Only yesterday I got into a spirited debate among the blognoscenti about why so many modern horror movies involve a handful of thoroughly unlikeable characters traveling to some exotic or remote locale to do unpalatable things in their own self interest, argue endlessly amongst one another, and then die one by one in thoroughly unappetizing but entirely deserved ways.  I guess the model for this type of scenario is Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974).  The basic set-up can be seen earlier in such films as Piero Regnoli’s THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE (1960), Michael Armstrong’s THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969),  Jean Brisme’s THE DEVIL’S NIGHTMARE (1971), Jim O’Connolly’s TOWER OF EVIL (1972) and León Klimovsky’s THE VAMPIRE’S NIGHT ORGY (1973), to name but a few titles, but it was the Hooper film that employed that scenario (an extension of the hoary old “the bridge is out, you’ll have to spend the night” angle of the classic old dark house films) in the service of a scorced earth attack on the audience’s senses.  Hooper took the logline out of the box, if you’ll forgive my use of a woefully overused expression, and it seems that every third filmmaker working in the horror genre these days is trying to better the example.  They’re failing, I might add, and that’s where the debate I involved myself in got started.  The complaint is that so many recent fright flicks – BORDERLAND (2007), AUTOPSY (2008), THE RUINS (2oo8), ALBINO FARM (2009) – fall back on this same set-up without bothering to bring to the genre a fraction of what they beg, borrow and/or steal.  “We need another H. P. Lovecraft,” I barked.  Coincidentally, today is Lovecraft’s birthday.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (yeah, it was his real name – rule!) was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island.  His father, a traveling salesman, went insane when Lovecraft was only three years old and was remanded to an insane asylum, where he was confined for the last five years of his life.  Lovecraft was raised by his mother with the help of some aunts and her father, who encouraged the young boy to boost his imagination with folklore, myth and Gothic tales of his own invention.  A bright and studious boy, H. P. Lovecraft was also plagued throughout his life by various illnesses (some of them likely psychosomatic) and was, I regret to tell you, quite the racist and antisemite.  That may well be the contract breaker for many of you interested in his work but for me those qualifications (for wont of a better word) are merely symptoms of a larger disease… fear.  H. P. Lovecraft was an intensely fearful person and he poured it into his fiction.  In the last decade of his life, prior to his untimely death from cancer at the age of only 36, Lovecraft spun an ungodly body of work devoted to horror and terror and blasphemies ancient and modern.  His simple tales of Gothic horror (“The Rats in the Walls,” “In the Vault”) are supremely creepy in their simplicity but he pressed on to develop his Cthulhu mythos, which is (I’d argue) the key to his cult standing among fans of the grotesque and arabesque.  If you’ve read stories of his, such as “The Colour out of Space” or “The Dunwich Horror,” you’ll know that they are unique, far-sighted, and from an authorial standpoint all but incapacitated by the fear of an unguarded, unregulated and insecure universe haunted by old gods and the unspeakable products and byproducts of their creation.  In the world according to H. P. Lovecraft, the stakes couldn’t be higher, and the price for losing is nothing short than the loss of one’s soul.

Now, if you know anything about horror movies you’ll know that my call for another H. P. Lovecraft to save horror cinema is kind of funny because filmmakers have been bungling the job of adapting the author for decades.  Roger Corman took on Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” but got stuck with THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963) as a title because his producers wanted moviegoers to think it was another of Corman’s popular Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, in which Vincent Price had also starred.  The movie itself is okay, with some sublimely creepy imagery, but its depiction of ancient, undying evil is strictly matinee stuff.  The story was adapted again as THE RESURRECTED (1992) by Dan O’Bannon (of ALIEN fame); this also had its moments but has to be marked ultimately as a well-meaning swing and a miss.  “The Colour Out of Space” has seen movie life as DIE, MONSTER, DIE! (1965) with Boris Karloff and THE CURSE (1987) with Claude Akins (playing the Karloff character – no lie).  THE DUNWICH HORROR (1970) is based on the Lovecraft story of the same name; it tries, it really does, but it just doesn’t have the budget or the imagination to realize the trippy mishegoss that Lovecraft was throwing down:

‘Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd it Heaven—that haff face on top…”

Mind you, anyone who sets about trying to adapt H. P. Lovecraft is setting themselves quite a task.  I’m not saying it’s easy and I have appreciated, on some level, all the efforts mentioned above to channel the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft even though they’ve been (to my mind) in vain.  Some succeed on their own lunatic level, and probably none more than Stuart Gordon’s ooey, gooey, rich and chewy RE-ANIMATOR (1985), his take on Lovecraft’s “Herbert West, Reanimator.”  The movie is too tongue-in-cheek and laugh-out-loud funny to be real Lovecraft but it does tap into Lovecraft’s particular brand of bug-eyed insanity.  I have a fondness for, and am creeped out as well, by THE HAUNTED PALACE, but for reasons that are too personal to explain here.  (Not so long ago I bought a commemorative coffee mug at a gallery opening that was a celebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories on film and one of the choices was Vincent Price’s possessed face from THE HAUNTED PALACE – I really could not look at that every morning.)  THE SHUTTERED ROOM (1967) is okay but I enjoy it less as Lovecraft than as a showcase of late 60s, non-Hammer Studios British horror (plus anything with Oliver Reed in it is worthwhile).  LURKING FEAR (1994), CASTLE FREAK (1996) and DAGON (2001) are okay and have their supporters but are largely forgettable and a there are many more titles (THE UNNAMABLE, NECRONOMICON and a 2009 remake of THE DUNWICH HORROR) that I mean to get to one of these days… but maybe I’ll just read the original stories instead.

My point in the debate I spoke of and my point here is not that I want movie makers to flock to the collected H. P. Lovecraft to try to expand upon or open up his supremely disturbing stories as movies but to understand on a personal level where the man’s aesthetic was rooted.  He watched his father and later his mother descend into madness, he feared for his health, his worst fears about his health were realized, he feared strangeness and otherness, he failed in marriage, he died in poverty.  When he succumbed to cancer in 1937 he had no idea that one day his work would be considered immortal and one wonders if, in his last hours, he lamented for and mourned a life that might very well have seemed to him wasted.  He didn’t have his eye on the prize, he didn’t lust for a fame modeled on someone else’s success… he was just trying to get his stuff down on paper, make sense of his own demons, and chart a universe that made sense out of randomness, disorder and senselessness.  He was profoundly tragic and his legacy of horror stories is, if you are sensitive to these things, as moving and poignant as it is horrifying.  Do young fright-makers working today with CGI and prosthetic body parts understand that horror is an emotion, not an effect, not fashion?  That it is not an add-on, like a tattoo or a bod-mod, but what is left, what remains after all else has been stripped, torn or burned away?  I wouldn’t wish the man’s life on my worst enemy but I would direct anyone wanting to work in the genre today to make a study of it and take from that catechism the lesson that horror is the death of hope, not the death of ideas.