Tag: film

Deeper Cut: Lovecraft & Universal Horror

I don’t attend the cinema very often, but realise what a marvellous conveyer of weird images & impressions it could be if it would only utilise seriously its tremendous range of optical & mechanical potentialities.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 21 May 1934, LHB 81-82

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born into a world where moving pictures were not yet a commercial reality. His youth would have seen Edison’s Kinetoscopes and nickelodeons give way to projection screens; plays and other acts would share space with silent films. Imagine the thrill of being in a darkened theater and hearing the voices of the actors come through the speakers for the first time, with the background hum of the reels clicking above and behind you. To be there at ground zero as the Phantom’s face was first revealed, as the suave Count relished the howl of wolves, as something stirred beneath the sheet in the doctor’s laboratory.

The first half of the 20th century launched two great franchises of horror. One was the Cthulhu Mythos, a literary game begun by H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries that eventually grew into the largest, most sprawling public domain shared universe since Arthurian myth. The other was the Universal Monsters, a franchise of cinematic creations that forged the identities of a pantheon of horror, which still influences how those monsters are seen and understood today. Many of the visual aspects of monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Werewolf owe much to actors like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr.; and even much of the popular lore of these entities was determined or popularized by their films.

That first generation of horror films was experienced entirely within the movie theater, or in associated media and advertising. There were no television stations to rerun the old films on; that was something for a later generation, the Monster Kid generation that could relish Famous Monsters of Filmland (founded by Forrest J Ackerman, who had sparred with Lovecraft in the pages of The Fantasy Fan in the 30s) and other magazines. There was no home video market. If you missed seeing a film in theaters during its initial run, you might never see it, unless it was run again. As amazing and influential as the Universal horror films were, they were also exceedingly ephemeral experiences. We are used today to having the lore of films at our fingertips, but in Lovecraft’s day such information was difficult to come by, scarce and disjointed memories supplemented by Hollywood propaganda.

This essay is an exploration to answer the questions “How many Universal horror films did H. P. Lovecraft see, and what did he think of them?” At the start, we have to acknowledge that we might never have definitive answers to these questions. While Lovecraft did attend the cinema, he didn’t do so regularly and he didn’t make a point about discussing every single film he saw. While his letters give us insights into some of the films he did see, especially between 1923 and his death in 1937, which coincides with the first wave of Universal Monster movies, there is no way to know if he missed some films or simply failed to mention them.

For the purposes of this essay, films that aren’t technically horror but have notable influence on later horror film like the romantic melodramas The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and The Man Who Laughs (1928) are included. If for no other reason than Lovecraft’s reaction to these films somewhat colored his appreciation of Universal’s later monster films. Likewise, films which might make it onto horror lists, or are very influential like The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Unknown (1927), Secret of the Blue Room (1933), The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934), and Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935) are left out—although for anyone curious, there’s no evidence Lovecraft watched any of those films. At least, there are no mentions in his letters.

That said, we can at least examine the Universal Horror movies that Lovecraft could have seen, and what he did (and did not) say about them.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913)

Silent • 26 min. • Dir: Herbert Brenon • Prod: Carl Laemmle

The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1912, a merger of several independent film companies under the leadership of Carl Laemmle, which bucked Thomas Edison’s attempts to control the motion picture industry. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, from a screenplay by Herbert Brenon based on the novella “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, was one of Universal’s earliest films, and its first horror film. As such (and because prints survive), it is often considered the earliest of the Universal Monster films, while lost films like “The Werewolf” (1913) are often forgotten.

Early Universal star King Baggot had the dual role of Jekyll and Hyde, a transformation accomplished with greasepaint, buck teeth, crepe hair, and a slow dissolve. Effective stuff for the 1910s, though a far cry from the advanced prosthetics and camera techniques of later decades. Like many of Universal’s earliest pictures that derive from a literary source, considerable liberties are taken with the plot, which is simplified and Hyde/Jekyll’s death made manifest on the screen.

Lovecraft never mentions this film in his surviving letters; though he might have seen it either during its initial run or its 1927 re-release. He did see Paramount’s 1931 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and since he draws no comparison with the Universal film, it seems likely that Lovecraft missed the dawn of Universal monsters at the theatre.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Silent • 133? minutes • Dir: Wallace Worsley • Prod: Carl Laemmle

Universal produced and distributed a number of horror films during the silent era, but their first massive financial and critical success was The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Actor and makeup artist Lon Chaney, who played the starring role of Quasimodo, obtained the rights to Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel in 1921, determined to play the role. The film showcases the makeup skills that earned him the moniker “The Man With 1,000 Faces,” including a plaster hump, facial prosthetics, etc. Chaney’s appearance and performance are the most-remembered aspects of the film, although the immense scale of the production—with the milling crowds of extras and a cathedral set that was used by Universal until destroyed by fire in 1967. Stage 28, which housed the opera house set, was demolished in 2014.

This was one of the films that Lovecraft confirmed he had seen.

Of the Chaney cinemas which you list, I have seen “The Miracle Man”, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, & “The Unholy Three.” I believe he would have appeared in “Dracula” has he lived.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1931, LJVS 35

The screenplay by Edward T. Lowe, Jr. and Perley Poore Sheehan takes considerable liberties with the novel, most notably letting Esmeralda survive while Quasimodo dies. Lovecraft was normally a stickler about such things, preferring accuracy to the novel, but we don’t have any idea what he thought of the film as an adaptation.

The original print of the film, which Lovecraft would have seen, has been lost. Restored home video versions are based on shorter 16 mm prints. While the film was re-released in the 1930s with various soundtracks, there is no evidence that Lovecraft saw (and heard) these alternate versions of the film.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Silent • 107 minutes • Dir: Rupert Julian (Uncredited: Edward Sedgewick) • Prod: Carl Laemmle

Lon Chaney’s reputation as a master of makeup did not begin with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), but The Phantom of the Opera (1925) sealed his reputation as a monster actor. Laemmle bought the rights to Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera in Paris in 1922, and even before his star turn as Quasimodo, Chaney was a natural choice for the role of the Phantom. Elliot J. Clawson wrote the first screenplay based closely on Leroux’s novel, with the addition of a lengthy flashback (later eliminated). The screenplay went through several versions, and changed again during a tense and complicated filming; though they were able to reuse the opera house set from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The original ending tested poorly with audiences, and much of the film was re-shot under the direction of Edward Sedgewick, and then quickly re-edited. This version of the film premiered at the Astor Theater in New York City on 6 Sep 1925.

Not long after, H. P. Lovecraft and his wife Sonia H. Greene went to see it.

Having duly met S H, I accompanied her on a walk toward Times Square, in which we studied theatre facades with a view to the evening’s entertainment. We at length chose the new weird cinema, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, for which we obtained 1st Balcony tickets. This has been extensively advertised, & I knew it must be good. We now proceeded to the Grand Central to get S H’s valise, checked it at the Hotel Astor near the theatre, & walked some more before the opening of the performance at 8:30. Then came the cinema (ticket stub enclosed)—& what a spectacle it was!! It was about a presence haunting the great Paris opera house—a Second-Empire (i.e., mid-Victorian) structure built by the architect Charles Garnier on a site honeycom[b]ed with mediaeval vaults—but developed so slowly that I actually fell asleep several times during the first part. Then the second part began—horror lifted its grisly visage—& I could not have been made drowsy by all the opiates under heaven! Ugh!!! The face that was revealed when the mask was pulled off . . . . . & the nameless legion of things that cloudily appeared beside & behind the owner of that face when the mob chased him into the river at the last! You must see it if it comes to Providence. That face is the one definitive triumph of the art of makeup—nothing so horrible has ever existed before, save unexpressed in the brain of such an one as Clark Ashton Smith.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 18 Sep 1925, LFF1.398-399, cf. CE 5.167

Lovecraft’s praise was also repeated to Clark Ashton Smith himself:

Apropos of the weird—I saw a cinema the other night which contained some of the best horror effects ever visualised by the camera. It is called “The Phantom of the Opera”, & contains a character whose face is worthy of your own artistic pencil. Ugh! It is a living shudder! You ought to see the film as a sheer spectacle, mediocre as the plot & melodramatic situations are.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 20 Sep 1925, DS 81

As a film, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is heavily melodramatic, slow in the beginning, and perhaps tries to appease too many tastes. Much of the nuance of Leroux’s novel is lost, both in the screenplay adaptation and the cutting room floor. The score for the premiere was by Eugene Conte, while the general release had the more familiar score by Gustav Hinrichs; it isn’t clear which Lovecraft heard. One has to imagine Lovecraft sitting in the balcony as the orchestra plays, eyes locked on the flickering screen, watching Chaney play the organ and hearing the house organ’s notes float through the darkness. In 1929, the film was re-released with a new soundtrack.

Like many early silent films, preservation of The Phantom of the Opera has been piecemeal, with no complete print of the 1925 original as Lovecraft would have seen it.

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Synchronized sound • 110 minutes • Dir: Paul Leni • Prod: Carl Laemmle

The success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) led Universal to pursue a similar project: an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs (1869), with Lon Chaney offered the lead of Gwynplaine, but an issue with the rights led to a delay in production. Chaney pivoted to The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and the success of that film caused Laemmle to focus on The Man Who Laughs as the next big Gothic-flavored romantic melodrama.

Chaney was not under contract to Universal at the time, and German actor Conrad Veidt was hired for the lead role as Gwynplaine. Veidt had previous horror credits, including Eerie Tales (1919), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Hands of Orlac (1924), and Waxworks (1924). Instead of doing his own makeup Chaney-style, Veidt was placed into the hands of Jack Pierce, head of Universal’s makeup department, who handled the monstrous visage of Gwynplaine.

The Man Who Laughs was a transition film as Universal moved from silent to talkies; it was filmed without dialogue (Veidt had a notable accent), but with a synchronized soundtrack and sound effects as a “sound” film. Leni brought German Expressionist influences to a solid, if melodramatic, adaptation of Hugo’s novel by J. Grubb Alexander.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft missed it.

I’ll look for “Rome Express”—though I saw neither “The Man Who Laughs” nor “Caligari” in their respective days.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Arthur Leeds, 19 Jun 1934, LRK 342

While not a horror film unto itself, The Man Who Laughs was a strong influence on the later Universal Monster movies. Lovecraft missing it at the cinema was unfortunate, but also shows how easy it is to miss films before reruns and home video.

It is notable that Universal silent horrors in the 1920s do not feature any actual supernatural elements. Quasimodo, the Phantom, and Gwynplaine are disfigured or deformed, but not actually unnatural; U.S. audiences seemed to prefer a rational (even if incredible) explanation to a supernatural one, and this also applies to highly influential films like The Cat and the Canary (1927), a silent horror-comedy developed from a Broadway play that both established and lampooned many elements of the “old dark house” film; and the Lon Chaney vehicle The Unknown (1927), directed by Tod Browning, where he plays the murderous human oddity Alonzo the Armless in a circus. However, that would change.

Dracula (1931)

Sound • 85 minutes • Dir: Tod Browning • Prod: Tod Browning, Carl Laemmle, Jr.

Horror was not limited to the cinema in the 1920s. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was adapted to the stage in 1924 by Irish actor/writer Hamilton Deane. Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, was engaged in a copyright lawsuit with the creators of Nosferatu (1922) and authorized the production. The play toured for three years, and was later revised by American writer John L. Balderston in 1927 for Broadway. The Broadway production included Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi in the role as Count Dracula, in his first major English-speaking role, dressed in what would become the iconic suit and opera cape. It was a major theatrical success, and opposite him as Abraham Van Helsing was Edward Van Sloan.

The makers of Nosferatu lost the legal battle with Florence Stoker in 1925; this opened the doors for an authorized version, and the success of the Broadway play, which began to tour in 1928, offered possibilities. Carl Laemmle, Jr., son of Universal Studios’ founder, became head of production in 1928, with his first films hitting cinemas in 1930. Inspired by the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Junior Laemmle would be a major productive force behind Universal’s Monster films of the 1930s, starting with Dracula (1931).

Louis Bromfield was hired to pen the screenplay, but was swiftly replaced by Garrett Fort, who based his drafts largely on the 1927 stage play, and even borrowing some scenes from Nosferatu. The result doesn’t look a great deal like Stoker’s novel reads; for practical purposes, the play had left out the lengthy stagecoach journey at the beginning and severely condensed the book and plot, so that everything happens within England. The film, at least, opens with Dracula’s castle, and is heavy with Gothic atmosphere; though the rest of the film largely follows the play, with Dracula contending with Van Helsing as he attempts to secure his prey.

Lon Chaney might have won the role of Dracula, but he died on 26 Aug 1930; Conrad Veidt, star of The Man Who Laughs (1928), returned to Germany rather than try his English on sound films. Bela Lugosi campaigned hard for the role, and ultimately both he and Van Sloan ended up reprising their roles from the play on the screen.

Lovecraft, who had read Stoker’s novel, was not impressed:

Of the Chaney cinemas which you list, I have seen “The Miracle Man”, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, & “The Unholy Three.” I believe he would have appeared in “Dracula” has he lived. I saw that film in Miami on Whitehead’s recommendation, but didn’t get much of a kick except for the castle scenes at the very beginning.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1931, LJVS 35

Lovecraft had gone down to visit his friend and fellow weird fiction writer the Rev. Henry St. Clair Whitehead in Dunedin, Florida in summer 1931, and traveled down to Miami (and then Key West). One can imagine the hot, stuffy theater, the house lights dimmed, the film opens…and few will argue that the opening scenes of Dracula are almost enough to make anyone fall in love with Universal horror; cinematographer Karl Freund wielded his camera expertly. However, Lovecraft was unhappy once the action left the castle, and so too did most semblance to Stoker’s novel:

What the public consider “weirdness” in drama is rather pitiful and absurd—according to one’s perspective. As a thorough soporific I recommend the average popularly “horrible” play or cinema or radio dialogue. They are all the same—flat, hackneyed, synthetic, essentially atmosphereless jumbles of conventional shrieks and mutterings and superficial, mechanical situations. “The Bat” made me drowse back in the early 1920’s—and last year an alleged “Frankenstein” on the screen would have made me drose had not a posthumous sympathy for poor Mrs. Shelley made me see red instead. Ugh! And the screen “Dracula” in 1931—I saw the beginning of that in Miami, Fla.—but couldn’t bear to watch it drag to its full term of dreariness, hence walked out into the fragrant tropic moonlight!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 16 Feb 1933, LWH 78

Unfortunately (and completely unknown to Lovecraft), by walking out before the end he missed the original epilogue of the film, where Edward Van Sloan emerged for a curtain speech. This scene was subsequently censored in the 1936 re-issue of Dracula, and is believed lost.

There are worse sins than walking out of what is now considered a cinematic horror classic to lay at Lovecraft’s door, and he was dedicated in his appreciation of the literary originals above the cinematic adaptations, so perhaps he can be forgiven. He made a note, in a later letter, that it was not Lugosi’s portrayal of the Count that he minded at all, only the script:

Yes—& kindred apologies for overrating your esteem for Signor Lugosi. However—if I recall the film “Dracula” aright, this bird is far from bad. The trouble with that opus was (a) the sloppiness of Stoker himself, & (b) the infinitely greater sloppiness of the cinematic adapters. The acting was fully as good as the lousy text would permit!
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 1 Sep 1934, OFF 173

Lovecraft calls him “Signor Lugosi” because of a mistaken impression (due to the last name), that Lugosi was actually Italian. In an era before the internet, such mistakes were not unknown:

Hull Daily Mail, 6 Oct 1931, p8

At the same time as Dracula was being shot in English as Universal Studios, a Spanish-language version was being shot on the same sets. Lovecraft appears to have been unaware of this, and never mentions it in his letters.

Frankenstein (1931)

Sound • 71 minutes • Dir: James Whale • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

British playwright Peggy Webling approached Hamilton Deane, who had been touring Dracula on stage, with a stage adaptation of Frankenstein. This was a success, and American write John L. Balderstone, who had previously adapted the Dracula play for Broadway, also adapted Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre with the intention of staging the show in the U.S. Carl Laemmle, Jr. was looking to begin work on more horror films after Dracula, and to this end, Junior bought the film rights for Balderstone’s Frankenstein—and approaching Bela Lugosi to play the Monster.

Lugosi played the Monster for a test reel, but the point was moot when director James Whale was brought to the project. Whale was a British director influenced by German expressionism, with a strong sense of the Gothic. He eventually cast relatively low-profile British actor Boris Karloff in the role. Jack Pierce provided Karloff’s makeup, including the flat-top and neck bolts that have become iconic elements of the Universal Frankenstein’s Monster. The production came together relatively quickly, and was released in theaters in December 1931.

Like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) greatly simplifies and veers strongly from the source material. The frame narrative and beginning of Shelley’s novel is ditched, opening with Henry (Victor in the novel) Frankenstein reanimating the monster using electrical apparatus. It is a thrilling and now-classic opening; but the Monster that emerges is not the terrifyingly intelligent and menacingly articulate entity from the novel, but a creature of almost childlike innocence and inhuman strength. The Monster then lurches through misadventures as Henry Frankenstein’s romance with his fiancée Elizabeth plays out, culminating in the Monster’s destruction and a wedding and a happy ending.

Lovecraft, who admired Shelley’s original novel, was not a fan of these changes. He was quite vocal about this, and it is ironic that we hear more about Universal’s Frankenstein than any other film in Lovecraft’s letters.

I haven’t been able to get around to any cinemas except “Frankenstein”—which vastly disappointed me. The book has been altered beyond recognition, & everything is toned down to an insufferable cheapness & relative tameness. I fear the cinema is no place to get horror-thrills!
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 9 Dec 1931, LJVS 85

Also saw “Frankenstein” last month & was vastly disappointed. The film absolutely ruins the book—which indeed it scarcely resembles!
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 23 Dec [1931], OFF 18

“Frankenstein” was the only cinema I attended during the autumn of 1931, & was woefully disappointed. No attempt to follow the novel was made, & everything was cheap, artificial, & mechanical. I might have expected it, though—for “Dracula” (which I saw in Miami, Fla. last June) was just as bad. Last month “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” came & went without my inspection.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [28 Jan 1932], DS 344

As for cinemas—“Jekyll-Hyde” has been & gone, but I didn’t have the energy to attend it. I fancy “Frankenstein” somewhat discouraged the cinematic interest which “Street Scene” almost awakened.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 5 Feb 1932, LJVS 90

As for cinemas—I haven’t been to one since the “Frankenstein” disappointment! I have heard “Arrowsmith” well spoken of, & hope I can catch it on one of its returns to town. A friend of mine saw “Jekyll-Hyde” & was woefully disappointed.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 22 Mar 1932, LJVS 93

I saw the cinema of “Frankenstein”, & was tremendously disappointed because no attempt was made to follow the story. However, there have been many worse films—& many parts of this one are really quite dramatic when they are viewed independently & without comparison to the episodes of the original novel. Generally speaking, the cinema always cheapens & degrades any literary material it gets hold of—especially anything in the least subtle or unusual.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 10 Jul 1932, DS 33

“Jekyll-Hyde” was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), a film adaptation from Paramount; Arrowsmith (1931) was a medical drama based on the 1925 Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name.

The last comment is perhaps the most telling; Lovecraft wasn’t complaining about Karloff’s performance, or Pierce’s makeup, or Whale’s direction—he was a stickler for literary accuracy, unable to avoid comparing the Universal film to its thrice-removed source material. There is some indication that Lovecraft appreciated elements of the film, particularly the elements taken from German Expressionism:

The re-named “Island of Dr. Moreau” is on exhibition here right now—but the advertisements kill any enthusiasm I might otherwise have for attending. I did see what bore the name of “Frankenstein” in the cinema—to my commingled rage & ennui. If any effective horror-film ever comes into being it will not be American. Germany might produce once—& I hope to see anything of the kind which does materialise.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 15 Jan 1933, LHB 54

Lovecraft refers here to Island of Lost Souls (1932), a Paramount film and a follow-up to their successful adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the previous year. The actor, Boris Karloff, also impressed Lovecraft, or at least proved memorable:

You catch resemblances like a veteran—I can recognize the actor in the cinema version (or rather perversion!) of “Frankenstein” from the pen & ink sketch.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [c. 6 Dec 1933], LRBO 92

I’ve heard of that cinema “White Zombei”—in fact, I fear I let it split by under the impression that it wasn’t much good. A picture called “The Ghoul” (with Boris Karloff, the chief attraction of that “Frankenstein” fizzle as the star) is not running at a downtown theatre, but I have not seen it so far.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, [19 Mar 1934], DS 119

White Zombie (1932) was a United Artists film, starring Lugosi, strongly inspired by William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). Parts of the production were actually filmed on Universal’s lots. The Ghoul (1933) was a Gaumont British film, starring Karloff. It is somewhat sad to think that Lovecraft missed both films; while not as acclaimed as the Universal horror films, they showcase both actors’ greater range and abilities.

In truth, the combined disappointment of Dracula and Frankenstein seems to have made Lovecraft rather critical of horror films in total:

Most radio and cinema versions of classics constitute a combination of high treason and murder in the first degree—I’ll never get over the cinematic mess that bore the name (about the only bond of kinship to the book!) of “Frankenstein”.
—H. P. lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 3 Apr 1934, MF2.761

The censors had a go at Frankenstein when it came out, and it isn’t clear if Lovecraft saw the version where Frankenstein’s Monster accidentally drowns the young girl, or where Henry Frankenstein declares “Now I know how it feels to be God!”

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Sound • 62 minutes • Dir: Robert Florey • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

After Robert Florey and Bela Lugosi left the production of Frankenstein (1931), they became attached to another Universal horror project, a loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Like most of Universal’s horror films at this point, the film borrows literary cachet but makes significant departures from the source material; in this case, very little of Poe’s story remained in the screenplay by Tom Reed and Dale Van Every, and was further altered on-set with new dialogue added to replace stilted lines. Lugosi’s character, Dr. Mirakle, doesn’t appear in Poe’s story at all. The financial success of Frankenstein encouraged Universal to increase the film’s budget, and it went back for reshoots and editing before its 1932 release.

Even Karl Freund’s cinematography could not save this picture, however; and while not a box office bomb, it was a financial disappointment for Universal after the huge success of Dracula and Frankenstein. Ironically for Lugosi, who hadn’t wanted to be typecast playing monsters, he would go on to star in a number of films as a mad scientist, including in two more Poe adaptations (The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935)). Hollywood had pegged Lugosi, and most of his career would be spent in sinister roles.

Censors had a go at Murders in the Rue Morgue, especially any scene the least sexually provocative and, perhaps surprisingly to today’s audiences, a scene about evolution. The 1925 Scopes Trial was still within living memory, and conservative and fundamentalist religious interests objected to the theory of evolution, or the idea that humans and great apes shared a common ancestor.

Given Lovecraft’s love of Edgar Allan Poe, he might have been interested in Murders in the Rue Morgue, but one of his younger cinema-going friends apparently warned him off of it:

I’ll be warned & remain absent from the “Rue Morgue.”
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 22 Mar 1932, LJVS 93

Given Lovecraft’s reactions to Dracula and Frankenstein, this was perhaps for the best.

The Old Dark House (1932)

Sound • 71 minutes • Dir: James Whale • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

In 1927, British author J. B. Priestley published a novel titled Benighted, a quasi-Gothic novel where a number of travellers are caught in a storm and seek refuge in an old Welsh manor house. It was re-released in the United States in 1928 under the title The Old Dark House, to fair acclaim. H. P. Lovecraft mentions it a few times in his letters, although he never appears to have read it.

After the success of Frankenstein, Universal acquired the rights to the novel for Whale, who cast Boris Karloff as the mute butler Morgan, a “heavy” role that echoed the imposing physicality of Frankenstein’s monster. Benn W. Levy and R. C. Sherrif wrote the screenplay, which was largely faithful to the novel, albeit with more humor, making this the first of Universal’s horror-comedies. The film benefited strongly from Whale’s suspenseful direction, the relative fidelity of the script to the original, and a strong cast, but the lampooning of Gothic tropes didn’t click with U.S. audiences, although it did good business when released in the U.K.

The relatively poor performance in the U.S. likely meant that Lovecraft would have had limited opportunity to see it in the theater, and judging by the lack of references to it in his letters, he likely missed it.

The Mummy (1932)

Sound • 72 minutes • Dir: Karl Freund • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

It was a trend in Universal horror films that they were adapted from established novels or short stories; cinematic horror was rooted in literary horror, even if filtered through stage theater and then Hollywood conventions and sometimes colored by German Expressionism. When Junior decided on an Egyptian-themed film, however, Universal did not manage to find an appropriate literary property to license and adapt. The mummy of Imhotep would be the first original Universal monster, one that drew on a literary tradition of the undead of Egypt, but not any specific work.

Karl Freund moved into the director’s chair for this film; John L. Balderston, who had done the screenplays for Dracula and Frankenstein, adapted a treatment by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer. Boris Karloff once again plays the monster, with a legendary makeup by Jack Pierce for the opening sequence of the film. Karloff gives a strong performance, and the romance plot that is so common for Universal horrors of that period is actually much more effectively worked into the plot here, as the mummy seeks to reunite with his long-dead love through her reincarnation. (A lengthy flashback through various incarnations was filmed but cut, and is now sadly lost except for stills.)

The film opened to lesser numbers than Dracula or Frankenstein, though its popular legacy is extremely solid. Lovecraft, despite his modest interest in ancient Egypt and archaeological horrors, sadly does not seem to have seen this Universal horror either:

Most cinema ‘horrors’, however, are flat & mechanical. I have not seen “The Mummy.”
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 14 Mar 1933, DS 57

The Invisible Man (1933)

Sound • 70 minutes • Dir: James Whale • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

With the success of Dracula (1931), Universal was already looking at various projects, including an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Invisible Man (1897), but Frankenstein (1931) got the greenlight first. After The Old Dark House (1932), director James Whale signed onto the project, and brought writer R. C. Sherriff (also fresh from The Old Dark House) to write the screenplay. As The Invisible Man novel is not inherently horrific, Universal also bought the rights to The Murderer Invisible (1931) by Phillip Wylie, and the the film combines elements of both. Initially, Karloff was intended to play The Invisible Man, repeating his successful work with Whale from Frankenstein, but by the time production got going Karloff wasn’t available, and the Invisible Man is played by Claude Rains in his film debut.

The Invisible Man stands out among the early Universal horrors for its technical achievements. It is easily the most ambitious in terms of special effects, with the Invisible Man requiring a number of different practical and film effects to convincingly portray the illusion; this is reflected in the budget, which was almost as high as for Dracula. The film is also notable in centering the story on the Invisible Man himself, an anti-hero and a jovial bastard rather than a tragic figure like Frankenstein’s Monster or Imhotep, or a supernatural evil like Dracula.

It was a box office success, well regarded for the spectacle of its effects as well as its writing, acting, and direction. Lovecraft was no doubt wary of the whole horror film business at this point, but he did eventually get around to seeing it when it came back to theaters for a second run—and was suitably impressed:

I missed “The Invisible Man”, but will try to take it in when it returns, as it undoubtedly will.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [25 Dec 1933], LRBO 95

Also went to see “The Invisible Man”. Surprisingly good—might easily have been absurd, yet succeeded in being genuinely sinister.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 4 Feb 1934, LJVS 226

Lovecraft’s fellow pulp-author and correspondent Robert E. Howard also saw The Invisible Man, and reported back:

We had purchased our whiskey and intended to celebrate Saint Patrick’s in a fitting manner, after seeing a whimsical movie called “The Invisible Man” from a story by Wells, I believe, but the sandstorm was followed by a biting blizzard, with driving sleet and lightning and thunder, so we postponed the merry-making.
—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, c. Jul 1934, MF2.779

The Black Cat (1934)

Sound • 65 minutes • Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr., E. M. Asher

While nominally inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, this is really an original story, and a vehicle for Universal to get two of its most bankable horror stars together in one economical picture. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi play opposite each other for the first time, and if the plot is somewhat overloaded—involving as it does a bus crash, revenge, a gallery of dead women, The Rites of Lucifer, murder, a black mass, and a black cat—there is something joyful in how both Karloff and Lugosi get to revel in their respective roles. Ulmer managed to make the film much more violent and lurid than typical for the period, and had a talent for making the most of subject matter, since he couldn’t rely on epic sets, huge casts, or expensive special effects. Unfortunately, he also began an affair with the wife of one of Carl Laemmle’s nephews, which led to this being his last film for Universal.

Karloff gets top billing and top dollar in this film, as his star had already begun to eclipse Lugosi. In truth, Karloff had the better part, playing the villain with relish while Lugosi is more the straight man. The pairing was successful; it was Universal’s most financially successful film in 1934, and led to seven more films featuring both Karloff and Lugosi.

Lovecraft was skeptical…

From what you say of “The Black Cat”, I don’t think I’ll make any special attempt to see it. Apparently it is a typical cinematic cheapening & distortion—on the order of the so-called “Frankenstein” film of a year or two ago. I don’t attend the cinema very often, but realise what a marvellous conveyer of weird images & impressions it could be if it would only utilise seriously its tremendous range of optical & mechanical potentialities.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 21 May 1934, LHB 81-82

As for “The Black Cat”—I guess Edgar Allan might very well have written the cinema version so far as any resemblance to the work of our friend Eddie Poe is concerned!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Arthur Leeds, 4 Jun 1934, LRK 340

Hope the new Poe mangling didn’t disappoint you too badly—I’ve seen neither it nor the so-called “Black Cat.” Just what the cinema would do to the “Tell Tale heart” is more than I can imagine at the moment!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Arthur Leeds, 19 Jun 1934, LRK 342

The “new Poe mangling” was The Tell-Tale Heart (1934) from Fox Film Co., which was nominally based on “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe, but released in the U.S. as Bucket of Blood.

Life Returns (1934)

Sound • 60 minutes • Dir: Eugene Frenke • Prod: Lou Ostrow

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The actual experiment of bringing the dead back to life, which is part of the motion picture “Life Returns” was performed by myself and staff on May 22, 1934 at 11:45 P.M. in Berkeley, California. This part of the picture was originally taken to retain a permanent scientific record of our experiment. Everything shown is absolutely real. The animal was unquestionably and actually dead, and was brought back to life. May I offer my thanks to my assistants, Mario Margutti, William Black, Ralph Celmer and Roderic Kneder, who are shown carrying out their respective parts. Respectfully submitted, Dr. Robert E. Cornish.
—Opening card, Life Returns (1934)

Robert E. Cornish was a child prodigy who became interested in medical resurrection, and claimed to achieve success in reanimating a series of dogs who had been put to death during a series of experiments at the University of Southern California in 1934. Director Eugene Frenke filmed the experimental operation, and incorporated the genuine medical footage into a short drama, with Cornish playing himself. Frenke made a deal with Universal to split costs and profit, with Universal lending some of their actors (including Valerie Hobson, who would also star in Bride of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London this year) and handling the distribution.

It would have been surprising if Lovecraft had seen Life Returns. The film was pulled from general release by Universal after a preview, limited to a roadshow. The drama isn’t very good, the production slapdash and amateurish, certainly not as stylish as Universal’s big-budget horrors. The genuine medical footage is both boring and arguably more horrific than any Lon Chaney or Jack Pierce makeup, because actual dogs were harmed in the making of this film. While it might have been interesting to see Lovecraft’s reaction to a real-life reanimator, that’s about the limit that can be said for this footnote in Universal horror history.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel, 11 Nov 1934, p17

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Sound • 75 minutes • Dir: James Whale • Prod: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

Studios in the 1930s certainly understood the concept of the franchise; the Fu Manchu and Tarzan film series were, if not cinematic universes unto themselves, at least proof that studios recognized that movie-goers could and would spend their hard-earned coin to see more of the same. Several of Universal’s horror films were successful enough to warrant sequels, but the first to actually expand beyond a single film was Frankenstein (1931). Karloff’s profile had risen, and he was willing to replay the part of the Monster; Jack Pierce was still a master of makeup; James Whale was willing and able to direct. The only issue was the script and the budget.

Various treatments were written and rejected; in 1934, John L. Balderston returned to Shelley’s original novel and plucked out a plot point that wasn’t in the first film: the monster demanding Frankenstein build him a mate. This screenplay was polished by William Hurlburt and Edmund Pearson, and then presented to the Hays Office. Unlike previous films, production of Bride of Frankenstein would have to take place under the onus of the Hays Code; while previous Universal horrors had dealt with occasional censorship from various local bodies, this was a top-level of oversight that would challenge directors for decades.

The film went overbudget and suffered various production snafus. Karloff broke his hip. Clive Colin, playing Henry Frankenstein, broke his leg. The Hays’ office objected to various scenes and lines. None of that mattered once the film was released. The film was a financial and critical success, praised for the acting, the score, the cinematography and direction; for Jack Pierce’s makeup, Kenneth Strickfadden’s lightning bolt, and the rotoscoped homunculi in Dr. Praetorious’ jars. Elsa Lanchester’s look as the Bride was instantly iconic, and her dual role as Mary Shelley and the Bride was a poignant and wonderful link to the original story.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that Lovecraft saw it. Not surprising, given his poor opinion of Frankenstein (1931). Though he did not know it, it was his loss.

Werewolf of London (1935)

Sound • 75 minutes • Dir: Stuart Walker • Prod: Stanley Bergerman

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) was the last Universal horror film directly produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr. While Junior had not been the producer for all of Universal’s films, he had successfully midwifed Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, and Bride of Frankenstein—impressive credentials for anyone. The Laemmles’ time at Universal was coming to an end; after the expensive box office bomb of Sutter’s Gold in 1936, investors would force both Carl and Junior from the company.

The Universal horror films of 1935-1936 thus represent a transition between the Laemmles’ style of production and the much more franchise-driven approach of the 1940s and 50s. This period is often less productive of classic characters; Werewolf of London, for example, is not The Wolf Man (1941), though it does help establish some of the cinematic werewolf lore that would be carried on for decades, such as the bite of a werewolf passing on lycanthropy, and the light of the moon controlling the transformation. It was, in fact, the first feature-length werewolf film.

The film was initially intended to be another Karloff/Lugosi vehicle. However, Karloff was working on Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Lugosi on Mark of the Vampire (1935) for MGM, so director Stuart Walker cast Henry Hull and Walter Oland in their place. The story was original, with screenplay by John Colton. Jack Pierce provided the makeup for Hull’s transformations, accomplished with a stop-frame technique, so that as Pierce gradually adds more hair and prosthetics Hull seems to change before the viewer’s eyes. Effective stuff for the 1930s.

While entertaining enough, the film lacks the starpower of Unviersal’s big horror films like Bride of Frankenstein, which may be why it fared rather disappointingly at the box office. Still, word of mouth got around. We don’t know if Lovecraft managed to see it, but several of his friends urged him to do so:

Incidentally, I’ll keep “The Werewolf of London” in mind.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [c. June 1935], LRBO 143

I’ll be on the lookout for “The Werewolf of London”, despite my rather discouraging past experiences with alleged “horror” cinemas. Thanks for the tip!
—H. P. Lovecraft to William F. Anger, 22 Jul 1935, LRBO 241

Thanks for the warnings against allegedly weird cinemas. Someone has just recommended “The Werewolf of London” to me—but I have my doubts.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, 4 Aug 1935, LPS 386

The Raven (1935)

Sound • 61 minutes • Dir: Louis Friedlander (Lew Landers) • Prod: David Diamond/Stanley Bergerman

A spiritual sequel to “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1932) and “The Black Cat” (1934), and the third and final film in Universal’s unofficial “Poe trilogy” of the 30s. Universal paired Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the latter of whom once again plays a scientist. It took time and several writers to finally arrive at an acceptable screenplay, which David Boehm finally delivered. This was director Friedlander’s sixth film (counting earlier serials), and his first horror film.

Perhaps as a result of inexperience with horror, the film was not a critical success. Censors did not like the piling-on of horror on horror; the Poe element was prominent, but the story wasn’t particularly true to any of Poe’s tales or poems in tone or content; Karloff and Lugosi play their parts with characteristic professionalism, but the script was a bit of a mess. As with “The Black Cat,” there’s a strong theme of sadism that underlies the whole affair; the torture-dungeon has a distinct science fiction serial or comic strip aspect, exaggerated and theatrical.

Lovecraft does not mention “The Raven” in his letters; given that he apparently skipped “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Black Cat,” and was critical of cinema’s approach to adapting Edgar Allan Poe, it seems unlikely he would have watched this one.

The Invisible Ray (1936)

Sound • 79 minutes • Dir: Lambert Hillyer • Prod: Edmund Grainger

After “The Raven” (1935), Karloff and Lugosi were intended to be paired together again for an adaptation of Bluebeard; production was delayed and they were shifted to another project, the science fiction horror The Invisible Ray, again under director Stuart Walker. However, Walker didn’t like the script and left, replaced by Lambert Hillyer, who was an experienced director, though mostly of westerns. Hillyer eventually delivered the film late and over-budget.

The end result is very much a work of its time; mad science and the wonders of radiation, which is both deadly and invisible, able to both harm and heal. The laboratory sets are particularly charming in retrospect, and would also appear in Flash Gordon (1936) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936); the special effects, while relatively sparse, are effective. However, this was a B-movie through and through, and doesn’t really pretend to be otherwise.

Lovecraft does not mention “The Invisible Ray” in his letters, and probably didn’t see it. He seems not to have gone to the cinema much in the last year of his life. Ironically, Karloff would star in another film involving a radioactive meteorite some decades later—Die, Monster, Die! (1965), an exceedingly loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” In both films, the strange invisible rays from the radioactive meteorite eventually consume Karloff’s character.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Sound • 71 minutes • Dir: Lambert Hillyer • Prod: E. M. Asher

The sequel to Dracula (1931) took a while to get going, due to a complicated situation to the rights. The first film had run through the plot of the novel and play, and Stoker hadn’t written a sequel. After his death in 1912, a “lost chapter” titled “Dracula’s Guest” was published in 1914, which included a beautiful female vampire, and this was ostensibly the inspiration for the sequel. MGM bought the rights to “Dracula’s Guest,” with certain stipulations (because Universal still had rights to Dracula).

In 1934, Universal bought the rights to “Dracula’s Guest” (including Balderston’s scenario) from MGM with the stipulation that the rights would revert if product didn’t begin before 1935 (later extended to February 1936). , which were due to run out, and so rushed Dracula’s Daughter into production without a final script. The initial treatment was by John L. Balderston, from Dracula, Frankenstein, and other Universal horrors, but director James Whale, then attached to the project, brought in R. C. Sherriff. His screenplays found difficulties with censorship boards, and eventually he was passed over for Garrett Fort, whose name appears in the film’s credits. Whale left the project, and eventually Hillyer, who had previously directed The Invisible Ray (1936), was placed in the director’s chair.

Initial hopes of an ensemble cast with a returning Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, etc. were ultimately dashed; Lugosi only appears as a wax bust in his likeness in a coffin, and the only returning character from the original Dracula (1931) is Edward Van Sloan, here playing “Von Helsing.” Gloria Holden plays the eponymous daughter, Countess Marya Zaleska, in her first starring role—which is a bit far and away from the Theda Bara-style vamps of yesteryear, with a degree of self-loathing that is almost palpable. Jack Pierce was again on makeup duties, and worked with the special effects people to light Holden to maximum effect.

Perhaps because of all of this, the film lacked the originality of many of the earlier horrors, and the rushed production shows in spots. Universal still had excellent crews and sets, but the script was a mess and performances often feature too much dialogue and too prosaic a tying-up of loose ends. One of the saving points of the film is the implicit lesbianism, in particular a sequence when the Countess has a young woman model for her, resulting in a kind of seduction that somehow made it past the censors.

It was the last gasp of Universal horror during Lovecraft’s lifetime. The Laemmles were forced out of Universal during production, and the new owners were not fond of horror films. Universal did not produce another horror movie until Son of Frankenstein (1939), long years after Lovecraft was dead. There is no mention of Dracula’s Daughter in Lovecraft’s letters, and considering his thoughts on Dracula (1931) and “Dracula’s Guest,” he most likely did not see it.

Curtain Call

H. P. Lovecraft barely lived long enough to be aware that the Universal horrors which he had seen or been aware of were on their way to becoming something else. He did not see any of the films of Kharis, the spiritual heir to Imhotep, who shambled through a series of mummy films. Never saw Lon Chaney, Jr.’s defining performance in The Wolf Man (1941), or the sequels to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man grow together into a cinematic universe of crossovers and cross-references that oddly reflected what was happening with his own literary legacy, culminating in the Abbott & Costello films. One could have wished that Lovecraft had at least survived long enough to see the Gill-man swim in the underwater acrobatic ballet of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)—but, that was far in the future. Cancer claimed him first.

We have the advantage of several decades hindsight, we know how successful and influential these films were and would be. Before we judge Lovecraft for his critical takes on films like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), perhaps we should ask ourselves if we today are ignoring or misjudging the horror films that will be seen as classics in the future? Because not even the most dedicated cinephile can see everything, nor can anyone predict which films will enter the bargain bin of history, while others become enshrined as cinematic legends.

This little survey is not the totality of Lovecraft’s film-going experience, not even of horror films. This is a core sample into a particular strata of cinematic history, to showcase how Universal horror grew and intersected with Lovecraft’s life and experiences. We do not look for vampires with opera capes in Lovecraftian fiction, and in part that reason is because even during Lovecraft’s lifetime Lugosi’s distinct appearance influened how vampires were being portrayed, even in pulp fiction; as the decades wore on, the Universal monsters would become more and more fixed archetypes for others to play off of—much as the Cthulhu Mythos would become a sandbox for all to enjoy.

Those who grew up in the generations after Lovecraft were heirs to both legacies, which sould sometimes be combined together in works like Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October (1993). Kids who had read scholastic paperbacks of Lovecraft or books like Monsters Monsters Monsters would also stay up late to watch the re-runs of old Universal horrors flicker in black and white on late-night reruns . . . and today, kids might stream some of the same classic films, or snuggle with an e-reader to learn what Pickman’s model is all about. Both Lovecraft and the Universal monsters have become part of the world’s heritage of horror.

Sources and Acknowledgements

Entire books have been written on Universal’s horror movies and the history of the studio, far too much to recapitulate in detail here, so I’m borrowing on the scholarship of others and simplifying greatly. Facts on the films and the story behind them are drawn from the following reference works, for which please see for more information:

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.

Innsmouth (2015)

インスマスを覆う影 (Innsumasu o Oou Kage, 1994). Return to Innsmouth (1999). Dagon (2001). Innsmouth Legacy (2004). Cthulhu (2007). Innsmouth (2015). H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020). The Innsmouth School for Girls (2023). H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (2024).

Those titles don’t even cover the entire cinematic legacy of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which includes a number of short films, television episodes, and a broad thematic influence that crops up in a number of films. Innsmouth, with its relatively accessible settings, modicum of action, near-human creatures that are fairly easy to depict with make-up and prosthetics, and a combination of folk, cosmic, and body horror vibes is one of the most popular and identifiable works for filmmakers to either adapt, riff on, or incorporate into their own original works.

Each film is unique, each faces its own limitations and creative choices, which makes the variations on the familiar theme interesting for comparison with the others. So what sets Innsmouth (2015) apart from its fellows?

Innsmouth (2015) is an 11-minute short film, directed by Izzy Lee, written by Izzy Lee and Francesco Massaccesi based on the novella by H. P. Lovecraft, and starring Diana Porter and Tristan Risk. Cinematographer was Bryan McKay, and they even used the exterior of the Wentworth Coolidge Mansion, which Lovecraft actually visited (Horror Guide to Northern New England 211).

The story is a highly abbreviated adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” crossed with a police procedural: Detective Olmstead travels to Innsmouth to solve a murder, and finds some unexpected genealogical (and gynecological) revelations. As Izzy Lee put it:

Innsmouth was created to make [Lovecraft] roll over in his grave a little by having the cast 98% female and switching the gender roles. […] there’s also a ton of light being shed on how film excludes central female characters. I wanted to create a film where women call the shots onscreen, in nearly every role.
—quoted in Joe Yanick’s “Izzy Lee puts a New Spin on Lovecraft with Short INNSMOUTH” (Diabolique, 8 Mar 2016)

The result is, like most shorts with hard budget limitations, a bit bare-bones. One of those works that promise something a bit more than can be delivered in the running time. It would have been nice to have seen this premise stretched out to feature length, more atmosphere, and characters and plot given more time to develop. Yet within the constraints, Lee seems to have achieved her directorial goals.

Most of the cast is women, and that results in a shift in focus away from the normally patriarchal stories of Innsmouth. In The Deep Ones (2020), the point is made explicit that this is a story about fish men impregnating human women; in Cthulhu (2007), the prodigal son is not exactly welcomed home, but is expected to get busy fairly immediately with breeding the next generation of Deep One hybrids. The male characters in these stories rarely come out sympathetic, and the women characters are often fairly eager to accommodate.

KATHERINE 
Asses are made to bear, and so are you.

PETRUCHIO 
Women are made to bear, and so are you.
—Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene 1

Lee and Massaccesi’s script doesn’t ignore the Deep One colonization project angle, but they do but their own twist on it, which is aided by some relatively simple but very effective props/makeup effects. Picture Innsmouth as more matriarchal and more fishlike in their reproduction and you get the gist.

Detective Diana Olmstead (Diana Porter) arrives on the scene of a bizarre death: a body with a strange bite wound and a mysterious egg sac on her back. A clue leads her to Innsmouth, where she meets a seductive and horrific fate in the form of Alice Marsh (Tristan Risk: American Mary, The Editor, ABCs of Death 2). Innsmouth explores the “monstrous feminine” with an all-female cast and two male extras. This is notable because Lovecraft’s universe is traditionally male-dominated.

You can expect nudity, blood, egg sacs, gills, teeth, claws, and a soon-to-be notorious scene with Tristan Risk.
—”Innsmouth” at H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival website

Part of the short film’s fame comes from one scene that it would be unfair to spoil. It is enough to say that of all the films that have tried to capture something of the sexual and body horror that Lovecraft implied in his story but could never put on the page, Izzy Lee’s “Innsmouth” may be the most daring in trying to depict it. Kudos to Tristan Risk for her work in bringing that to the screen. In the hands of a less conscientious director, the camera might have lingered too long and crossed the line into exploitation, but I think the brief glimpse into the eye of madness was the mingled shock and titillation needed to set this short film apart.

As with many short films, the length ultimately works against it. This film whets the appetite for a more daring, less traditional reimagination of Lovecraft’s story that treats the subject seriously and isn’t afraid to break a few taboos if it gives the final product some punch, but doesn’t completely satisfy. Lovecraftian film fans who appreciate more mature fare should watch this at least once; filmmakers tackling Innsmouth should challenge themselves to see what works here.

After its initial run on the film festival circuit, Innsmouth (2015) was available for a time on DVD from Nihil Noctem films, though it is now out of print. As of this writing, the film is available for streaming on Shudder.

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.

Herbert West Re-Animator (2017)

Italian director Ivan Zuccon isn’t a household name, even among the select audience of Lovecraftian film enthusiasts. Yet he should be; he has directed no less than five feature-length Lovecraftian films and adaptations:

These are all independently produced Italian horror films with modest budgets, but they have all received English-subtitled releases in some format (DVD, BluRay, and/or streaming), though the earlier ones can be more difficult to find, and few have garnered much critical attention.

That is a pity, because while Zuccon obviously is working within tight constraints in terms of budget, these are interesting films. None of them are a straight adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s stories, although La casa sfuggita and Colour from the Dark are strongly inspired by “The Shunned House” and “The Colour Out of Space,” respectively, and partially adapt those tales to an Italian setting. However, Zuccon likes to go beyond Lovecraft, to spend more time developing the characters in his stories and the weirdness they encounter. Which is particularly evident in his 2017 film Herbert West Re-Animator.

In many ways, the all Re-Animator media lives in the shadow of the breakout success of director Stuart Gordon’s classic Re-Animator (1985). Even when the pornographic parody Re-Penetrator (2004) came out, the film riffed off the iconic image of a syringe of vivid green reagent, and even Zuccon cannot completely escape that particular visual. However, Herbert West Reanimator is not a remake or adaptation of Lovecraft’s story; it is something much stranger: a film that tries to make Herbert West more Lovecraftian.

Despite Lovecraft’s original stories of Herbert West being set in Arkham, the series itself had no connection to any other aspect of his nascent artificial mythology. West doesn’t invoke Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, doesn’t find the formula for his reagent in the Necronomicon, never tries to resurrect a Deep One hybrid from Innsmouth or anything of that nature. Later media, especially in various comics that derive from the 1985 film, have gone back and brought Herbert West into closer contact with eldritch entities and the familiar props of Lovecraft’s Mythos.

What Zuccon has done that is different is try to capture something of the cosmic nihilism and weird aesthetic of Lovecraft in his Reanimator story, while still keeping the Mythos at arm’s length. This is Herbert West against an eldritch universe where death is but a door; but this is not Herbert West vs. Cthulhu. That approach, so different from all the others that riff off of Lovecraft’s creations as if the prop version of the Necronomicon was the source of horror instead of the creeping sense of dread, has rendered a film that is at times beautiful, bizarre, disjointed, and difficult to grasp—but is always and very importantly weird.

Emanuele Cerman plays Herbert West, and Rita Rusciano plays Elizabeth West, his daughter; they are the main viewpoint characters among the small cast, deliver solid performances, and the contrast between their narratives is key to how the film plays out. Here, rather than Herbert West’s obsession with reanimation being a coldly inhuman drive for knowledge that morphs into a morbid fascination with reanimation for its own sake, West pursues reanimation for extremely personal reasons. Nor is he the only one; unweaving the web of personal relationships between living, dead, and reanimated, and their experiences with life, death, and undeath, is the crux of the story that is revealed as viewers learn more about what awaits on the other side of the veil. This metaphysical aspect is where things get Lovecraftian in the sense of other dimensions, strange entities, and sanity-blasting knowledge.

It is still a rather modestly-budgeted independent production, so there is a certain lack of polish at points. The music by Mauro Crivelli and Christian Valentini suits the film, though it lacks the stylistic flourish to make it as memorable as Richard Band’s (who was, admittedly, borrowing heavily from Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Psycho (1960)). The impressive practical effects and almost slapstick physical acting of Stuart Gordon’s film aren’t there; the gore on display reflects more contemporary and brutal horror film conventions. Some computer-generated effects are less than convincing, but fortunately, the whole film is not shot in front of a green screen. I suspect the limitations of the production encouraged Zuccon’s creativity in trying to capture certain images and convey mood through careful shot composition, camera angles, and use of color rather than rely on CGI tentacles, and often the simpler and more stylized effects work to the film’s benefit.

When viewed in comparison to Zuccon’s previous Lovecraftian films, Herbert West Re-Animator comes across as the most polished, the one that most shows his growth as a filmmaker. While there are many fans of Lovecraft’s work that look for faithful adaptation of his stories into other media, they sometimes miss the possibilities of re-imaginings like Herbert West Re-Animator. Works that take Lovecraft’s ideas and aesthetics and run with them in a way that holds interest and keeps the viewer guessing.

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.

Conann (2023)

AIso I just thought it was interesting to make the character of Conan female to turn it on its head.
—[Interview] Delving into the Surrealist World of SHE IS CONANN with Director Bertrand Mandico 

Conan the Cimmerian first appeared in “The Phoenix on the Sword” by Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales (Dec 1932); his immediate literary antecedents were Conan the Irish Reaver in “The People of the Dark” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Jun 1932), and the Atlantean barbarian Kull, who last appeared in “Kings of the Night” (Weird Tales Nov 1930). Like most of Howard’s heroes, Conan was male, and the gender politics of the Hyborian Age tended to be a combination of 1930s Texas and various historical periods and cultures as Howard understood them. There were warrior-women in Howard’s stories: Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast; the Valeria of the Red Brotherhood; Red Sonya of Rogatino; and Dark Agnes de Chastillon—but savage as they might be with sword or pistol, these were not barbarians per se, and they were always exceptions in male-dominated settings.

Howard wasn’t alone in producing warrior-women for his fantasy and weird adventure stories, with C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (who first appeared in “Black God’s Kiss” (1934)) being a notable peer to Conan in the pages of Weird Tales. Yet the Cimmerian’s popularity won out, and influenced generations of later media, from pastiche stories and novels to comics, beginning with Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian in 1970, and film, with Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1982.

Many of these adaptations included warrior-women as well. Red Sonja was created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith as a foil for the Cimmerian in the pages of Conan the Barbarian, and went on to an extensive career of her own. Valeria (played by Sandahl Bergman) in the 1982 film served as Conan’s ally and later lover. Later sword & sorcery works sometimes focused on female barbarians, such as Hundra (1983), Red Sonja (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985), Amazons (1986), Stormquest (1988), and Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back (1990), but these were mostly poor pastiches that often captured the fur-bikini aesthetic but little to nothing of the character or power of Howard’s warriors, men or women.

So when French director Bertrand Mandico set out to make a film that took the popular conception of the ultramasculine figure of Conan and turned it on its head by making the barbarian female, that was an interesting premise. The resulting film is Conann, released to English audiences as She Is Conann, is a 2023 French-language film written and directed by Mandico.

However, the key aspect of this film is less Howard’s hero, and more Mandico’s definition of barbarism:

I wanted to make a film about barbarism, and tell what is for me the height of barbarism, it’s old age killing youth. So, in the figurative sense, physically, but at the same time, symbolically, by betraying convictions, etc. So I started with this idea and I invoked Conan, the character from Howard’s novels. I even went back to the source that inspired Howard. It’s a character from Celtic mythology named Conan with two n’s who was surrounded by dog-headed demons. I started from this mythology to traverse time, eras and to make a sort of survey of barbarism. All of this carried by a choir of actresses.
—Bertrand Mandico, interview with Sara Bradbury

In a purely factual sense, Mandico has erred here. The mythological Conann and the Cynocephali (Dog-Headed People) he refers to appears to be a reference to The Voyage to the Other World Island in Early Irish Literature by Christa Maria Loffler or equivalent source. In that work, Conann (or Conainn) is one of the Tuatha de Danann, and the Cynocephali are another name for the Fomorians whom the Tuatha de Danann overthrew in the conquest of Ireland, as recorded in works like the Book of Invasions. Howard was certainly familiar with some of the content of the latter, because he discusses it in letters to Lovecraft, but it isn’t clear that Howard ever read the Book of Invasions himself, and makes no reference to dog-headed people (or even Fomorians) in his stories of Conan.

Still, the point of this film is not pastiche of Howard, or even of the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film; it is a film concerned entirely with Mandico’s concept of the barbarian, which is radically different from Howard’s, and starring a largely female cast. The film stars Elina Löwensohn as Rainer; Julia Riedler as Sanja; and six actors that play the eponymous Conann at various ages: Claire Duburcq (15), Christa Théret (25), Sandra Parfait (35), Agata Buzek (45), Nathalie Richard (55), and Françoise Brion (Queen Conann and dead Conann).

The film “Conan the Barbarian” was the symbol of virilism, of virility. And I found it really interesting to take the complete opposite of this character. With “The Wild Boys” [“Les garçons sauvages”], I had already wondered about the masculine-feminine shift with fairly aggressive characters. And there, I wanted to work on this barbarity and make it feminine. Then also bring a great breath of romanticism. Because barbarism, in itself, does not interest me. What interests me is the contrast between barbarism and romanticism.
—Bertrand Mandico, Sur le tournage de Conan de Déviante, de Bertrand Mandico
cf. Le réalisateur Bertrand Mandico féminise « Conan le Barbare »

The Nanterre National Drama Center, well known for its hybrid and avant-garde exhibitions, will welcome the filmmaker from January to February 2021, for a theatrical performance on the border of living theater and cinema which “will also give birth to a film shot in film” , and “will invite the public to settle in the middle of its various paintings and stories, in a circus-hell of rocks studded with bursts of tears and blood”
—Bertrand Mandico adapte « Conan le Barbare » pour le théâtre des Amandiers

While production details are a bit hazy, French media reports from 2020-2021 or so indicate that what would become Conann started out as much more focused on the 1982 film for inspiration, which can perhaps be seen in the first act with the 15-year-old Conann, which partially seems a response to the opening of the 1982 Conan the barbarian where Conan’s mother is killed and he is enslaved. The earlier version of what would be Conann seems to have been much more of a multimedia/performance space, which may have suffered delays or transformations due to COVID-19. Yet the final film(s) that resulted seem fairly true to Mandico’s original vision as expressed in interviews and press releases.

 I feel like a barbarian-adventurer myself in the way I built this project. As for Howard’s original novels, I have kept the esoteric impulse, the memory of an adaptation by Corben “Bloodstar,” but I especially see Conan as a pop figure, a war cry. In my project, Conan is girl(s) and woman(s), and they will evolve in a feminine world. I decided to offer actresses of all ages and all origins unusual characters and situations . There will be six Conans, as many as there are periods in his life. Each new Conan will come and kill the previous one because, for me, the height of barbarity is to kill one’s youth.
—Bertrand Mandico, « Conan la barbare » : Bertrand Mandico nous présente sa prochaine œuvre monstre

Mandico references Richard Corben’s novel Bloodstar, which is an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm.” Understanding that Conann is not in any strict or even broadly metaphorical sense related to Howard’s Conan as put on paper is important, because viewers who go in hoping for something like an adaptation of Red Nails where a female Conan and Valeria might kiss are going to be disappointed.

Mandico’s approach to filmmaking is very much surrealist, gritty, and avant garde compared to Conan the Barbarian and its sequel and pastiches. Director Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) has been described as an Acid Western, and Mandico’s Conann might be described as Acid Sword & Sorcery. It has that punk aesthetic, not just in the sets, the wardrobe, the props where swords look forged out of scavenged bits of rebar, but in the attitude of the characters, which is often nihilistic, focused on the moment, and ultimately self-destructive—just as the darkest part of punk has always been a disenfranchised generation preying on itself.

But is it any good?

I realized, almost while making this film, that it concludes a trilogy. A trilogy that began with “Les garçons sauvages” [The Wild Boys], and continued with “After Blue” [Paradise Sale/Dirty Paradise]. So “Les garçons sauvages” would be paradise, “After Blue” the purgatory, and “Conann” hell. So there’s hell in my paradise, but there’s also a romantic dimension in my hell.
—Bertrand Mandico, interview with Sara Bradbury

If you like Mandico’s other films, you’ll probably like Conann. If you haven’t seen his other films, it’s important to go into Conann with an open mind. There is a deliberate sense of theatricality: according to an interview, the sets were built inside a big warehouse in Luxembourg, and there’s a conscious sense that these are sets, not location shots. The camera moves, but it stays close, there’s no peeking around corners, and the narrative structure plays to that sense of place.

From the standpoint of pure cinematography, there are some beautifully shots, even when the subject is ugly; Mandico shot on film instead of digital camera, and that reality comes through in almost every frame. The contrast between the black-and-white and color segments works well. The practical effects come across very well, much like an 80’s horror film, and the visceral presence of the gore effects often blends with the rather surreal nature of the narrative. Costume and makeup deserve all due praise; the dog-like face mask of Ranier in particular is an effect that seems fundamentally simple but effective, as in the Twilight Zone episode The Masks. By contrast, the action sequences are not the best-choreographed; while there is plenty of bloodletting and bladework, the tone of the film and the shape of the narrative doesn’t build up much tension.

If there’s a major turn-off for audiences expecting something more akin to the nearly-dialogue-free first twenty minutes of Conan the Barbarian (1982), it is the script. There’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of philosophy, and a lot of narration, to the point where sometimes the best parts of the film are those rare moments when the characters stop talking and do something. Yet the philosophy is in a large sense why Mandico is here; the story is being told because this is how he puts barbarism—or at least his conception of it, the self-destructive Ouroboros that eats its own tail—on display. You either appreciate the film for what it is, or you don’t.

I want to adapt Conan the barbarian on stage. With only women. Several generations of women, who kill each other, fuck, betray each other, embrace, and love one another in a world doomed to disappear.
—”Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley”

Filmed alongside Conann and featured on the BluRay as bonus features are “L’Emission a déjà commencé” (“The Show Has Already Started”), an introductory segment to three short experimental/surrealist/metafictional films: “Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley”; “Nous le Barbares” (“We Barbarians”), and “The Last Cartoon -Nonsense, Optimistic, Pessimistic.” These are much more in the deliberately arthaus vibe, but can be seen as meta-commentary and interactive with Conann as a film. By their nature, they tend to showcase different aspects of the film and its lead actors’ performances. If you like Conann, it’s worth watching these short films too.

“Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley,” for example, is a meta-commentary on the difficulties of filming during the COVID-19 pandemic. A director reading Lips and Conan (a fictional paperback) wants to produce a play and makes a deal with the dog-faced demon Ranier to produce Conann. “The show must go on. At all costs.” The short film can say outright things that the film itself cannot say without breaking character.

Conann is very consciously a queer narrative. The eponymous Conann, in all of her incarnations, is primarily sexually interested in women, but their sexuality is fluid, especially in the short films, with relationships marked by violence, death, and betrayal. While the majority of the cast are women, some of the cast is deliberately more ambiguous: Christophe Bier is presented in drag throughout; Elina Löwensohn’s Ranier is consistently described as male, and all of them have a sexuality, implicit or explicit.

The nudity in the film isn’t particularly egregious as far as Sword & Sorcery cinema goes, but unlike those films the titillation doesn’t seem to be solely targeted for the male gaze. Women aren’t stripped to show vulnerability, but to tease titillation with violence: a recurring image is a breast with a vicious spike growing from the nipple. Sex and violence are often combined, but not in the sense of rape, but more in a BDSM-inflected sense of pain as an enhancement or counterpart of pleasure. Mandico plays with certain fetishistic images, but steers clear of anything to explicit; whatever else Conann may be, it is not sexploitation.

Of all the weird cinema with some strand of Robert E. Howard in their literary DNA, Conann and its bevy of short films are probably the strangest to yet see widespread release—and it can be very difficult, if you haven’t gone back through the interviews and press-releases, to see how Bertrand Mandico got from Conan to Conann. Yet if you are willing to watch it with an open mind, and appreciate the spectacle and the craft, the performances and the ideas on display, then Conann is at least an interesting film, far more than just another Sword & Sorcery pastiche.

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.

Deeper Cut: Lovecraftian Movie Posters From Ghana

The first regular movie screenings in Gold Coast colony took place in Accra shortly after 1900 when traveling showmen from other parts of West Africa began screening their wares in various coastal cities on tours that took place over a period of months. The Gold Coast’s first purpose-built movie theatre, constructed by the British businessman John Bartholomew on Station Road in Accra, dates from 1914, just seven years after the first purpose-built theatre appeared in the United Kingdom, illustrating the very rapid spread of cinema technology and film entertainment across the empire although the logistical and financial challenges of operating in a colonial location limited further expansion at that time.

Gareth McFeely, “Gone Are The Days”: a social and business history of cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910-1982 (2015) 138

The British Empire claimed the Gold Coast in Western Africa as a colony from 1821-1957, and for many years it was white British businessmen who dominated the modest cinema industry and controlled what kinds of films were shown and when—and sometimes to whom, as Batholomew’s theater sometimes staged “Europeans Only” showings (McFeely 142). The modest little industry expanded slowly through the period of silent films and into the era of sound, marketing primarily English-language British and American films to an increasingly English-speaking and English-literate audience. Films were subject to the approval of the Cinematograph Exhibition Censorship Board of Control and other British laws and regulations.

Even as neighborhood theaters continued to expand to meet the needs of a growing urban population, beginning in the 1940s, the colonial government’s Gold Coast Film Unit also used buses to distribute documentary films, newsreels, and government information films to rural areas, including propaganda films produced by the Colonial Film Unit. In 1957, Ghana achieved independence and operated as a commonwealth realm; the new government took over the colonial-era government’s production and showing of films, and this continued when Ghana became a republic in 1960, with the government-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation established in 1964 and the state-owned West African Pictures Co. Ltd., which ran a chain of movie theaters. Foreign entities like AMPECA (American Motion Picture Export Company) had to deal not just with government regulations and censorship, but sometimes direct competition with private theater owners in Ghana.

Political unrest and economic hardship rocked Ghana for much of the later 20th century, notably the military coups of 1966, 1972, 1979, and 1981; the government finally transitioned back to civilian democratic rule in 1993. During this period of turmoil, film censorship in the country slackened:

Films such as Blacula and The Exorcist underline the mild nature of censorship in the mid 1970s: a decade earlier the censor banned almost all horror films, never mind ones that contained dramatic scenes of bodies rising from the dead or adolescent girls possessed by evil spirits.

Gareth McFeely, “Gone Are The Days”: a social and business history of cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910-1982 (2015) 311

Economic hardship still continued, with inflation, widespread unemployment, and sometimes radical shifts in government policies all making it more costly to import films and keep up ticket receipts. Worse, after the 1981 coup the government enacted a nighttime curfew that lasted for two years, effectively destroying the old business model of nighttime cinema screenings.

In the early 1980s, the first independent films were produced in Ghana, many taking advantage of the Video Home System (VHS) technology to film direct-to-video. Videocassette recorders (VCRs) first became commercially available in the mid-1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that home systems became commercially viable, with VHS emerging as the dominant format. The increasing availability and lowering costs of VHS VCRs spurred the home video market; films that were previously only available in traditional movie theaters could now be rented or purchased to view at home for relatively little cost, and the smaller, more portable, and cheaper VHS cameras lowered costs for independent filmmakers. Video rental stores proliferated in countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and some filmmakers and distributors increasingly skipped traditional theater releases, releasing their films directly to video.

In many ways, the VCR changed how people all over the world watched and interacted with movies. Video cassettes were now marketed directly to the public, with the art on the paper sleeve taking the place of the traditional cinema poster. The lowering cost and increasing availability of video cassette technology allowed it to penetrate new global markets. You no longer needed to build a special building just to show films, and entrepreneurs were no longer restricted to government-made entertainment or officially licensed imports. In the 1980s, as the first independent Ghanaian filmmakers were shooting direct-to-video, small VCR-based theaters and video clubs began to pop up in urban areas of Ghana like the capital Accra, often with pirated video tapes:

With the widespread introduction of foreign videocassettes into Ghana in the mid-1980s, a group of entrepreneurs created small-scale mobile film distribution empires, sending their agents out on the road with videocassettes, television monitors, VCRs, portable gas-powered generators and rolled-up canvas movie posters. This mobile cinema phenomenon quickly became a part of the cultural domain of even the smallest villages and hamlets in the Ghanaian countryside. In the early years a big city distributor or his aide would roll into town—often by bus—possibly for three or four days, and begin the local version of a movie marathon. By day this would generally occur within the confines of a family home or possibly some small communal meeting center, such as a social club; by night, weather permitting, in the open air. By the early 1990s, these mobile cinema operations had peaked and local businessmen at the village level had largely replaced their traveling predecessors, purchasing their own TV sets, generators and VCRs. In order to assist with marketing, the big city distributors continued to provide a hand-painted-on-canvas movie poster with each cassette they rented or sold.

Ernie Wolfe III, “Adventures in African Cinema, 1975-1998” in Extreme Canvas (2000) 25-26

The timeline for when exactly hand-painted posters emerged in Ghana is unclear; through the 1970s Ghanaian theaters would use standard industry posters:

The main methods of advertising to this varied clientele were posters outside the theatres and the projection of trailers for coming attractions. Until the 1970s, American and British film distribution companies supplied posters and other advertising materials at the same time as the reels of film, while locally hand-painted canvas posters, similar to the vivid panels used to publicize concert party performance, were also used at times.

Gareth McFeely, “Gone Are The Days”: a social and business history of cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910-1982 (2015) 166

Using pirated VHS tapes would mean no official marketing materials, however; to advertise these films, local Ghanaian artists were commissioned to hand paint posters, often on cheaply available materials like flour sacks (and later, locally milled linen canvases, Wolfe 26). These were typically local commercial artists—sign painters and the like—who watched the film or used existing video cassette box art for inspiration. Many of these were foreign films, produced in Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, and the United States; as a consequence, the artistic sensibilities and commercial priorities for these handmade signs were very different from Hollywood or Bollywood counterparts. Few actor names appear, and the posters may feature nudity, graphic violence, gore, and spoilers that didn’t appear in the original advertising materials.

By the late 1990s cheap preprinted publicity materials had crowded local advertising traditions out, while the video club boom had also peaked, reducing the demand for eye-catching advertising materials in a market where profit margins were razor-thin.

Gareth McFeely, “Gone Are The Days”: a social and business history of cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910-1982 (2015) 166

Pure economics ultimately brought about the demise of this once-thriving and extremely localized contemporary African painting phenomenon. By 1996, with the Ghanaian economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s nearing its end, mobile cinemas were all but gone and video clubs had reached their peak. Business interests outside of Ghana, often from Europe, had begun providing many more video titles to the local marketplace, and with them for the first time came a large inventory of free offset-printed posters.

Ernie Wolfe III, “Adventures in African Cinema, 1975-1998” in Extreme Canvas (2000) 26, 28

By the 2000s, the hand-painted movie poster tradition was in serious decline; the spread of television in Ghana, the advent of digital video discs, and mobile video streaming increasingly made home viewing more accessible and affordable to local audiences. The Ghanaian movie posters began to receive international recognition with the publication of works like Extreme Canvas (2000) and art gallery exhibitions. As local demand declined, the market for such art shifted. Original posters became collectibles to be displayed in art galleries and sold on eBay; new posters might be commissioned and prints sold through marketers like the Deadly Prey Gallery for a Western audience who appreciated the aesthetic, or produced for exhibitions of contemporary African art—but the original theaters and context in which these artworks first emerged is essentially gone.

Of all the films to receive the Ghanaian treatment, very few are examples of Lovecraftian cinema. While potentially any video cassette could make its way to Ghana, there were a few practical limitations when considering such works that have come to light: the film had to be released on video cassette between c. 1985-1999, a relatively available mainstream or direct-to-video release, and would need to be sufficiently lurid or gory to appeal to Ghanaian audiences—or at least, to produce a poster sufficiently striking or memorable to be subsequently noticed and reproduced for Western audiences. By no means has every handpainted movie poster from Ghana been preserved; these posters are the quintessence of ephemeral commercial art, aging quickly and destined to be eventually discarded once their purpose was served.

In practice, this rules out the early Lovecraftian films of the 1960s like The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die! (1965), or The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), and more obscure or international independent efforts like Cthulhu Mansion (1990) or Cthulhu (2000), leaving a handful of adaptations and more loosely Lovecraftian films.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

A loose update and adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” set in the contemporary late 1960s. While there are few gory scenes in the film, the psychedelic visuals, Rosemary’s Baby-esque plot, and a brief scene of Wilbur Whateley’s twin brother might all appeal to horror aficionados in Ghana.

Official poster for The Dunwich Horror for reference.
Source: Deadly Prey Gallery
Source: Hail Records and Oddities
Source: private collection
Source: private collection

These posters all follow the official marketing for The Dunwich Horror (1970) fairly closely, and given when the film was released—before the “Golden Age” of hand-painted posters, when official posters were in circulation—some of the earlier artists may well have seen versions of that poster and consciously modeled their images on that. It’s notable that the poster signed A. Michael Art, which is probably the most recent, differs much more markedly in the design (even depicting actress Sandra Dee as Black!), and with several uncharacteristic elements not in the film (the grasping hands, the rope around her neck). What’s really striking is how all of the artists chose to depict the tentacles as snake-like hair, turning Wilbur Whateley’s twin into a gorgon-like figure.

Re-Animator (1985), Bride of Re-Animator (1990), and Beyond Re-Animator (2003)

The first Lovecraftian film by director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna was an update and adaptation of “Herbert West–Reanimator,” followed by sequels Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator. Unlike the rather sedate Lovecraft adaptations of the 60s, this was a horror comedy with outstanding practical gore effects, black humor, vivid action, and intense visuals. It is little surprise that it attracted the attention of Ghanaian audiences.

Official Spanish Re-Animator poster for reference.
Source: Movie Posters from Ghana Pt. 4
Source: Tribalgh Ethnic Art Gallery
Source: Tribalgh Ethnic Art Gallery
Source: X.com
Original Japanese Re-Animator poster for reference.
Source: X.com
Source: Extreme Canvas 2 228
Source: Deadly Prey Galley on Facebook

The gore and nudity in Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator (labeled as Re-Animator 2 above), and Beyond Re-Animator gave Ghanaian artists plenty of opportunity to use their own imaginations, with the decapitation of Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) given the spotlight. Two of the posters closely follow international marketing materials, albeit with their own Ghanaian spin (the reanimating reagent is replaced with blood in the first poster featuring Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, and Barbara Crampton appears to have gotten a breast augmentation and is no longer censored by the blood drop in the lovingly rendered head-giving-head scene). While not explicitly labeled as Beyond Re-Animator, the final poster is easy to identify as that film because of the distinct depiction of the scene where a rat fights a reanimated penis (although in the film, the testicles are not attached).

Very noticeable about these posters is the skill and attention given to the lettering; while some of the artists may have closely copied other posters or appear to have been told the plot of the movie instead of watching it, the lettering on the titles is terrific.

Source: Extreme Canvas 2 226

As a related piece of work, consider this poster for Dr. Giggles (1992). Jeffrey Combs doesn’t appear in this movie—the eponymous doctor was played by Larry Drake—but Dr. Herbert West obviously resonated with at least one Ghanaian artist.

From Beyond (1986)

The second Lovecraftian film by director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna is an update and adaptation of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond.” This film doubles down on suggestions of sex and the visual effects, with inhuman monsters and grotesque transformations. Fewer posters of this work have been preserved.

Source: Extreme Canvas 191
Source: Deadly Prey Gallery

The first poster for From Beyond is a not-entirely-inaccurate rendition of Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) in his makeup; although the enlarged, external pineal gland has been rendered as a snake (shades of The Dunwich Horror posters). By contrast, the second post is completely unrecognizable as any imagery from the film, and indicates that the artist probably painted it based on a description or straight from the imagination.

Evil Dead II (1987) & Army of Darkness (1992)

Director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II and its sequel Army of Darkness defined the look of the Necronomicon for moviegoing audiences for a generation, and the image of the book as roughly bound in human skin with an actual face visible on the cover continues to influence depictions of Lovecraft’s fictional tome today. Ghanaian artists seem less interested in depicting the Necronomicon ex Mortis, however, than they were with the character of Ash (played by Bruce Campbell) with his iconic chainsaw-prosthetic.

Source: Deadly Prey Gallery
Source: Movie Posters from Ghana, Pt. 4
Source: Extreme Canvas 185
Source: Extreme Canvas 186-187
Source: Deadly Prey Gallery
Source: Deadly Prey Gallery
Source: Tribalgh Ethnic Art Gallery
Source: Movie Posters from Ghana, Pt. 4

Between the two Sam Raimi films, there are a lot of great images and scenes for Ghanaian artists. Which is why it is surprising that the artists sometimes recombine the Evil Dead imagery with that drawn from other films, such as Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and what might be Pumpkinhead. Which might be false advertising, but the important thing was to get butts in seats, and the more exotic imagery of some of the posters shows how syncrenistic these posters could be, borrowing horrific images from other films to fill in the space and spice up the post.

Hellboy (2004)

This adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comic book character to the silver screen by director Guillermo del Toro falls outside the “Golden Age” of Ghanaian movie posters, and posters for it may have been produced later for Western audiences. The final Lovecraftian villain for the film gets less attention than Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).

Source: Movie Posters from Ghana, Pt. 3
Source: Mollusc No.6
Source: Ghanavision

It’s interesting to note that the first two posters both mention Ron Perlman by name, which was rare during the Golden Age unless the lead was an international superstar like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bizarrely, David Hyde Pierce is also mentioned; Pierce had provided the voice for Abe Sapien (played by Doug Jones), but went uncredited in the film.

Some readers might be disappointed that these hand-painted Ghanaian posters aren’t more “Lovecraftian” in the sense of emphasizing imagery familiar to Western audiences—there are scarcely any tentacles, nary a Necronomicon, no signs pointing to Dunwich or Arkham or Miskatonic University—but that is part of the point and the charm of these posters. They were being created outside the wider Western cultural milieu; they were at several removes from the original fiction H. P. Lovecraft wrote, and were working within their own cultural context, with images that stood out to them or made sense for their purpose.

This is Lovecraftian cinema as Ghanaians would have seen it in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. When school kids might wait for the sun to go down, praying it wouldn’t rain, and then crowding into an open-air theater, like a drive-in without cars, all eyes glued on the screen. There were people in Ghana that could chant “Klaatu barada nikto!” as loudly as anyone else anywhere else in the world, who would hold their breath as David Gale’s disembodied head was lowered between the nubile legs of Barbara Crampton, or cringe as Ken Forey was eaten alive by things just beyond the edge of perception. It was their part of a shared experience, and these posters are the remnants of that, as surely as any Mythos tome ever stood as a record and monument of a lost age.

Suggested Further Reading:

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 House of Rothschild (1934)

Antisemitism

The following article deals explicitly with antisemitism in a historical context. Frank discussion of these matters requires the reproduction of at least some samples of antisemitic speech from historical sources (e.g. Lovecraft’s letters). As such, please be advised before reading further.

In early May of 1934, H. P. Lovecraft was in DeLand, Florida, soaking up the sunshine. His young friend and correspondent R. H. Barlow had invited Lovecraft to stay with his family for a few weeks—and after Lovecraft had overcome his shock at finding out that Barlow was only a teenager, he had enjoyed the generous hospitality of the host family. One day, Lovecraft and Barlow were driven into town and took in a new film playing at the Athens Theatre: The House of Rothschild.

Advertisement in the DeLand News, 5 May 1934

Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 and immediately moved to put his antisemitic rhetoric into effect. Hollywood’s response was slow; antisemitism was rife in the United States as well, and any film dealing with Jewish subjects risked censure from the Anti-Defamation League on one hand, and feeding fuel to bigots on the other. It was in this atmosphere that The House of Rothschild began production. For more details on the background of the film, check out The American Jewish Story Through Cinema.

Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson adopted George Hembert Westley’s play of the same name, interjecting the Prussian Count Ledrantz (played by Boris Karloff) into the picture to give a face to the antisemitic bigotry that the Rothschilds would contend with. George Arliss, in the lead roles of Mayer Rothschild and Nathan Rothschild, had already played prominent Jewish characters such as Benjamin Disraeli in the play Disraeli and the 1921 silent film of the same name. The result was that the 1934 film, while definitely cinema, had a strong theatricality to the staging, shooting, and performances. In 1935, looking back at the films he had seen over the last year, Lovecraft noted:

I saw the Rothschild film—which was smooth, but obviously theatrical.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 10 Feb 1935, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 244

Lovecraft had a noted fondness for historical dramas, and while he did not address the issue in his letters, likely appreciated the attention to detail in historical costumes and settings. Likewise, Lovecraft did not comment on one of the technical achievements of the film: while most of it is shot in black-and-white, the final scenes were shot in Technicolor, rendering a vibrant finish to culminate with the Rothschild’s triumph over adversity.

One detail that Lovecraft did notice was an odd emblem mounted on the wall outside the door of the Rothschild house, which each member would touch as they come in or leave throughout the film. Neither he nor Barlow knew what this was, but back in Providence Lovecraft’s aunt took it upon herself to find out, and so Lovecraft wrote back to his young friend:

Also—to be returned—an echo from the recent past in the form of an explanation of that queer door-post thing that the Jews kissed in the Rothschild cinema. My aunt saw the film & was as curious as we were—& at her request a friend connected with the public library looked it up (& had a helluva time finding it!) & made a transcript of the information for her. So here you have it all at your finger-tips…mezuzah….sounds like a name out of Klakaksh-Ton!

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow, 21 Jul 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 153

The mezuzah is a parchment with verses from the Torah, affixed to the doorposts of homes in Rabbinical Judaism. One can imagine a rather confused Providence librarian, working only from a description of something half-glimpsed on screen, consulting the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia or equivalent source and copying out the relevant article.

The House of Rothschild (1934); the mezuzah is first seen a little over five minutes into the film.

The film was a commercial and critical success. While it did not shake the stereotype of “the Greedy Jew,” it was generally received as a positive portrayal with an emphasis on the discrimination that the Rothschilds and other Jews in the film had suffered. It emphasized that even relatively wealthy and successful Jews were, at best, pariah capitalists whose wealth could be taken away because of prejudicial laws, and emphasized the threat of violence that all Jews lived under. A timely message considering Nazi Germany’s enactment of antisemitic laws, pushing Jews out of various occupations, stripping them of rights and citizenship, and finally coming for their lives and property, had just begun.

The ambiguity of The House of Rothschild—the way it both plays to the stereotypes of Jewish greed and financial influence and to the real discrimination that Jews faced in Europe—and its critical and commercial success left it open to exploitation. Director Fritz Hippler and Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels pirated two scenes from The House of Rothschild in the antisemitic Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew,” 1940), co-opting the same imagery presented in The House of Rothschild to deliver the entirely opposite message. The Nazis also made their own, openly antisemitic version of the story as Die Rothschilds (“The Rothschilds,” 1940).

By the time The Eternal Jew came out, Lovecraft was long dead, so it cannot be said whether he would have recognized the scenes that the Nazis stole from The House of Rothschild. It can be said with some certainty that Lovecraft would have recognized the stereotypes of Jewish prejudice that the Nazis presented. This can be said because Lovecraft’s letters give a fairly detailed account of his own antisemitic prejudices and how they changed over time; he even recorded encounters with Jewish media such as The Dybbuk (1925) by S. Ansky and Jewish characters and themes in fiction such as The Golem (1928) by Gustav Meyrink.

What Lovecraft’s letters do not show, perhaps surprisingly, is any specific prejudice against the Rothschild family, or any general belief in Jewish conspiracy theories. The fabricated text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and related conspiratorial works find no mention in Lovecraft’s letters, even during those letters where Lovecraft wanders into the idea of Jewish control of newspapers in New York City, e.g.:

I didn’t say that Jews own all the papers, but merely that they control their policies through economic channels. The one great lever, of course, is advertising. Virtually all the great department stores of New York (except Wanamaker’s) are solidly Jewish even when they deceptively retain the names of earlier Aryan owners; & a clear majority of the large shops of other sorts are, as well. These Semitic merchants are clannish & touchy to the very limit, & will arrange to withdraw all their advertising at once whenever a newspaper displeases them. And, as Mencken has pointed out, their grounds of displeasure are limitless. They even resent the frequent use of the word “Jew” in the news, so that papers speak of “East Side agitators”, “Bronx merchants”, “Russian immigrants” &c. Let any N. Y. paper try to refer to these people in the frank, impartial, objective way a Providence or Pittsburgh or Richmond paper would, & the whole pack of synagogue-hounds is after it—calling down the vengeance of heaven, withdrawing advertising, & cancelling subscriptions—the latter a big item in a town where 1/3 of the population is Semitic in origin & feelings. The result is, that not a paper in New York dares to call its soul its own in dealing with the Jews & with social & political questions affecting them. The whole press is absolutely enslaved in that direction, so that on the whole length & breadth of the city it is impossible to secure any public American utterance—any frank expression of the typical mind & opinions of the actual American people—on a fairly wide & potentially important range of topics. [(in margin:) P.S. Better not quote any of this to Bloch (who I discover is of Jewish extraction). While of course this question does not involve any aspersion on the Jewish heritage as a whole, it nevertheless makes embarrassing reading for anybody having more than an academic connexion with Semitism. One would handle it differently with a Jewish correspondent.] Only by reading the outside press & the national magazines can New Yorkers get any idea of how Americans feel regarding such things as Nazism, the Palestine question (in which, by every decent standard, the Arabs are dead right & both England & the Jews intolerably wrong), the American immigration policy, & so on. This is what I mean by Jewish control, & I’m damned if it doesn’t make me see red—in a city which was once a part of the real American fabric, & which still exerts a disproportionately large influence on that fabric through its psychologically impressive size & its dominance both in finance & in various opinion-forming channels (drama, publishing, criticism &c.). Gawd knows I have no wish to injure any race under the sun, but I do think that something ought to be done to free American expression from the control of any element which seeks to curtail it, distort it, or remodel it in any direction other than its natural course. As a matter of fact, I don’t blame the Jews at all. Hell, what can we expect after letting them in & telling them they can do as they please? It is perfectly natural for them to make everything as favourable for themselves as they can, & to feel as they do.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 8 Nov 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 170-171

This is about as close as Lovecraft gets to outright Jewish conspiracy theories in his letters. Lovecraft’s particular prejudice in this instance is colored by his antipathy toward New York City in general, which he had left seven years prior, to return to his native Providence.

The sticky question: is this absence of evidence or evidence of absence? It is entirely possible that in some lost letter that has not come down to us, Lovecraft went all-in on some antisemitic tirade that recapitulated Nazi propaganda wholesale. When Robert E. Howard made a few dog whistles about “international capital” causing wars for profit (MF 2.819), we don’t know what Lovecraft’s response was because his next letter is non-extant. On the other hand, there are hundreds of letters where, even when airing his worst antisemitic prejudices, Lovecraft never brings up the issue. Hugo Gernsback, for instance, is never depicted as part of a conspiracy. So it is not entirely clear if Lovecraft had heard of these conspiracy theories and did not credit them, or if he did credit them but we simply don’t have those letters anymore.

Since we know that Lovecraft saw The House of Rothschild (1934), we can definitely say that Lovecraft was at least introduced to the idea of the influence of Jewish bankers and financiers, and their influence on European conflicts. We also know that in the limited context of New York newspapers, Lovecraft felt Jewish economic influence amounted to suppression of speech on certain topics. Yet for all that, Lovecraft’s prejudices do not seem to have extended so far as to believe wholesale in conspiracy theories about Jews. Even considering how much Nazi propaganda Lovecraft did swallow, several points of Nazi antisemitism went too far even for Lovecraft:

It is amusing to think of the thoroughly Aryan people who would be placed outside as aliens if the strict Nazi test were made worldwide. Palgrave, compiler of the Gold Treasury (whose sire was born Cohen), the present Lord Rosebery (whose mother was a Rothschild), the aristocratic Belmont family of America (whose forebear change his name from Schönberg), the Hamiltons of Philadelphia (Andrew Hamilton, the lawyer famous in the Zenger freedom-of-the-press case of 1735 & the designer of Independence Hall, married a Jewess named Franks) & so on! Indeed—since the Nazi ban is not merely on Jews but on all non-Aryans, it would come down heavily upon all who bear a trace of Indian blood—such as the descendants of Pocahontas, famous throughout Virginia & including men as eminent as John Randolph of Roanoke! Plainly, then, the present attitude of the Nazis on this point is an extreme & unscientific one….. although, as I have said, I certainly believe that actual members of the Jewish culture-group ought to be kept from securing a grip on the legal, educational, artistic, & intellectual life of any Aryan nation. They had gone too far in Germany, & they have gone too far in America—where so much literary & critical material is either of Semitic origin or (through Jew-owned publishing houses) Semitic selection. It is certainly time that the Aryan people everywhere made sure that they are not being led by fundamentally antipathetic aliens, & that they are not permitting such aliens to serve as their mouthpieces of opinion.

H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 25 Jul 1934, Letters to Alfred Galpin 209-211

Prejudice has to be seen as a spectrum of ignorance and discrimination; while it is common to label historical figures as antisemitic or not, the truth tends to be more nuanced. Antisemitic stereotypes were common in the United States in the 1930s, but it does not follow that every antisemite believed exactly the same things, or even agreed with one another on the exact details of their prejudices.

How much of the message of The House of Rothschild did Lovecraft actually take in? Films are both a product of their time and actors in it; they present ideas that already exist and they also shape them. It does not seem likely that Lovecraft’s beliefs in Jewish conspiracies were strengthened by watching George Aldiss on screen say: “Money is the only weapon that the Jew has to defend himself with.” Yet we have to wonder if he was at all moved by the sentiment: “To trade with dignity, to live with dignity, to walk the world with dignity.”

Again, we have no evidence either way. Certainly, Lovecraft was not often driven by sentiment in his arguments. It cannot be said with any certainty that Lovecraft’s slow turn against the Nazis in his letters was driven, at least in small part, by popular media that depicted the historical persecutions of Jews. Yet we cannot say that didn’t play its part either. On the balance, we are left only with Lovecraft’s two neutral comments on the film, and an awareness of the social and historical context in which he watched it. Lovecraft and Barlow sat in that darkened theater and saw on screen the naked prejudice which was being enacted half a world away in Nazi Germany…and came out, no doubt, blinking in the Florida sunlight, with some questions about what they saw.

Beyond that, we can only reflect on what The House of Rothschild means for us today, as a piece of cinematic history. It is worth watching.

The House of Rothschild (1934) can be watched for free.

Thanks to Dave Goudsward for his help.

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.

Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (1968)

Other rejects included Jesse (Jesus) Franco’s Necronomicon (1967) AKA Succubus, an S & M flick without the slightest Lovecraft connection.

Charles P. Mitchell, The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography 20

If you were thumbing through Mitchell’s excellent filmography, this dismissive reference to a film named Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (Necronomicon – Dreamt Sins) by Jesús Franco may catch your eye and cause a moment of pause. The film does not often appear on lists of Lovecraftian cinema, did not make an appearance in that valuable tome The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, and generally gets short shrift in Lovecraftian cinematic scholarship. There are good reasons for this, but the lack of attention hides an interesting story.

The film’s title wasn’t Necronomicon. It was Green Eyes of the Devil.

Jess Franco, “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco”

Jesús “Jess” Franco (1930 – 2013) began making films in Spain, under Gen. Francisco Franco’s tyrannical regime. Talented, adaptable, versatile, and rebellious, Jess Franco’s film career began in the 1950s, doing black-and-white films, comedies, documentaries, and musicals. Censorship dogged Franco’s early films; the conservative Spanish regime was wary of sex or anything that could be construed as a political message.

Inspired by the British film company Hammer’s Gothic horrors such as Brides of Dracula (1960) and the success of the French horror film Les yeux sans visage (1960, Eyes Without A Face), Franco’s made the pivot to horror. His earliest horror films, Gritos en la noche (1961, translated as The Awful Dr. Orloff in English), La mano de un hombre muerto (1962, The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus), Gritos, El secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964, Dr. Orloff’s Monster), and Miss Muerte (1965, The Diabolical Dr. Z) combine a mixture of medical horror, Gothic sensibility, and a voyeuristic approach to sadism. Franco exploited the marketability of sex and violence while keeping the films from being explicitly gory or pornographic. Yet Franco still had difficulty with Spanish censors.

The key to artistic freedom was international financing. In 1966, Franco came in touch with West German production manager Karl-Heiz Mannchen.

After producing the fast-pased comic srip concotion Lucky, el intrépido (Lucky, the Inscrutable) in 1967, Franco came to Mannchen with an eight-page script for a proposed erotic horror feature that would go on to be considered one of his finest films, Necronomicon.

Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 184

The 2006 Blue Underground release of the film includes “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco” by David Gregory and Bill Lustig which delves into the development of the film. Shipka quotes from the interview:

“I started scouting locations in Spain and Belin and it’s there I met my second co-producer of the film because my partner was Adrian Hoven, but he had an associate a co-producer named Pier Maria Caminnecci. He was very rich, the main stockholder in Siemens. So he had quite a bit of money. And he had a magnificent house. And on his bookshelf, I discovered a book entitled Necronomicon.” Looking for ideas, Franco found a short story in the book that he felt could be translated to film. The problem was the story was only three pages long. Fusing it with a script from a horror movie he’d previously written, Franco came up with a complete screenplay.

Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 186

There are issues with this narrative. For one, the actual interview on the DVD tells a different and much more involved story about the Necronomicon being an actual book published by the University of Vienna based on an ancient fragment by an Arab named Al Azrad. Weird Tales: Jess Franco meets the Elder Gods describes this as “bullshitting on a heroic scale,” which seems correct. Shipka was paraphrasing and left out all the blatantly myth-making bits. But assuming there is a core of truth there, what book, exactly, could Franco have supposedly found in Caminnecci’s library?

Arkham House had begun to promote translations of Lovecraft’s fiction in languages other than English after World War II; collections appeared in French in the 1950s, and in German, Italian, and Spanish in the mid-1960s (although as a caveat, it should be noted unauthorized translations of English-language Weird Tales were appearing in South America in the late 1930s and 1940s, such as the Argentinian pulp magazine Narraciones Terrorificas). The problem is that none of these collections used the title Necronomicon. Indeed, this was before the rise of the hoax Necronomicons. L. Sprague de Camp’s hoax Al Azif was published in 1973; Schlangekraft would not publish the Simon Necronomicon until 1977; The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names edited by George Hay appeared in 1978, a full decade after Franco’s film. H. R. Giger’s artbook Necronomicon would also not be published until 1977.

A clue to the puzzle may lie in the story mentioned. Based on length and relevance, the most likely piece would be Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.” In the mid-1960s, that work was relatively obscure; while it had first seen print as a fan-made pamphlet in 1937, Arkham House did not publish it in book form until Miscellaneous Writings in 1995, and it isn’t listed in any of the non-English collections or anthologies during the time when Franco might have seen it. However—in 1967, Mark Owings of Mirage Associates published The Necronomicon: A Study, an oversized chapbook that collected what was known about the Necronomicon from what had been published up to that point, including Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.”

However, there is no occult grimoire to be seen in Franco’s Necronomicon, nor is one referred to in the script. No omniscient narrator conveys the action as if it were some forbidden text, magickal lore plays no part in the story, and there are no Arabs screaming curses to ward off daemonic other-dimensional monstrosities. Essentially, Franco just loved the word, although he did claim that he based the story on a genuine grimoire called “The Necronomicon” discovered in fragmentary form and kept by the University of Vienna! Some observers may put this down to Franco’s taste for teasing reviewers, or his dedication to blurring the line between fact and fiction. If it’s the latter, it’s entirely in keeping with the theme of the film, which is precisely the permeable membrane between reality and fantasy.

Stephen Thrower, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, Vol. 1 133-134

Thrower points to why Jess Franco’s Necronomicon is something of a black sheep of Lovecraftian cinema: regardless of where Franco picked up the name, like the hoax grimoires and Giger’s artbook listed about, it is a Necronomicon in name only. There is nothing Lovecraftian in its cinematic DNA.

Except… for about a decade or so, this was the only Necronomicon widely available. It was certainly the only film with the title until the 1993 film Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. However, this is a legacy that might easily be lost on English audiences. In the United States, the film was cut by Terry Van Tell for Titan Productions, Inc., and aside from numerous differences from Franco’s cut of the film, it was also retitled to the much more generic Succubus, negating even the label of a Lovecraftian connection.

Then Ameerican International, who bought the film for the US, Canada, and other territories wanted to change the title. They explained the title Necronomicon was not commercial enough in the US because no one knows what it means. So they adopted the title Succubus. That’s even more bizarre than the original title.

Jess Franco, “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco”

Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden helped make Jess Franco’s reputation, both in terms of controversy and appeal. Franco had successfully “dragged up” an erotic film into something like mainstream prominence by making it a nightmarish art house horror film; a water mark in the emergence of sexploitation cinema that would lead to what has been called Eurotrash or Eurosleaze in the 1970s…and, perhaps Franco’s eventual devolution, his artistic sensibilities increasingly spent low-budget and quasi-pornographic or outright pornographic efforts. While Franco would never revisit Necronomicon directly, he would sometimes reference it in later films.

In Jess Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein (1998), actress Lina Romay wears a Necronomicon t-shirt in the early part of the film. Draculina magazine published a photo-comic adaptation of the film in 1999.

Franco’s Necronomicon was ahead of the curve in another way, which doesn’t get discussed much: the 1960s was a time when Lovecraft cinema was focused on adaptations of existing works like The Shuttered Room (1966). The tangential Lovecraftian tie-in film, the kind that may have only a trivial connection to Lovecraft or his works—but whose connections, however brief and overlooked, are sometimes tantalizing—basically didn’t exist on the big screen until Franco’s Necronomicon was released. While some folks claim Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959) or The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) as Lovecraftian films, they speak of themes or vibes, not even a vague connection like a Necronomicon prop-book.

So Franco’s Necronomicon stands as at least a spiritual forebear to works like Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy: Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980, City of the Living Dead), …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldil (1981, The Beyond ), and Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981,  The House by the Cemetery). These films have, in turn, inspired others, some without Lovecraft connections such as Saint Ange (2004, House of Voices) to those that are explicitly Lovecraftian such as L’altrove (2000, Darkness Beyond) and Maelstrom – Il figlio dell’altrove (2001, Unknown Beyond). Fulci’s films have also inspired literature like “Phantasmagore” (2021) by H. K. Lovejoy.

That is the nature of influence: an insidious chain of connections; ripples in a pond that echo out far beyond the sight or control of whoever or whatever stirred the waters in the first place. Jess Franco’s Necronomicon may not be Lovecraft’s Necronomicon—but Franco’s Necronomicon is also no less the Necronomicon than Simon’s or H. R. Giger’s, and if it hasn’t quite spawned the cult following as some of the other Necronomicons, it is no less a testament to the enduring influence of Lovecraft’s work, in all of its unexpected permutations.

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.

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 DVDEnglish 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 EcstasyEnglish 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 39-40English 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).

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H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021)

After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House”

Lovecraftian cinema is a diverse body of work, from short films to feature-length presentations to episodes of television or streaming shows; live-action to animation; zero-budget schlock and student films to big-budget Hollywood productions; from works that strive to adapt Lovecraft’s stories to the screen with various degrees of fidelity to more original presentations that take inspiration from or make reference to things Lovecraftian but seek to tell their own stories and focus on their own characters. In brief, Lovecraftian cinema is simply an extension of the Mythos into another media, with all of its own quirks and conventions.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021), directed by Bobby Easley, is loosely inspired by “The Dreams in the Witch House,” but with several twists. Mathematics graduate student Alice Gilman (Portia Chelleynn) is fleeing an abusive relationship and boards in an old house (the historic Hannah House in Indianapolis), which has a dark history involving the witch Keziah Mason (Andrea Collins), and whose odd angles and witchcraft tie in to Gilman’s own theories about other dimensions—and as the bodies pile up, Gilman learns that Mason and her coven are still very much active…

When compared to other productions of this type and covering this sort of material, H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House is firmly in the middle of the pack of independent film festival fare such as The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2016), H. P. Lovecraft’s Two Left Arms (2017), H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020), and Sacrifice (2020). All of these films pay more than lip-service homage to Lovecraft and the Mythos, are produced on modest budgets, and are serious efforts at a dramatic storyline and low-key horror rather than campy horror-comedies (e.g. The Last Lovecraft: The Relic of Cthulhu (2011), Killer Rack (2015)), arthouse reimaginings (e.g. Herbert West Reanimator (2018)), or reboots of previous franchises (e.g. Castle Freak (2020), The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021)).

Individual performances, writing, cinematography, special effects (practical and CGI), score, and sound design vary—every film has its high points and low points, and if none of these seem destined right now for classic or break-out-hit status alongside films like Reanimator (1985), neither are they completely without merit or enjoyment. For most of these films, the problems they run into isn’t low budget or bad actors but poor writing: these are the cinematic equivalent of Cthulhu Mythos pastiche stories, and it shows in every familiar plot point and trope. The creators probably mean well by incorporating the Simon Necronomicon and its symbols, or by referencing Lovecraft and how his Mythos is really real…but these are both very old hat, and less clever than they might think.

Still, if nothing else, it’s fun to see how different creators approach the same material, like new wine in old bottles, and how far a given director or actor or special effects unit will go in pursuit of giving the audience something they haven’t seen before. For H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House, there are a few pleasant surprises: Alice Gilman might be the first bisexual character in Lovecraftian cinema, and her brief love scene was probably the first live-action, non-pornographic lesbian love scene in a Mythos film. The dream sequences in particular are rather effective, and the lead actress Portia Chelleynn turns in a very competent performance.

Using you as a vessel for the birth of the antichrist.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House

If there is a criticism to be leveled against H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House, it’s the emphasis on Satanic witchcraft and the recycling of plot elements of Rosemary’s Baby into its Lovecraftian framework…and that requires a bit of explanation for why it might look like it would work, and why it really doesn’t.

The Salem Witch Trials were the belated American expression of a centuries-long persecution by civil and religious authorities of an imagined Satanic conspiracy. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret A. Murray recast this as an imagined pagan religious conspiracy, and this was the form of the “witch-cult” which H. P. Lovecraft understood, believed, and worked into his stories. The diaspora of the Salem witch-cult is referenced in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Festival,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Dreams in the Witch House” and other stories. Following Murray, Lovecraft eschewed Satanism in his witchcraft—rather than something as prosaic as Christianity, Lovecraft was developing his own artificial mythology that was outside the narrow confines of God and Satan.

Likewise, Satanism had nothing much to do with Lovecraft, at least while he was alive and for some decades thereafter. In 1966, Anton LeVay founded the Church of Satan, a non-theistic religious philosophy that took the theatrical trappings and some of the rituals which literature—including accounts of the witch trials—associated with Satanism in the early modern period. The founding was propitious; Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby came out in 1967, and the award-winning film was released in 1968. LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969, William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist came out in 1971, and in 1973 was also adapted to the screen. Bands like Black Sabbath (1968) and Coven (1967) adopted elements of Satanism and occultism in their acts, laying some of the groundwork for what would become black metal.

It was the start of a Satanic pop culture renaissance, one that borrowed from and built on earlier ideas of Satanism, but took it in a new direction, some more theatrical and some more serious; sometimes both. Despite his dearth of Satanic connections, Lovecraft had his part too. Lovecraftian references appear in The Satanic Rituals (1972), notably “The Ceremony of Nine Angles” and “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Dunwich Horror (1970) deliberately echoed many of the beats of Rosemary’s Baby, with Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) serving in the role of Rosemary, complete with weird dreams, cultic conspiracy, and infernal impregnation. From there, parallel paths developed: Satanists and occultists borrowing Lovecraft into their rituals, philosophy, and theology, and pop culture confusing the Lovecraftian Mythos with Satanism as they sought to borrow on the dark appeal of both for black metal music, horror films, comics, and other media.

In the case of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Witch House, it’s easy to see where the writers were coming from and what they were going for: Keziah Mason was intended to be the genuine Salem Witch in Lovecraft’s story, and accused witches were believed to be associated with Satanism. It isn’t much of a stretch to give Keziah Mason a Satanic coven, or a typically Satanic goal…it’s just not a very Lovecraftian take on the subject. Quite the opposite of Lovecraft’s very non-Satanic take on witchcraft, really. It’s not even how most contemporary non-theistic Satanists and occultists would integrate Lovecraft’s Mythos into their beliefs and practices.

Which isn’t quite a damning indictment of the film as a whole, but it emphasizes the issue with Lovecraftian film pastiche: the people writing these movies and putting them together mean well, but are largely aping the most obvious aspects of Lovecraft’s Mythos stories without understanding the underlying ideas and mood that make those work. In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” the ultimate revelation was that the horrors were real…that there was a cruel reality that lay behind the Salem witch accusations, that the accused were not just innocent victims of religious mania; something a bit closer to The Lords of Salem (2012).

On its own merits, as a part of the Lovecraftian cinematic oeuvre, H. P. Lovecraft’s The Witch House isn’t a terrible film—but it is exemplary of an approach that misses the mark of what can make a really great Lovecraftian film, focusing on obvious surface elements and easy references, like Miskatonic University hoodies instead of making a film that captures the feel of a Lovecraft story.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House was released in 2021 and is available on DVD and streaming.

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