My wife put aside an article for me from a magazine published by the university's College of Literature,
Science, and the Arts. Entitled
“Mountains of Madness”, it described how H.P. Lovecraft used a news story about
Laurence McKinley Gould, an Antarctic explorer, as the basis for his novelette,
At the Mountains of Madness. Gould was temporarily lost during an
expedition to the South Pole in 1929; he was later found and returned to camp
safely. In 1987, a Lovecraft scholar
named Jason C. Eckhardt was able to demonstrate that Lovecraft had used Bryd’s
expedition as source material for his story, which is one of his best, in my
view at least. At the Mountains of Madness reads more like a science fiction
adventure story than much of his work in horror and the supernatural. It is also relatively free of the “purple
prose” that he is prone to use. It was
delightful to read at the end of the article that the book is currently “in
development as a major motion picture directed by Guillermo del Toro”. I believe he also directed Pan’s Labyrinth, which was excellent. (The project was evidently abandoned in 2011,
but the famous director perhaps wants to try again this year. Apparently Tom Cruise is interested in one of
the parts.)
Lovecraft
movies are few and far between, and often disappointing. A few that I recall as being fair to good are
“Die Monster Die”, loosely based on The
Colour Out of Space, “The Dunwich Horror”, “Herbert West, Reanimator” , and
“From Beyond”. I also liked “At The
Mountains of Madness”, but this had nothing to do with the novelette; it was
more of a pastiche and an homage to Lovecraftian themes.
I recently went down to Best Buy to see if there were any Lovecraft
inspired horror DVDs. I found two: The
Shuttered Room (1967) and and Cool
Air (2012).
I
watched The Shuttered Room last
night. As with many Lovecraftian movie
titles, this film had little to do with the original short story, though the
setting and character names have some similarity. The action takes place on “Dunwich Island”
among several members of the Whately clan, who know of a terrible secret hidden
in the family’s old decrepit mill. The
family bears a curse, and it is the misfortune of the lead character, played by
the beautiful Carol Lynley, to discover what it is.
What
is interesting about the film is how it differs from a typical Lovecraft
story. The most obvious difference is
that the protagonist is a woman—most Lovecraft stories are nearly devoid of
women. The people of the village, ignorant,
drunken, violent, and leering, are also depicted at times sympathetically as
victims of poverty and economic depression.
One of the young women in the village dreams of going to an airport to
see how an airplane lands. One of the
young man imagines blowing up one of the power pylons that bypassed his island,
so that rich people in the big city can wake up and experience a power
outage. This movie was made in the 60s,
when concerns about social justice were prevalent. (Lovecraft typically ascribed the behavior
of the lower classes as to race or ethnicity and left it at that).
This
was a low budget film, so I appreciate what its creators attempted with limited
resources. The photography is
interesting, as is the music, which is mostly jazz—but the characters
frequently whistle or sing vaguely celtic tunes. There are several arresting visual metaphors. The shuttered room of the title has a red
door with an eye hole surrounded by inward pointing nails. What can this mean but that seeing the truth
is going to be painful and dangerous?
The lead character reminisces about a large doll house in her room. As a child she had the unsettling notion that
people were staring out of the house at her while she lay in her bed. Later she hides inside the dollhouse from an
attacker. There is a lot of climbing in
this movie—up stairs, up hills, onto docks--lots of physical struggle, running, and fighting. Images of barb wire and chains also add to the disturbing tone. Also, unlike the ending of a typical Lovecraft story, when Lynley's character comes face to face with the secret of The Shuttered Room, it isn't cosmic terror she experiences so much as compassion and grief--even a psychic connection in which she shares the other's pain and distress.
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