Yet she showed great skill in the build-up of such terrors, and this is nowhere as prominent as in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Lovecraft, to his credit, appeared to recognize that Radcliffe had earned her place in the pantheon of weird fiction authors for her work:

Also—are you familiar with the so-called “Gothic” novels of the later 18th & early 19th centuries—Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Udolpho”, Lewis’s “Monk”, Maturin’s “Melmoth”, &c? Some years ago I wrote an article on the history of the weird tale, mentioning the titles of things which had particularly impressed me. If you’d like to see this as a guide to weird reading I might be able to dip up a duplicate to lend you.
H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, 22 Apr 1933, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 20

It is difficult to say how much Lovecraft was influenced by The Mysteries of Udolpho; there is certainly a deliberate echo of the Gothic manse in “The Rats in the Walls,” which was written after he read the Saintsbury Tales of Mystery but before he read the full novel. It might be fair to say that Lovecraft’s study of the Gothics confirmed in him the lessons of what not to do. No fainting heroines, little to no romances, something more than drafty castles at work. Nor did Lovecraft follow Radcliffe in explaining away every mystery with a rational explanation:

“I perceive,” said Emily, smiling, “that all old mansions are haunted; I am lately come from a place of wonders; but unluckily, since I left it, I have heard almost all of them explained.”
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Vol. 3, Chapter XII

The syntax of horror shifts through the years, decades, and centuries; in Lovecraft’s day, the old familiar terrors of Radcliffe’s Udolpho no longer held the same power as they did when they were fresh and new in the late 18th century—yet they were a part of the legacy of horror to which Lovecraft was an inheritor, and so too are both Radcliffe and Lovecraft part of the genealogy of horror fiction today, literary ancestors whose works have been often lampooned and satirized, adapted and criticized, but still read, still relevant to us today.

What better measure of their power and influence?

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Psyche (1953) by August Derleth

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

For ego and satyr,
for lover and beloved;

ask to know for whom the heart beats,
send to ask for whom the quickened pulse,
bend to hear the hushed impassioned voice
sobbing your name or mine in all the body’s rapture:
or send to know for whom arms’ clasp,
eyes’ love, the hot possessive mouth;

for lover and beloved,
islandless man, of sea and land equally,
of sky and stars, of heaven and hell—
but never need to ask for whom the bell tolls;
make each man’s answer to yourself:
It tolls for me.
August Derleth, canto XIV of “Enigma: Variations on a Theme of Donne,” in Psyche (1953) 25

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation XVII in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes (1623)

August Derleth’s greatest fame today is as a publisher, co-founder of Arkham House in 1939 with Donald Wandrei. Derleth was also an editor and anthologist of note, and a writer of diverse works of fiction and nonfiction, from the quiet regional portrayals of his Sac Prairie Saga to the potboiler horrors of Weird Tales, from the delicately plotted pastiches of Solar Pons to young adult and juvenile fiction; in non-fiction his works included everything from a book on Wisconsin’s rivers to newspaper columns on his nature walks to his biography of Henry David Thoreau.

Yet before, and during, and among all this other writing, August Derleth was a poet. He wrote, and what is more importantly published, reams of verse from the fantastic and the macabre to the lighthearted, odes on nature to sonnets on love, in many different meters and forms. Poetry was a sensibility and avocation that Derleth shared with many of his contemporaries, including Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and many other writers for Weird Tales. Some of it has been republished here or there, particularly those bits of verse dedicated to or relevant to Lovecraft fans such as “Providence: Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight” and “On Reading Old Letters, For H. P. L.,” but for the most part Derleth’s poetry remains unreprinted and largely unexamined.

This is a pity as such works provide, if nothing else, an interesting study of the importance of historical context. Derleth’s 1953 collection of love poetry Psyche is a good example.

These are poems of love and anguish. In this cycle of thirty-one poems, August Derleth tells the moving story of a love from its first awakening through uncertanty and agony to its foreseen dissolution.

These poems not only represent August Derleth at this best, but bid fair to take a place among the finest love poetry of our time.
Psyche, inner jacket flap

To anyone that holds this book in its hands, it may appear the prosaic but well-made product of a small press—in this case, the Prairie Press of Iowa City, Iowa—72 pages of good paper on cloth boards with a floral print; the dust jacket, when intact, is often rather tanned by sun and age. The contents are divided into two sections; “Enigma: Variations on a Theme of Donne” runs to 14 cantos, each taking inspiration from John Donne’s lines, and the second cycle of thirty poems runs the gamut of a love affair, from “I. When first I saw you” to “XXX. Beloved, now you are gone.” A few of these later poems have erotic elements, such as:

Something speaks for the essential you scattered here
in the black skirt and the blue blouse,
and the aqua pants with the embroidered I love you
and Forget-Me-Not (and who could?),
the slip in the usual pink and the gold slippers,
and the little bra from which the breasts
have spilled tightly above the taut belly
and Venus’ mound and the indolent legs
in their skilled proportions where you lie
waiting for love, savoring your victory
sweet in your smile, in your eye,
aloof, serene: the thin shoulders,
the slender arms, the small round
still firm nates behind,
all waiting for love, to be possessed
and to possess in ecstasy of union,
knowing my Achilles’ heel:
with that small cat’s contentment of triumph
the smile aware and the eyes
confident and the legs parted
where the dark hair already glistens
and the lips, there shadowed, opening
to sheathe my sword, waiting for love and lust,
knowing I will cross the room and touch and feel,
knowing I will possess and be possessed,
not alone because our mutual wish dictates
but because I must.
August Derleth, “XVII.” in Psyche 46

This collection of thirty poems was apparently a selection from a much longer cycle of love-poetry, which came to light after Derleth’s death when Peter Ruber, who had become editor of Arkham House in 1997, went through some of Derleth’s old files:

Another very important find was the entire Psyche lyric love poems cycle. Derleth published 30 in a 72-page book of that title in 1953. In reality, he had written 233 Psyche poems, and we have them in chronological order. The entire group will be published late 1997 or early 1998.
M. Dianne Bergenske, “Hidden Literary Treasures Revealed: Unpublished Works of Wisconsin Author August Derleth” in BookLovers (V5, N1), 7.

As with Ruber’s projected biography of Derleth and other projects, this never came to pass. However, Psyche did reach a wider audience in another form: as an LP.

It isn’t clear how well Psyche sold, but it evinced enough interest that in 1960 Derleth recorded the lyrics onto vinyl at the Cuca Records Company in his native Sauk City:

The LP was released with both a blue and a red slipcase; it isn’t clear if this represents separate printings or one printing, as the discs and backmatter are otherwise identical.

The title Psyche is in reference to the tale of Cupid and Psyche from the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and Derleth’s dedication in the book is: “for the woman who was Psyche and is gone…” which casts Derleth as Cupid, overcoming obstacles to achieve union. Such dramatic romances were not unusual within Derleth’s fiction, and there was often a quasi-autobiographical element, for example, the teenaged romance with “Margery” (a local Sauk City girl) which formed the basis for his first novel, Evening in Spring (1945).

The liner notes are clear on the autobiographical element of Psyche:

That PSYCHE is an immensely felt autobiographical experience can hardly be questioned, and the alert listener will learn that it is a tribute to two women—not only one called “PSYCHE” but another known as “Cassandra”—but primarily it is the celebration of love and passion by a widely-known poet and novelist.
Liner notes to Psyche (1960)

“Cassandra” had been the subject of a previous book of primarily nature poems, Habitant of Dusk: A Garland for Cassandra (1946). In Psyche, Cassandra is mentioned by name only in a single poem:

Death is my mistress; what name I give her matters not—
call her Psyche or Cassandra,
Call her by any name you will,
Death it is in love’s own guise,
my mistress.
August Derleth, canto XIII of “Enigma: Variations on a Them of Donne,” in Psyche (1953) 24

According to Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky, Cassandra was another romantic entanglement of Derleth’s in the early-mid 1940s, and their affair would be the subject for his unpublished novel Droughts of March.

For all that Derleth mined his personal experiences for fictional and poetic material and inspiration, he was not keen to publish his love affairs and generally avoided providing sufficient information in print for the average reader to identify who he was talking about. Sauk City was, after all, a small town and people would talk. Still, students of Derleth’s life would not be surprised at reading in Litersky’s biography that “Psyche” was none other than Sandra Winters, who married August Derleth in 1953, the year that Psyche was published. There is nothing unusual about a man writing love-poems to his wife, after all.

Except for one important detail.

PSYCHE is now virtually done in its 4th draft, and it seems to stand up very well in amatory verse, at which I have never pretended to be very good. But then, I have always had that as a poet I am at best a second-rater, which is saying a good deal, because there are a lot of poets far worse than that. But this book is most revealing and cannot be published for some (3) years because it is plainly about an affair with a girl who is not more than 15, and the facts wd currently be too obvious to local readers.
August Derleth to Carl Jacobi, 9 Jul 1949, MSS. Bowling Green University Library

Sandra Evelyn Winters was born 1 March 1935; according to Litersky she met August Derleth in 1948, and they married on 6 April 1953. That his relationship with her before their marriage was sexual is not much doubted; in another letter, he wrote:

Oh, yes, I would not deny that Sandra has done me a lot of good. Not just making love to her, Sandra herself. Of course, she is sharp enough to know that, and I think that in this lies the ultimate dissolution of the affair, unless an accident makes it necessary for us to be married. For, being young, she is entirely likely, even with her mother’s advice, to take me for granted, and that might well be fatal. She has been frank enough to say that she intended all along that I should ultimately need her more than she needs me, and, while she intends to marry me, she intends also to have as much of her cake and eat much of it too, as possible. That never works, manifestly. But whatever takes place, it is certain that I have already benefited a great deal, and all the clothes and jewelry I’ve bought her won’t balance my own benefits.
August Derleth to Zealia Bishop, 18 Aug 1949, MSS. Wsconsin Historical Society

Given the age gap (August Derleth was born in 24 February 1909, making him 40 years old in 1949 when these letters were written), Derleth may have had more to worry about than his reputation; statutory rape charges were a real possibility. As Litersky points out, this fact rather changes how Psyche is read. When Derleth writes:

When first I saw you,
but one among a sea of faces,
my glance swept past, came wondering back
in search of something from alien places
to see the countenance of little more than child,
demure, aloof, and bland,
not akin to what I felt—that wild,
strange beauty, that warm impassioned spirit
lurking deep,
hidden by a child’s serene and lovely face,
inscrutable as sleep.

As Iseult, Helen of Troy,
immortal Psyche—you, too, in this child’s guise:
something from deep within gazed tranquil back,
the challenge of your untamed spirit looked
from out your eyes.
August Derleth, “I.” in Psyche 26

At what age would you as the reader have put Psyche and Derleth based on this poem? Do you read it differently now that you know he met his future wife as a thirteen-year-old girl, and this poem might be an attempt to capture—or at least capitalize on—the beginning of that relationship? Without that piece of information about who Psyche was based on and her age at the time, Psyche is little more than an innocuous curiosity. With that bit of historical context, it becomes a different thing entirely, and a reader might not only look for new meaning in the lines, but find it. Comparable in some ways to “Doom of the Thrice-Cursed” (1997) by Marion Zimmer Bradley, it is impossible to turn back the clock to before you knew, and read the words they wrote with innocent eyes.

With thanks and appreciation to John Haefele for his help with this article.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Ecstasy (1989)

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected passages involving sexually explicit activites will be included.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

Bellezza prorompente e maliziosa, biondo desiderio che esplode dalle copertine delle riviste, dalle locandine dei cinema, dai cartellon dei night club e anche (quando la censura lo permette…), dal piccolo chermo televisivo. Con Moana Pozzi, diventata ormai un “mito”, il cinema erotico italiano si è conquistto un posto d’onore accanto alle produzioni internazionali più importanti. Moana è sensualità, irruenza, genuinità. Moana è… ecstasy. Chi è sensibile alle sue grazie non dimenticherà faclmente questo concentrato di sogni…

Beauty, breathtaking and mischievous, blonde desire exploding from magazine covers, movie posters, night club billboards and even (when censorship allows…), from the small television screen. Starring Moana Pozzi, who has now become a “myth,” Italian erotic cinema has won a place of honor next to the most important international productions. Moana is sensual, impetuous, genuine. Moana is… ecstasy. Those who are sensitive to her graces will not easily forget this concentrate of dreams….

Back cover text on the 2009 Minerva Video DVD

English translation

In the mid-1980s, Italian actress Moana Pozzi became a sensation for her adult films, brazen nudity on television, and her intelligence and outspokenness on sex and sexuality. In the 1990s she became a published author and political candidate, co-founding the Partito dell’Amore (“Party of Love”), which campaigned on a platform that included better sex education and legalization of brothels. While Pozzi never achieved any real political power, it added to her growing status as an Italian icon of the adult film industry. In 1994, Pozzi would die relatively young from liver cancer, leaving behind an enduring legacy—including inspiring the 1999 film Guardami and being the subject of the 2009 biographical docudrama Moana. Her name recognition was such that even in 2016, the Disney animated film Moana had to be marketed under the alternate title Oceanica in Italy.

Buried in Moana’s filmography is an odd gem: the relatively obscure Ecstasy (1989), which was very loosely adapted from (or perhaps more accurately, inspired by) Welsh author Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder,” one of the episodes in his picaresque weird novel The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895). Machen, for all his fame as a writer of the weird and an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft and others, has very rarely been adapted to film or television. Yet in the late 1980s, Moana Pozzi and director Luca Ronchi gave it a shot:

la storia è liberamente ispirata al racconto “Polvere biance” di ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)	the story is loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)
From opening credits of Ecstasy	English translation

It isn’t exactly clear which text/translation that the filmmakers were drawing from but it seems likely to be Giuseppe Lippi’s translation in Il gran Dio Pan e altre storie soprannaturali (1982). Whatever the case, the approach to adapting Machen’s story was very “liberamente,” taking broad inspiration but telling its own story:

[…] con Ecstasy di Luch Ronchi (’90) nel cui cast figura anche il pornodivo Rocco Siffredi (vero nome Rocco Tano), qui in veste soft. Storia onirica, molto liberamente tratta dal racconto “Polvere bianca” di Arthur Machen, scrittore inglese di fine Ottocentro, basata sui poteri di una misteriosa droga che esalta, ma allo stesso tempo uccide, Ecstasy offre a Moana Pozzi una chance che lei non riesce a sfruttare appieno. Del resto la Pozzi dichiarava allora, in un sussulto di autocoscienza: « Sia chiaro, io non sono un’attrice sono una che cerca di interpretare se stessa in tante situazioni diverse».

[…] with Ecstasy by Luch Ronchi (’90) whose cast also includes porn star Rocco Siffredi (real name Rocco Tano), here in a soft role. A dreamlike story, very loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by Arthur Machen, a late 19th-century English writer, based on the powers of a mysterious drug that enhances but at the same time kills, Ecstasy offers Moana Pozzi a chance that she fails to take full advantage of. After all, Pozzi declared at the time, in a jolt of self-consciousness: “Let it be clear, I am not an actress I am someone who tries to play herself in many different situations.”

Moana e le altre: il cinema pornografico in Italia 39-40

English translation

In Machen’s original, the scene is 19th-century England, where a sister worries about her brother’s ascetic habits. The family physician suggests a medicine—an innocuous white powder—and at first it seems to have positive effects, making her brother more social, outgoing, and forgetting his cares. Too soon, however, things take a turn for the worse; the drug had deleterious effects, yet the brother cannot cease taking it—and a trifle wound on the hand becomes something profoundly worse. The physician discovers it was not what he had prescribed at all, and its effects finally lead to a fate worse than death for the poor, afflicted brother.

Keeping in mind that Machen was writing a little less than ninety years before D.A.R.E., the parallels with drug addiction and “scared straight” drug literature may seem overly obvious in hindsight, but “The Novel of the White Powder” isn’t really an anti-drug story. The Victorians were well aware of the addictive possibilities of drugs like opium in the 1890s, but the white powder that the brother takes isn’t just a chemical pick-me-up:

By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder, and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and represented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew.
Arthur Machen, “The Novel of the White Powder”

This is how Machen took a familiar story and turned it from a familiar tale of dissolution into something infinitely more suggestive and supernatural.

In Ecstasy, the setting is moved from the 19th-century United Kingdom to Italy in the 1980s. Moana Pozzi plays a version of herself, an outgoing adult film actress named Moana. Her younger sister Anna (Carrie Janisse), is the opposite of her outgoing sister: reclusive and given to watching horror movies, living in the shadow of her more glamorous sister. Moana provides Anna with a strange drug (ironically, a grey powder). Moana narrates as her sister Anna slowly comes out of her shell…and then spirals into drug abuse and degradation. Despite a brief flirtation with witchcraft imagery at the beginning and the end, and Anna suffering a similar hand injury, there isn’t much in the way of Machen’s original idea for the drug or its effects….and it is these brief flourishes that are as near as the film ever approaches to horror in the traditional sense.

Ecstasy was evidently never intended as a straight adaptation of Machen’s story, but even so, it feels like there’s a lot of missed opportunity here. The film neither draws on the rise of cocaine or club drugs like MDMA (popularized with the street name ecstasy) in the 1980s, nor on the more overtly supernatural dissolution in “The Novel of the White Powder.” As such, there’s no explicit social commentary, and no horrific spectacle at the end. We’re left instead with a film that hovers between hardcore adult film and erotic thriller, never quite being one or the other. Sexually explicit, and yet not simply a succession of sexual encounters; being more dreamlike in tone, dominated by an overarching narration.

As a work of cinema, Ecstasy is hard to pin down. A good deal of European horror during the period was heavy on blood, nudity, and atmosphere, but there were often lines that still weren’t crossed—explicit sex and genitalia, for example, were not common features of anything except the sleaziest of the Eurosleaze during the 1970s and 80s. By the same contrast, adult films, even when they had a plot (this was not long after the Golden Age of Porn in the United States), rarely addressed anything like a drug theme in a serious way. Ultimately, the film is almost narcissistically focused on Moana herself; even her sister’s suffering is a story that happens within the context of Moana’s life, work, and her sexual encounters. Anna’s story lives in the shadow of Moana’s throughout the film, and that feels like a deliberate choice.

Ecstasy seems to walk this tightrope, being more restrained, artistic, and plot-driven than the typical adult film, and yet more sexually explicit than more overtly transgressive European horror films of the period. From the moment that Moana rubs a piece of banana on her bare vagina and offers it to the man she’s having a conversation with, you know that you’re watching a film that is transgressive in ways that your typical 1980s horror film couldn’t be, for fear of never getting distribution.

While working with a relatively small cast, and presumably a small budget, the film makes the most of what it has. The cinematography is surprisingly solid, especially the night shots of Rome. The film’s quasi-biographical aspect is an asset as well, taking advantage of Moana’s widespread publicity in showing magazine covers, glamour shots, fumetti, and pinups. The soundtrack is nothing special but doesn’t detract from the overall atmosphere either; simple synth-and-drum-machine pieces, neither corny nor overly dramatic, but oddly fitting the overall 80s aesthetic.

If there’s a charm to the film, it is how so very 1980s it is, from the teased hair to the technology, all instant film cameras, walkmans, telephone booths, and CRT televisions; the utter ubiquity of trash and cigarettes, the boxy Italian cars on the roads and the discotheque. So too, there’s something oddly endearing about how utterly blasé the adult film actors are in their skimpy outfits on the sets, the utter ambivalence they express to casual nudity and even foreplay. The conscious artifice of it all is at once a glamourization of the lifestyle, and highlights how fundamentally silly a lot of adult filmmaking really is, looking at it from the outside.

Ecstasy has never received an English-language release. The 2009 DVD is out of print, which makes this a relatively scarce and obscure film, especially for those obsessively interested in Machen’s rather limited filmography.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.