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 England211).
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.
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.
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 Conannis 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Deadseries, 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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Necronomiconuntil 1977; The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Namesedited 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 Writingsin 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Moralesthe 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.
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….
In the mid-1980s, Italian actress Moana Pozzi became a sensation for her adult films, brazen nudity on television, and her intelligence and outspokenness on sex and sexuality. In the 1990s she became a published author and political candidate, co-founding the Partito dell’Amore (“Party of Love”), which campaigned on a platform that included better sex education and legalization of brothels. While Pozzi never achieved any real political power, it added to her growing status as an Italian icon of the adult film industry. In 1994, Pozzi would die relatively young from liver cancer, leaving behind an enduring legacy—including inspiring the 1999 film Guardami and being the subject of the 2009 biographical docudrama Moana. Her name recognition was such that even in 2016, the Disney animated film Moana had to be marketed under the alternate title Oceanica in Italy.
Buried in Moana’s filmography is an odd gem: the relatively obscure Ecstasy (1989), which was very loosely adapted from (or perhaps more accurately, inspired by) Welsh author Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder,” one of the episodes in his picaresque weird novel The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895). Machen, for all his fame as a writer of the weird and an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft and others, has very rarely been adapted to film or television. Yet in the late 1980s, Moana Pozzi and director Luca Ronchi gave it a shot:
la storia è liberamente ispirata al racconto “Polvere biance” di ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)
the story is loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)
From opening credits of Ecstasy
English translation
It isn’t exactly clear which text/translation that the filmmakers were drawing from but it seems likely to be Giuseppe Lippi’s translation in Il gran Dio Pan e altre storie soprannaturali (1982). Whatever the case, the approach to adapting Machen’s story was very “liberamente,” taking broad inspiration but telling its own story:
[…] con Ecstasy di Luch Ronchi (’90) nel cui cast figura anche il pornodivo Rocco Siffredi (vero nome Rocco Tano), qui in veste soft. Storia onirica, molto liberamente tratta dal racconto “Polvere bianca” di Arthur Machen, scrittore inglese di fine Ottocentro, basata sui poteri di una misteriosa droga che esalta, ma allo stesso tempo uccide, Ecstasy offre a Moana Pozzi una chance che lei non riesce a sfruttare appieno. Del resto la Pozzi dichiarava allora, in un sussulto di autocoscienza: « Sia chiaro, io non sono un’attrice sono una che cerca di interpretare se stessa in tante situazioni diverse».
[…] with Ecstasy by Luch Ronchi (’90) whose cast also includes porn star Rocco Siffredi (real name Rocco Tano), here in a soft role. A dreamlike story, very loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by Arthur Machen, a late 19th-century English writer, based on the powers of a mysterious drug that enhances but at the same time kills, Ecstasy offers Moana Pozzi a chance that she fails to take full advantage of. After all, Pozzi declared at the time, in a jolt of self-consciousness: “Let it be clear, I am not an actress I am someone who tries to play herself in many different situations.”
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Historically significant, this was shot in three days by the legendary Carter Stevens, and was the very first adult XXX feature film to star real life twin sisters (Brooke and Taylor Young). Somehow their college professor stepfather (played by Leo Lovemore) has come to find the Necronomicon in his possession, which he needs for his witchcraft class. Right. That’s the thing to do with the most powerful and valuable book of dark magic on Earth…play show-and-tell with some 20-year-old turdbrains in community college. Inviting a horny friend (Eric Edwards) to help him with translating the ancient tome, the two men decide to give the Necronomicon a test drive and perform a ritual that’s supposed to give eternal life—which of course goes all wrong.
—Robin Bougie, “Enter My Dark Passage The Seventies Occultist Porn Film” in Cinema Sewer Volume Six (2017)9
Teenage Twins (1976) was not the first time one of Lovecraft’s creations had made it to feature film, as there was a run of Lovecraftian films in the 1960s. However, in addition to being the first X-rated American film to feature genuine twin sisters, it was the first pornographic film to feature the Necronomicon. How that came to be, is a bit of an entertaining story in itself.
Carter Stevens (Michael Stevens Worob) had been trained as a photographer and worked in film processing and directing. In 1972 he found a distributor and began his career directing pornographic films with Collegiates (1973); he would also do a fair amount of work in front of the camera. This was during the “Golden Age of Porn,” when adult filmmaking had a certain cachet—the stag film of the first half of the 20th century had given way to films that focused on plot as well as spectacle, and often featured a certain degree of arthouse aesthetic mixed in with the literal grindhouse appeal. By the mid-to-late 70s, Stevens had achieved some measure of success along these lines with films like Rollerbabies (1976), a science fiction pornographic film. As Stevens would then put it:
We had just put Rollerbabies in the can and were cutting it, (and that was the longest, most expensive, most complicated film I had done to date) and we were pretty burned out when Annie Sprinkle introduced me to one of the twins at another porn shoot we were all on. The twins had both been stewardesses for a couple of rinkydink southern airlines and had been laid off.
—Joshua Axelrod interview with Carter Stevens in Cinema Sewer, Volume Two65
“Taylor Young” (real name unknown) had begun acting in adult films with Fanny (1975), whose cast also include Annie Sprinkle and Leo Lovemore. A comparison of Stevens and Lovemore’s filmographies show that they worked on several films together before Teenage Twins, including Lickety Split (1974), Highway Hookers (1975), Hot Oven (1975), and Mount of Venus (1975); Eric Edwards had been in the last three films as well, and would be in Teenage Twins also; Tia von Davis, who would play the twins’ mother in Teenage Twins was also in Mount of Venus. While it wouldn’t quite be a repertory company, it was clear that Stevens had a few actors he’d worked with before and could trust to perform when the opportunity presented itself.
I met the sister [Brooke Young] and she said she might be interested. I called my distributor in Detroit and told him I needed money right away to make another film. He balked as I hadn’t finished Rollerbabies yet but when I said I have a set of twins his wallet dropped open faster than his mouth. It was a real challenge making Twins as neither girl knew crap about sex. I remember Mary Stuart siting in my kitchen with a dildo trying to teach the girls how to give head. And I swear I’m not kidding when I say up until then they thought the term “Blow Job” was literal. We cobbled together a script (yes my films had scripts) in no time and within 2 weeks we shot Teenage Twins.
—Joshua Axelrod interview with Carter Stevens in Cinema Sewer, Volume Two65
Mary Stuart was an actress who had worked with Stevens on Lickety Split and Rollerbabies. Stevens’ distributor was Arthur Weisberg, president of Gail Film Distributors, who had backed him financially on The Collegiates, The Hot Oven, and Mount of Venus before Rollerbabies and Teenage Twins. As for the script…
The credits for Teenage Twins name “Al Hazard” as responsible for the script; this was the pen name of writer Richard Jaccoma, who also used it (or a variation on the name) for Vampire Lust (1975), Punk Rock (1977), Honeymoon Haven (1977), Pleasure Palace (1979), and various adult magazine articles; he would eventually edit Screw magazine. Jaccoma was a definite fan of pulp fiction, and the use of a variation of Abdul Alhazred as a penname is one of the Easter eggs for fans—and it is really his script which makes what would have been just another mid-70s pornographic film with a gimmick into something of interest to Mythos films today. His non-pornographic works include the Fu Manchu pastiche Yellow Peril— The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe—one of the characters in the novel being a certain writer named Al Hazard.
It was shot in one long 3 day weekend. We saved money by renting the camera equipment for a Friday and it didn’t have to be returned till Monday morning all for one day’s rental fee, so we shot most of our films in 3 day (pardon the expression) spurts. The kitchen and dining room shots were done in my real kitchen and dining room. The rest was shot in my studio on sets.
—Joshua Axelrod interview with Carter Stevens in Cinema Sewer, Volume Two65
The hurried production probably accounts for some of the roughness of the film, and little errors in the editing. There was no budget for special effects, but the script and directing is clever in how it works to try and suggest it. The twins, for example, are supposed to have a psychic bond so that each feels what the other feels; a sex scene with one could thus alternate in cuts with how the other twin is handling their empathic arousal—which notably includes one scene where the promiuscious twin Hope is with her boyfriend and the virginal twin Prudence relieves herself by masturbating with a Bible—which scene was cut from some releases of the film so as not to offend audiences. The soundtrack, however, is fantastically funky.
The overall low budget and rush of the filmmaking is probably most notable with the ending. The film culminates with a ritualistic orgy, guided by the professor reading from the Necronomicon—but ends with notable abruptness at the final line. Whether or not they simply ran out of film, it sure feels like that.
In fact we all called them the Quaalude twins. Sexually they were rather unschooled. They did not fool around with each other off screen, it was strictly my idea to pair them up on screen as I had never heard of it done in any movie before that. […] When I found the male twins for Double Your Pleasure I had to dly down to Florida to get one of the female twins out of jail where she had been doing time for passing bad checks. In turth I think she had just gotten so stoned and ust kept writing checks long after the bank had closed the account.
—Joshua Axelrod interview with Carter Stevens in Cinema Sewer, Volume Two65
The actors in Teenage Twins would go on with their careers; Carter Stevens would direct them both again in Double Your Pleasure (1978), which would be almost their last film—it isn’t uncommon for actors to leave the industry after only a few years, to put their screen names behind them and move on with their lives without the stigma. It is a pity there are no interviews that give Brooke and Taylor’s perspective on the filming of Teenage Twins, or their brief careers.
Stevens claimed that Teenage Twins was his most profitable film, and with the low production costs and the number of times it has been packaged and re-packaged, that wouldn’t be surprising. While the “teenage” part was always spurious (no birthdates are given for Brooke and Taylor, but they look to have been in their mid-20s), incest was and is still a taboo subject, and taboo always has a marketing draw…as evidenced by films like Hammer Studio’s Twins of Evil(1971) which included a brief (non-explicit) lesbian scene, or by the Sexxxtons Mother/Daughter duo in the 2010s, although in that case the two women made sure to never make sexual contact with one another. Whether Teenage Twins could be legally made today would probably require a careful analysis of the incest laws of whatever state it was filmed in (Stevens is quoted as saying “As far as I know, there’s no crime called ‘conspiracy to aid and abet the commission of incest.'” Teenage Twins Collection booklet 6).
Yet for Mythos fans, the most interesting part of the film is the Necronomicon itself.
Although mentioned in the film’s opening, the Necronomicon itself doesn’t appear until well over half the film’s runtime, and no good shots have appeared of the prop itself. Pulp fans might be interested to know that the incantation read out of the book is “Ka nama kaa lajerama”—the incantation from Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales Aug 1929), the film thus marks the adult film debut of Howard’s literary creations as well.
The Necronomicon in Teenage Twins acts as a catalyst as much as it does a grimoire; supposedly the very presence of the book inspires some of the sexual escapades, such as when Gerald has a threesome with his step-daughter Hope alongside Professor Robert. It is an interesting angle, but as with many pornographic films, the plot is mainly there to set up the scenes and the pairings. Yet if Jaccoma hadn’t written the Necronomicon into the script—and Stevens hadn’t rolled with it—who would remember Teenage Twins today as more than a mid-70s effort to capitalize off of gay-for-pay twin actors?
There are several versions of Teenage Twins out there in the marketplace, including on VHS and DVD, and it has been marketed as Teenage Tarts and The Young Twins. The Teenage Twins Collectionincludes commentary on the making of the film with director Carter Stevens, as well as great little details like:
Ads for production assistants and actors appeared in the Village Voice on December 1, 1975 and shooting commenced days later on December 5. […] A $65 receipt from Chicken Galore for fried chicken, ribs and twenty paper plates gives some indication of the cost of feeding cast and crew on a tiny budget. —Michael J. Bowen, Teenage Twins Collection booklet 5
I was once told that at an early WorldCon a cut of Teenage Twins was shown which excised the hardcore sexuality and left intact the plot; it was supposedly screened under the tongue-in-cheek title At the Mons of Madness. I’ve never been able to find any confirmation to this, but Stevens was a known science fiction fan, and a con reporter in the fanzines Drift #3 and Event Horizon #349 confirms that he attended MidAmericaCon (the 34th WorldCon) in 1976, and apparently held private screenings of some of his films…so I consider it at least possible that the film was shown.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 