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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John S. Robertson

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Alan Moore once wrote that the world needs new heroes. The old ones, he argued, were no long relevant; too much of their exploits have been exposed by time, now seen in the light of modern psychoanalysis and cultural empathy to be at best obsolete and at worst, actively harmful.

What, then, of villains? If the newly recognized complexity of the human mind defeats the standard square-jawed protagonist of old, what becomes of the antagonist, that mustache twirling bastard burns down orphanages for no clear reason beyond his designated nature? He seems just as diminished as his traditional foe, albeit in the opposite direction. Dracula loses his bite (sorry, sorry) if he’s being driven by lost love and a penchant for young hotties. Darth Vader’s growls become asthmatic gasps when the man behind the mask is Hayden freakin’ Christensen.

Written decades before any of this became an issue, Steven’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manages the neat trick of providing an answer without ever really acknowledging the question: it’s pro- and an- tagonist are one and the same person. While the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, serves as an audience surrogate for most of the novella, (sort of) heroic Jekyll is the driving force, and his struggles against the villainous Hyde transform the Victorian’s thoroughly capitalized notions of Good and Evil into inescapable flesh.

Utterson, whose character can be best described as “consistent,” is out for a walk one evening with his friend Richard Enfield. While on their rambles, they come across a particular doorway that strikes both men as disagreeable. Enfield informs Utterson that the door reminds him of a most peculiar incident. Some night earlier, he happened to be passing by the very spot on which they now stand, and witnessed a thoroughly horrid man bump into and then trample over a young girl. The man was quickly accosted by Enfield and a crowd of concerned citizens, who demand he pay the recompense to the injured child.

Hyde—for that was the man’s name—is forced by the size of the crowd to give in. He enters the disagreeable doorway and returns moments later with a check, signed by the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll.

The news of Jekyll’s involvement distresses Utterson, as he is both lawyer and friend to the good doctor. To think he might be associated with such a immoral fiend-! Utterson questions Enfield more as to the nature of this Hyde, but all Enfield can say is that Hyde is utterly repulsive for reasons which lie beyond his abilities to adequately describe. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the man; but his features, when combined, result in a shockingly abhorrent whole.

Over a period of time, Utterson learns more of Hyde and his inescapable connection to Jekyll. The door which Hyde entered in Enfield’s story is actually the back entrance to Jekyll’s own laboratory, located just off the doctor’s home. Jekyll changes his will to include Hyde, and instructs his servants that the contemptible creature is to be given full authority of the household. Hyde’s misdeeds continue, culminating finally in the brutal, unprovoked murder of an elderly man. This attracts the attention of the law, forcing Jekyll to officially (and with a good deal of guilt) cut ties with his apparent protégé.

But the connection between the two men, whatever it may be, is not so easily severed. Utterson becomes ever more concerned about the fate of his friend, until he is called to Jekyll’s house one night by a servant who believes that the doctor is no longer in his right mind. They break into Jekyll’s laboratory to find Hyde’s dead body on the floor; and a confession written in Jekyll’s hand explaining his relationship to the murderer and his own terrible fate.

To a modern audience, the structural dancing about the bush which takes up most of Stevenson’s story seems frustratingly unnecessary. Everyone knows that Hyde is Jekyll, Jekyll Hyde, and the time spent with Utterson as he unravels the plot keeps us away from what perhaps should’ve been the novella’s true focus—the horrible Mr. Hyde. For all the intimations made about his character, we’re never really privy to Hyde’s misdeeds; the two acts of violence he commits that we know of happen while he’s on his way home. One can’t help but wonder what mischief he gets up too while out on the town. (After all, it’s doubtful that Jekyll willingly transformed himself into his evil alter ego simply to rough up a child and beat an old man to death.)

But perhaps concessions should be made to the times—perhaps the suggestion of vice was more acceptable than any explicit description might have been. There is something to be said for insinuation; in the hands of a talented writer (and Stevenson is one, no question), implication and conjecture are often just as unsettling as real facts. Seeing Hyde getting drunk and groping the waitress, while transgressive for the period, wouldn’t hold much weight today; without any hard facts, Hyde’s dalliances take on a surprisingly sinister quality, as though he were committing acts to atrocious for the human mind to contemplate.

The novella’s structure also introduces the premise in a way that makes it difficult to ignore. There’s a fundamental reality to the London Stevenson gives us, with gossip and conjecture providing a surprisingly concrete foundation for the story’s supernatural core. And it is supernatural, science be damned; one of Jekyll’s colleague’s, Dr. Lanyon, repeatedly expresses his objections to the man’s pursuit of the standard Things Which Are Not to Be Meddled With. Once you start making potions that change your personality and drastically alter your physical appearance, there’s at least an intimation of sorcery, even if no one is wearing a pointy hat.

The terribly repressive nature of Victorian society has been well-documented, and that it would lead to the sort of schizoid personality that Jekyll works so hard to encourage isn’t much of a surprise. We can assume that Jekyll’s unfortunate impulses were towards sexuality activity and drug use; and even drug use may not have been of much importance, given that people generally indulge in drink and worse to remove the restraints that Jekyll has already dealt with through less conventional means. (You could use the novella as a metaphor for any sort of addiction, really—the fact that a literal drug is needed to begin the doctor’s downfall makes the narcotic connection inescapable.)

So, let’s say sex, then, for want of any hard facts. (Good lord, I hope that wasn’t a pun.) There’s something pitiful about a fifty year old man who’s so desperate not to lose the respect of his peers that he’s willing to break all natural laws, just so he can get some tail on the side. (But maybe it’s not female tail he’s after?) To the Victorian mind, biological urges existed largely as a way to test one’s commitment to God and civilization. Indulging in any sort of desire could only be permitted through the most rigorous of social contexts, which meant personal standards were inordinately high. So high that failure was nearly inevitable; the sort of failure Jekyll finds himself rushing towards, torn between the demands of society and his own internal needs. The solution he finds, while ultimately a failure, does have a certain ironic elegance to it.

A phenomenal success upon publication, Jekyll & Hyde would inspire stage plays and, eventually, a long series of film adaptations. One of the earliest, and best, is the 1920 silent movie John Barrymore in the title role. Filmed in 1920, the movie marks the first full-length version of the novella, although the story had been making the rounds nearly since the invention of film.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde wastes no time in introducing us to the title character. After an opening title card setting up the moral of the story ("We are who we most want to be,"), we see Barrymore laboring over a microscope and conferring with a colleague, Dr. Lanyon (Charles Lane). Lanyon is impressed with Jekyll’s work, but advises him to stick to the “natural sciences.”

While this scene doesn’t exist in the original story verbatim, it does agree with what we’re told about the relationship between Lanyon and Jekyll. The movie then establishes the utter purity of Jekyll’s character; others discuss how he gives his life to his work, and he even runs a health clinic for the poor and destitute. The long hours he spends there make him late to any social engagements, and also attract the attentions of Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), an older man of some great experience. Over dinner, Carew questions Jekyll as to how he can be sure of his soul if he’s never been truly tempted. Jekyll, while initially hostile to the idea, reluctantly agrees to a night on the town, so that Carew can give him a better idea of what he’s missing.

One surprisingly hot dancing girl later, Jekyll has his world tilted and decides to take his dabbling in “unnatural” science one step further; he will transform himself in to a different person in order that he might indulge the sweet tooth that Carew has instilled in him. He succeeds, and Hyde is born, an evil grinning embodiment of Jekyll’s own newly awakened lust.

Initially, Jekyll’s plan seems to be working. Hyde rents a room for himself and hooks up with the hot dancing girl, while Jekyll maintains his usual noble self. But the wear and tear of leading a double life nags at him. He establishes a relationship with Carew’s daughter, Millicent (Martha Mansfield), and swears off his other life. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite “take,” and the next time he turns into Hyde, the connection between the two men becomes publicly known. Sir Carew visits Jekyll to demand he explain his relationship with such a villain. Jekyll angrily rants that it’s Carew’s fault for tempting him in the first place. Then he changes into Hyde potion-free and beats Carew to death in the courtyard.

Clearly, some changes have been made from the Stevenson’s version. Instead of Utterson’s discovery of the Jekyll’s dual nature, the doctor takes center stage, changing the emphasis from cautionary tale to tragedy. The moral is still there, unquestionably, but presenting Jekyll’s downfall in chronological order makes us more accomplice to his choices than in the original story. In keeping with this change, Jekyll himself becomes more of a tragic hero; his initial goodness is given greater stress, and when he experiments with Hyde, he only does so after being led to corruption by the wicked Carew.

Or is he wicked? It’s possible to paint him as in some way responsible for the events of the film, but there’s something in what he tells Jekyll, about the values of fully experiencing life. While Carew may have sampled too deeply of vice, it’s repeatedly stressed that he’s managed to bring his daughter up “right,” ("right” at the time being “virginal and naïve,” admittedly, but he clearly loves her and wants to protect her), and he’s made more peace with his inner hungers than Jekyll ever manages. There’s a definite sense of Jekyll trying to achive perfection with his acts of goodness, and that when Carew questions the nature of his worth, he is vulnerable to the temptation because of his absolutism of purpose. Perhaps he’s a victim who would have led a blame-free life had it not been for a Carew’s influence; but one can’t help be at least a little suspicious of one so easily led.

While their routes to sin were different, both versions of Jekyll create Hyde in order to indulge themselves without having to worry about the consequences. Here the film version really gets going; Barrymore makes a solid, charismatic hero, but as lechery personified, he’s nothing short of brilliant, conveying bottomless contempt and debauchery by a simple twist of the hand. (The make-up is excellent too.) Any scene with Hyde makes for compelling viewing, and unlike the novella, here we at least get a clear impression of where his yearnings take him—it’s sex, no doubt whatsoever, and there’s even a brief insinuation of deviance that seems remarkably bold for the period. (We talk about this briefly in the discussion linked to at the end of the review; Lyz suggests the moment may just be about Hyde passing up one barfly for another, but if you watch closely, right before the cut, Hyde is embracing both women. Yowza.)

One of the reason’s Barrymore’s Hyde succeeds so nicely is that, even with Evil practically stamped across his forehead, there’s something undeniably charismatic in the man. It’s easy to believe he has enough magnetism to attract various lowlifes, which makes it all the more shocking late in the film when he snaps and murders Carew. Up until that moment, it’s possible to believe that Jekyll’s dalliance with the dark side of things is ultimately harmless; he hurts some feelings, and there is the bit of trampling, but it’s largely the act of a heretofore restrained temperament finally getting a little breathing room. Nothing unredeemable happens; Hyde is a jerk, but who isn’t a jerk from time to time?

But the Carew murder changes this. It’s one of the movie’s most effective sequences; the two men argue, and then Jekyll just snaps. For the first time, he changes into Hyde without benefit of his magic potion, and the hideous grin on his face forces you to realize that all the apparently harmless indulgences were leading to this fatal moment. He beats Carew to death still grinning, and from then on his doom is sealed.

In Stevenson’s story, the most disturbing thing about Hyde committing murder is the sheer arbitrariness of the act. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t know his victim at all; the man simply passes a pleasantry to Hyde on the street, and Hyde snaps. In the movie, Hyde’s motives are quite clear. Carew is both the symbolic cause of Jekyll’s growing self-hatred and the obstacle in his path to happiness. The change shifts the focus from the general to the specific—Stevenson is making a case for the evil in every man’s heart to be the unrestrained potential of destruction, while in the Barrymore film, evil is a surrender to the worst of one’s impulses. The Hyde in the novella would be the same for anyone who repeated Jekyll’s experiments; the movie-Hyde is an intimately personal monster.

There’s also the fact that the novella had no fiancé character for Jekyll to latch on to. There are no prominent female characters in the story (future Julia Roberts vehicles notwithstanding), and Millicent’s presence in the film humanizes Jekyll, and changes his eventual self-sacrifice from a shamed suicide to a surprisingly selfless attempt to save the life (and virtue) of the woman he loves. It also makes Jekyll as much of a hero as is possible in a tale where every moment of violence and horror stems from his own poor choices.

Novella-Jekyll and movie-Jekyll finally find themselves at the whim of their own worst nature, unable to control their transformations and left to hide from the eyes of the world their own inescapable guilt. This is just desserts, no question, but it’s possible to pity the doctor’s fate. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde posits that, just as a nation, a man divided against himself cannot stand. Unintentionally or not, there’s also the suggestion that impossible to achieve standards cause more harm than good; and that those who cannot accept their capacity for sin are doomed to damn themselves over and over again. The Barrymore film remains an effective expression of such concerns, and a terrific example of early horror cinema to boot.

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Whoever put together the Madacy DVD release really needs to rethink their music choices.

But you’re not done yet!

And You Call Yourself a Scientist:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1912)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1913)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1920, Sheldon Lewis version)

And when you’re finished, check Lyz, Chad and my discussion of all four films:

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The Shining, by Stephen King

No parent is perfect; no child escapes.

We try so hard to be good. Most of us, anyway. We struggle to be kind, to be decent, to never let our anger get the best of us. But the danger is always there—it’s impossible to live a life of complete serenity. One of the painful ironies of our common humanity is that the ones we come the closest to, the ones whose good opinion of us matters the most, are the ones who render us most vulnerable to our worst impulses. The closer you get to a person, the more the mask slips, and if we are successful in our relationships, we are also at risk. We can never be completely safe from the ones we love. Not from them, not from ourselves.

The Shining, Stephen King’s third published novel, deals with the damage parents pass on to their children, and the way that damages echoes as the children become parents in turn. It’s also a terrific ghost story; much like Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, it uses the central characters’ flaws to augment the spiritual danger around them. But where Haunting has the majority of the damage happening internally, The Shining presents us with a different set of stakes, using supernatural pressures to exploit the cracks in an already shaky family unit.

The story, for those unfamiliar with it: Jack Torrance has been hired on as the new winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel. The hotel, which stands closed from early fall until the spring thaw, rests high in the mountains outside Boulder, Colorado. During the winter, snow closes off the roads surrounding it, leaving anyone inside stranded from the outside world. For the next seven months, Jack, his wife Wendy, and their five year-old son Danny, will be the Overlook’s only guests. Jack will spend his time fixing whatever damage the winter brings. He also has a play he’s working on, and a wounded marriage to salve.

But every hotel has ghosts, and the Overlook’s are more potent than most. Powered by Danny’s psychic abilities (his “shine,” as the hotel’s cook Dick Hallorann calls it), those ghosts will seek to drive the Torrances to their doom. The last caretaker, a man named Grady, murdered his two daughters, his wife and then himself. But Grady was probably a drunk, and Jack has sworn off the stuff. Besides, he would never hurt the people he cares about.

But the snow is falling fast. Jack’s thoughts have gone queer. And when he is riled, oh he has such a temper….

As a horror novel, The Shining is full of great setpieces—the topiary animals and their malevolent games of “Red Light,” the unending masquerade ball with its decadent promises, the horrible inevitability of Room 217. Just as upsetting, and much more relatable, are the psychological horrors. There’s a chilling reality to Jack’s descent, a recognizable progression from self-loathing to hatred to blinding, undiscriminating rage. By the midway point, nearly all of his conversations with Wendy are bitter. If you’ve ever spent time with a couple in a difficult marriage—or if you’ve had the misfortune of being in one yourself—those moments will ring painfully true. There’s nothing particularly exotic about sniping at someone, at loathing every word that comes out of their nagging, bitching lips; and it’s far to easy too understand the fear that comes from dreading every conversation, of trying to placate while knowing that the battles already lost.

And all the while, your son is listening in to everything, understanding more than he should, and being damaged in ways you won’t see until it’s far too late to fix them.

One of the biggest challenges for anyone working on a “haunted house” story is coming up with a plausible reason for the hauntees to stay in the house long enough for the story to play out completely. Paranormal investigators are a possible solution, but at some point, when the chairs are flying and the walls bleeding red, one has to question one’s devotion to Science. King solves this problem neatly by giving the Torrances two undeniable pressures. Once Jack loses his teaching job in a fit of anger, the family’s financial situation becomes increasingly dire, so dire that to pass up the sort of paying job that the caretaker position represents becomes impossible. And when even that pressure pales in comparison to the dangers of the hotel, the weather and Jack himself (under the influence, so to speak) conspire to keep the Torrances at the Overlook.

That Jack is vulnerable to the sort of corruption the hotel specializes in is immediately clear. The very first line of the novel ("Jack Torrance thought, officious little prick.“) sets the tone, and in short order we learn not only that Jack has a drinking problem, but that his drunkenness actually led him to break his child’s arm. He’s since quit drinking, but that hasn’t stopped his tendency towards despair and self-pity—which leads to wanting to drink, which leads to more despair, etc. Abusing his son (the fact that the abuse is largely unintentional—Danny’s arm breaks when a furious Jack yanks him too hard—doesn’t make him feel any better) plays into this cycle, and also into Jack’s own history of abuse; something which the book doesn’t really get into until much later, but makes a good deal of sense when it’s finally revealed.

The Overlook initial machinations are fairly subtle. The first indication that anything is wrong comes when Jack goes up to reshingle the roof, a month or so after his family moves in. He discovers a wasp’s nest and gets stung a few times, nearly going over the side. This prompts a long introspection about how his life is sort of a “wasp’s nest,” and that most of the bad stuff that happened to him isn’t really his fault. (Incidentally, this whole wasp nest metaphor, while initially evocative, gets overplayed; it’s mentioned so often than by the end you expect some sort of giant stinging insect to be at the heart of the Torrance’s woes.)

One of the most important lessons taught in Alcoholics Anonymous is that some things are out of your control. AA attributes this to the presence of a higher power, but really, the most important thing to take from it is a firm understanding of your limitations. You can’t reform your life if you can’t put boundaries on what that means. In this light, Jack’s bout of acceptance is a positive thing. But it gets tricky when you notice how much of the blame he shifts off himself. By the end of the chapter, he’s achieved the queasy peace that comes from thinking you can leave your problems behind without ever really facing them.

When Jack discovers a scrapbook of the Overlook’s history, the hotel’s effects become even more apparent. His old drinking habits return—he wipes his mouth constantly, chews Excedrin, and, worst of all, his resentment at his wife keeps growing more and more pronounced. It’s the sort of progression that anyone with an anger control problem can relate to, with fits of irrational fury and the way every conversation, every mistake, every grating, whining question finds your hands squeezed into fists and your teeth grinding. Ever day sends him further along the downward spiral he’s been riding since October. Increasingly, Jack believes that the world is against him, and that he and the hotel have a bond which no one else is capable of understanding.

Through all of this, Wendy and Danny have been having problems of their own. In counterpoint to her husband, Wendy has her own issues of parental abuse to cope with. But while Jack’s father dealt largely in physical abuse, Wendy grew up in the shadow of her mother’s hateful mind games. Yet another in a long line of overwhelming maternal forces that runs through much of King’s writing (Mrs. White in Carrie, Mrs. Kaspbrak in IT, and Mrs. Cunningham from Chrstine, to name a few), Wendy’s mom is the sort of destructive, hateful person who’s spends her life grading the world with a never-ending supply of red ink.

Now a mother herself, Winnifred is constantly struggling against her past, unsure how many of her own choices are hopelessly tainted by the woman who raised her. It’s no surprise that she’s stuck with Jack as long as she has. The hotel’s spirits never work on her as directly as they do her husband, but they hardly need to. Any path that would begin with her taking Danny and leaving the Overlook and Jack to their mutual damnation would inevitably end up back at her mother’s door. It’s a choice that a few bad dreams and snappish conversations aren’t deadly enough to force her to take.

And then there’s Danny, menaced by dangers he can neither understand nor communicate fully to either parent. Blessed and cursed with extraordinary psychic ability, he is witness to Jack and Wendy’s internal struggles, as well as glimpses of the future from his “imaginary” friend Tony. Danny was sure he was the only person who could do what he does, until he met Dick Hallorann, head cook of the Overlook. On Danny’s first day at the hotel, and Dick’s last, Hallorann pulled the young boy aside and told him a little something about the gift they both share, a talent he calls “shining.”

The hotel, Dick said, can be unfortunate place for folks with a shine to them. After the thousands of guests who’ve stayed there at some point or another, the place is bound to have more than its share of bad memories and pain; these memories occasionally manifest themselves as pictures of the past to people like Danny. But pictures are all they are. If Danny saw something that frightened him, Dick told him all he needed to do was close his eyes and count to ten, and everything would be fine.

Hallorann left Danny with this dubious comfort, plus a promise that, should things get too unpleasant for the boy, all he needs to do is give as loud a mental shout as he can, and Dick would come running. Only, Dick is in Florida now, and that’s a long ways away. The storms keep coming. And Dick was wrong—sometimes, pictures do hurt. Sometimes, so do Daddies, no matter how they might promise otherwise.

As far as set-ups go, there’s a lot to work with here, and for the most part King manages to satisfy the novel’s potential. It’s not perfect, though. The foreshadowing of “that which will be forgotten,” a somewhat important plot point during the story’s climactic confrontation, is mentioned so many times the phrase itself becomes a joke. The pacing gets a bit thick near the climax just when it ought to sing; there’s a lot of intercutting between events at the hotel and outside, and while I understand the necessity of it, it’s still frustrating.

Most damning is King’s reliance on catchphrases as, apparently, the ultimate indicator of evil intentions. While hearing “Where do you want to go today?” for the ten millionth time may drive one to kill, it hardly works as suitable dialogue for a man who’s succumbed at last to the pressures of his own demons. Jack becomes increasingly threatening as the novel progresses, and his bitterness towards his wife is unpleasant and convincingly upsetting. Unfortunately, once things get past a certain point, Jack changes from the lead in an Edward Albee play to a Freddy Kruger clone. His constant exhortations that Wendy and Danny “come and take [their] medicine” are ludicrous in all the wrong ways. He becomes the first in what would be a long line of pointless madmen, and when he does, the story loses much of its intimacy, and the horror becomes “safe” in a thoroughly disappointing fashion.

The only other major reservation with the book (apart from King’s usual stylistic tics) is Danny’s “shine”. In general, psychic children give me hives. Psychic anything is usually a tricky business, since it puts the writer at risk of the worst sort of lazy, muddled plotting—people are always conveniently “sensing” things, and then just as conveniently failing to sense other things, or else being unable to explain what they sense in clear declarative statements. ("There’s a monster. It wants to eat your eyes. Run like fuck.") And of course a child psychic is even worse; nobody’s listening to them even on those rare instances when they do make sense.

Danny’s abilities actually work, though, because his “shine” is the fulcrum on which the entire plot rests. Without him around, the hotel’s ghosts would be largely formless—perhaps responsible for a few bad dreams, but none of the nightmares that the Torrance family suffers through. There’s a rather nice metaphor buried in there under all the supernatural mischief; something about how our children bring out the best and the worst in us, and how the cycle of abuse for Jack Torrance would have ended for him had he not had a son. We are all just as much the product of the poor choices of the ones who raised us as we are their love. And it is only when we try to carry on with our own families that we see how truly deep the damage goes.

All caveats aside, it’s a largely excellent novel, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.

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The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick

Included in the late nineties VHS release of The Shining (and all subsequent releases) is a brief behind-the-scenes documentary shot by Stanley Kubrick’s wife, Vivian. It’s a fascinating piece, existing long before the glossy, puffed up studio docs one gets today; there’s a charming off-the-cuff feeling to it, with Nicholson at the early height of stardom still not quite the iconic monster he’s become, and Kubrick himself huddled around the edges, two steps away from the crazy guy who mutters in your ear on late train rides home.

Most telling, though, are the moments we get with Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers. Crothers plays Hallorann, and in a brief interview, he expresses his gratitude for the role in a voice that verges on breaking. It’s a disconcertingly personal moment; while Nicholson and Kubrick are out goofing around, Crothers is damn close to bursting into tears. And Duvall is worse. Her smile jitters around the edges, her hand holding a cigarette shakes, and whatever she says, all you really pay attention to are her eyes. They’re wide open, as though she were just recovering from a blow—and already preparing herself for another.

These tremors run through Duvall’s entire performance, as does Crothers somewhat disconcerting sentimentalism. As Nicholson cavorts and grimaces his way into liberating madness, Duvall takes on the harried, shell-shocked expression of serial abuse, living in the moment to moment where every word, every step, every breath is fraught with dangers. Meanwhile, Danny Lloyd (as Duvall and Nicholson’s son) pedals down endless hallways, split between apathy and stark terror, as removed from his parents as they are from each other.

Kubrick was always interested in getting at the alienation that underlies the most intimate of human relationships. Even 2001: a Space Odyssey, arguably his most optimistic film, has a sense of profound awe at the climax of just how little any of us understand about anything—and how the comforts of personal contact are largely illusions we use to distract ourselves from the space around us, rather than a true panacea to loneliness.

Alienation is certainly the name of the game in The Shining. The opening sequence looks down from on high over seemingly endless mountains and rivers, watching a tiny car making its way down the road while the credits roll by in stark white font and the score pounds into our ears. There is so much space out there, between the mountains, along the water; even inside the Overlook itself. Once the winter begins, Jack spends most of his time in a living room the size of a gymnasium—huge windows loom over head, and you wonder what the pressure must be like. Danny’s riding through the corridors. Wendy cooking in the gargantuan kitchen. All that emptiness. All that space.

I remember the year after I graduated college being, for some brief time, utterly obsessed with this film. I’d seen it multiple times, and I knew it scared me—but I just couldn’t get my head around what it all meant, exactly. King’s novel was easy enough to grasp, but the movie was a mystery. What was the point? Nicholson and Duvall’s marriage is a ruin, and his relationship with his son nearly as bad; there was nothing to root for, nobody to invest in, no themes to focus on.

So, like any other enterprising cinesthete with no real social life and web access, I logged in and hit up Google for some answers. (This was pre-Wikipedia. Or at least, it was pre-me-hearing-of-Wikipedia.) By and large it was a wasted hour—did you know there’s Strangelove slash? I sure wish I didn’t!—but I did stumble across one site of interest. The author believed that The Shining was actually a symbolic examination of the tyranny of the white man against the American Indian, women, black folks, and pretty much anybody that ole whitey has a history of keeping down. He referenced the Overlook being built on an Indian burial ground (original to the movie), the Indian designs of the carpets and wall-hangings, even the cans in the pantry with Indian heads on them.

I thought this was the silliest thing I’d read in a long time (Dimitri/Muffley sex notwithstanding), and for years would describe it to friends as a perfect example of the foolishness of overwrought criticism. You can read anything into anything, we’d tell each other. Gosh, aren’t intellectuals funny! And we would laugh and nibble our crutons and speak of Pynchon long into the night.

The joke may have been on us, however. The more I watch The Shining, the more I wonder if that long-forgotten online reviewer wasn’t on to something. Hell, it might even be a major premise of Kubrickian criticism these days—and there’s certainly evidence in the film to back it up. The Indian textile work is hard to argue against, especially considering some of the outfits Duvall wears, and there’s a definite old boys vibe to Nicholson’s interactions with the hotel spirits. (The arrogant disgust in the dead Grady’s voice when he describes Hallorann is hard to forget.) Maybe it is all an allegory of American policy in the West, an examination of the indulgent selfishness that drives so many men to crush and disdain their fellows.

But what of it? I’ve seen the movie half a dozen times at least, and I’ll watch it again soon. It’s not the subtext that brings me back. I have no doubt that, if such subtext is there, I’ll find it eventually; Kubrick is too excellent a filmmaker to half-ass that sort of thing. That isn’t what keeps me watching, though. It’s the shots over Danny’s shoulder as he rides around and around; the twins and their pasty plump faces; the woman in 237 who seduces Jack, only to reveal the horrorshow underneath her illusory charms; the man with the bloody face who tells Duvall, “Great party, isn’t it?” There is a quality of filmmaking at work here that remains a delight to experience no matter how familiar it becomes.

Oh, and it’s remarkably scary, too. Not many jump scares, but just a thudding sense of dread that envelops you from those opening credits to that final, lingering shot.

Much has been made of Nicholson’s work here; I’ve heard it argued that The Shining is the first time he let the mannerisms do as much work as the rest of him. Whether that’s true or not, I think we can safely assume that he and the rest of the cast deliver exactly the performance Kubrick wanted out of them. Which makes Nicholson’s transformation from restrained, distant husband to gleeful lunatic an interesting twist on expectations—while Jack is certainly believable in both aspects, it’s only when he goes over the edge that you really start to enjoy watching them. Much like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, there’s the fascinating charisma of psychotic men; only where modern filmmakers chose to give us mad geniuses capable of the most implausibly Goldbergian punchlines, Kubrick is more concerned in showing us a level of evil that we can entirely relate to. How fun it is to hate! we remember. And how tiresome all the conventions that keep us restrained.

In which case, Shelley Duvall’s winces and Danny Lloyd’s blank eyes make sense; we can pity for them, but it’s nearly impossible to root for them. There’s no warm center at the heart of movie, nothing to make you think that, were the Torrances somehow able get away from the Overlook that their lives would be at all improved. You can’t care about the family because there’s no family worth caring about.

There any number of ways that you can interpret the film: the whole Indian thing, a parable about man’s unsteady relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect, maybe something about the unheralded dangers of the hotel caretaker industry. Any of these could make for a pretty good Film Studies paper. But the movie doesn’t need them. It’s just a terrific horror picture by a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. Why he does it only matters when the lights come up and you notice the shadows are darker than they used to be.

COMPARE/CONTRAST:

Stephen King has talked about his dissatisfaction with the original film version of his novel any number of times, but the most telling point he brings up comes in the form of an anecdote. While Kubrick was making his Shining, he would often call King at odd hours to ask him some seemingly random question. Late one night, Kubrick rang and said, without much fanfare, “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes, I do,” King told him.

“I don’t,” Kubrick said, and hung up.

While the story itself is probably unverifiable (it’s on the IMDB trivia page for the movie, but I’ve misplaced the book I first found it in), it serves as a perfect way to approach the novel and its startlingly different adaptation. It would be difficult to find a movie based on a book that plays more havoc with its source material, while at the same time remaining true to the major details. Jack Torrance is still a reformed alcoholic with a history abuse, and he’s still the winter caretaker at the Overlook. His wife is Wendy, his son is Danny, and Danny has some peculiar psychic tendencies. And the Overlook itself is still full to the brim with nasty, mind-screwing ghosts.

But the gulf between King and Kubrick is remarkably vast. Reading the novel and seeing the movie, the connections are apparent—but I can’t imagine someone experiencing only one and somehow managing to successfully anticipate the other.

What we have here is a rarity: an adaptation which, while failing in the strictest sense of the word (translating the original author’s plot and themes into a different medium), stands quite nicely on its own as an equally valid work of art. It’s not exactly new territory for Kubrick. In addition to ignoring the final chapter of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, he turned the straight-faced nuclear-era thriller Fail Safe into Dr. Strangelove, one of the most bitterly funny dark comedies ever made. A strong enough director to put his stamp on any material he chose to use, Kubrick was always more interested in using the work of others to make his own points—and if those points seemingly directly contradicted the original (as they do here), it certainly never stopped him.

Both novel and film have their first scenes in Stuart Ullman’s office; but where novel-Jack is irritable and humiliated, struggled to hold on to his temper and impress this thoroughly unimpressable man, movie-Jack just grins and passes the whole thing with flying colors. There’s not a hint of tension in the movie version, and movie-Ullman certainly never suggests that Jack might not be appropriate for the caretaker position.

Back home with Wendy and Danny, things are significantly less pleasant. While the novel has both characters somewhat worried for Jack (and Wendy depressed at the current state of their lives), the movie shows Duvall desperately eager to please, and Danny distant and closed-off. When Danny has a fainting spell, brought on by the imaginary friend who lives in his finger, Duvall calls in the doctor; with her son pronounced healthy, Duvall proceeds to tell the doctor, in her forced-smile, everything-is-okay voice about the time Jack broke Danny’s arm.

Clearly, it’s something she’s nervous of mentioning, but we never see movie-Jack expressing the same sort of sentiments. In the novel, it’s made explicit that Wendy seriously considered leaving her husband during his drinking days, especially after the incident with Danny. Only Jack’s remarkable reformation, and her love for their family as a whole, kept them together. In the movie, Duvall seems to be staying with her husband because she’s too frightened to do anything else. I doubt movie-Jack is physically abusive (apart from the arm break) before coming to the Overlook, but Duvall’s tentative neediness speaks to years of mental anguish. The film is probably more realistic in its approach to domestic violence—I’m sure there are more couples in the world like Duvall and Nicholson than the novel’s leads—but Kubrick’s detached approached means there’s already horror enough before the ghosts come out.

While the novel charts Jack’s gradually deteriorating mental state with a sort of tragic inevitability, Nicholson’s transformation seems to be headed in a different direction entirely. He’s been criticized for “starting crazy,” but this isn’t the case—it’s more that he begins the movie as a sort of low key kiss-ass who’s barely able to able to withhold his contempt for his wife, and ends it as screaming manifestation of his own Id.

There’s no question that it’s more difficult to convey an internal conflict on film than it is on the page, but this is something different. In the novel, watching a loving father forced against his will to turn into the man he grew up terrified he would one day become is moving and sad. There’s no equivalent sadness to the film; the transition seems more a revelation of what was there all along. As mentioned before, there’s no family in need of saving. It makes you wonder if there’s anything worth saving anywhere.

Another change requires some spoilage, so consider yourself warned.

In both versions, Dick Hallorann re-enters the narrative around the climax, in response to Danny’s desperate mental call. In the novel, after surviving attacks from the hotel and a drunken, possessed Jack, he helps Wendy and Danny escape while the Overlook burns. There’s a bittersweet (and, admittedly, somewhat pointless) epilogue, we see the remaining Torrances staying with Hallorann while they both recuperate from their injuries.

The movie has Hallorann making the same cross country trip, only instead of wrestling with the topiary animals and getting a roque mallet to the gut, poor Scatman Crothers is axed to death almost immediately after stepping in the hotel’s front doors. It’s nastily funny, like much of the film’s third act; even though his arrival does do some good, by distracting Jack long enough to let Wendy to get free, and providing both her and Danny with a Sno-Cat they can drive to safety in, all everyone remembers is his crumpled body on the lobby floor. It’s perhaps the most explicit contradiction of the source material in the entire movie. King’s Hallorann serves as a moderate deus ex machina; but stripped of his deus-hood by Kubrick, he has no place in the brutal machina that remains.

Oh, and while we’re in the spoiler section–what is up with that ending, anyway? The last shot of the movie is a photograph of a decades gone party during the Overlook’s heydays, and as the camera slowly closes in, we see a shockingly young Jack Nicholson in the front of the festivities, grinning like a loon. What to make of this? The most obvious conclusion is that Jack, after freezing to death in the hedge maze, has been assumed into the hotel’s crew of haunts and spooks. But unlike nearly every other horror film with a “kicker’ ending, there’s not the slightest hint that this is a bad thing. Torrance wasn’t punished for failing to kill his wife and son, nor did he discover that the Overlook wasn’t as welcoming as he initial believed, as would’ve certainly been the case in King’s novel. In fact, the ending seems like a happy one, at least for Jack. Which, again, is rarity. How many ghost stories can you think of where a murderous, hateful collection of spirits is actually the happiest place on earth?

There’s the end of the spoilers.

King has been very public about his disappointment in the first film version of The Shining. He even went so far as to write the teleplay for a disastrous ABC miniseries, trumpeting it as the book’s first “faithful” adaptation. Hopefully he’s mellowed in the years since then, because while it’s easy to understand his frustration, there’s no denying that Stanley Kubrick’s Shining is going to be sticking with us for a long time.

If no parent is perfect, and no child escapes, the reverse is equally true; but in the end, King doesn’t think that’s quite as terrible as it sounds. Redemption is still possible, he believes, even if it sometimes comes at the cost of all we have. But the movie, stripping the novel of its humanistic core, whispers another message entirely, describing a world where redemption is so alien as to be absurd, and that every relationship has too many rooms and too many closed doors. And that behind those doors are parties that we long to join, even if we cannot possibly comprehend them.

SOURCE: QQQQ
SCREEN: QQQQ
That “237″? Not a typo.

NOTE: Due to a tech glitch that I still don’t understand, sometimes this page (and all the review pages) doesn’t load correctly. If you have any problems, trying refreshing the page, as that seems to work.

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“From Beyond,” by H.P. Lovecraft

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From Beyond, directed by Stuart Gordon

Look I’m standing naked before you
Don’t you want more than my sex
I can scream as loud as your last one
But I can’t claim innocence…
-Tori Amos
“Leather”

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us will admit to being at least a little uneasy about sex. We think about it a great deal, and there are times we want it so badly we can hardly think of anything else—and isn’t that sort of off-putting? You get used to your body making demands which supersede the intentions of your rational mind; but when you get right down to it, most of what matters happens in the base of the spine, the impulses that drive us to decisions we can only justify after they’re made. Lust makes us vulnerable in ways we can’t avoid. The drive, with all its squishy, dangling moments, is both too intimate and too alien to be completely understood.

Most of us make some kind peace with this. After all, sex (or the idea of sex)(sigh) is exciting enough on the surface that there’s really no need to actually think about it; and some would argue that it’s the thinking that gets us in trouble. But then there are those who don’t have the luxury of reflex. The ones who can do nothing but think.

While it’s dangerous to speak for the dead, we can be reasonably sure that H.P. Lovecraft fell in the latter category. Sex itself, even of the most formal and oblique variety (ie, love), is a very rare occurrence in his writings, surfacing only in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”—and since “Innsmouth” revolves around a particularly disgusting series of miscengenations, it’s not exactly a positive spin. Even beyond “Innsmouth,” however, the fear of sexual intimacy runs through nearly every short story the man produced.

It can be argued that Lovecraft’s central preoccupation was the horror of the Other. By translating his racism (and xenophobia, since xenophobia is just racism with a better Scrabble hand) into something far more potent and obscene, he transcended his limitations as a person and achieved something that resonates in even the healthiest of minds. Sex is just another extension of this concern. While its presence in his fiction is largely subtextual, it is the ultimate Other-dread. It represents an invasion of the horrid unknown on a most personal level. There’s something awfully–vulgar–about the goings on down in R’yleh land, with all those great chasms and tentacled beasties. It’s not something nice people talk about. It’s too damp.

“From Beyond,” the story that serves as inspiration for today’s review, is one of Lovecraft’s underachievers: short, somewhat generic, and sustained by a premise which, while compelling, never intrudes on the reader as successfully as his best writing. The plot is simple—an unnamed narrator describes his last encounter with the ill-fated Crawford Tillinghast, a scientist obsessed with expanding the limits of human perception.

From the beginning, the narrator is both intrigued and apalled by his friend’s work:

That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

(Transcribing this, I can’t help but wonder what Lyz Kingsley of And You Call Yourself a Scientist would make of it. The logic fascinates me—does this apply to all scientific disciplines? Is there a certain level at which every possible area of study begins to yield poisonous fruit?

It’s a shame Lyz hasn’t done more Lovecraft. But then, it’s not like she needs to concern herself much over “feelings,” as anyone who’s faced her army of remote-controlled, flesh eating zombies can attest.

I miss my other leg.)

Back on topic—the narrator’s apprehensions, when voiced, lead to his expulsion from Tillinghast’s house. A few weeks later, however, he is invited back. It seems the good doctor has had a breakthrough, and is desperate to share his good fortune with a former friend.

In his efforts to go “beyond,” Crawford has constructed a machine which stimulates the pineal gland, giving him (and anyone else in the room while the machine is on) glimpses into the unseen world. The narrator agrees to sit in on a session, and soon finds himself witness to monstrosities undreamt of; thick wriggling creatures that fill every millimeter of the space around us. Crawford tells the narrator that he must stay absolutely still. If he doesn’t, he’ll attract the attention of even more dangerous fiends—because if the narrator can now perceive the beings around him, those beings can perceive him. And They are hungry. Always hungry.

Which might explain the absence of servants downstairs, but it doesn’t justify the growing predatory gleam in Tillinghast’s eye….

In terms of adaptation, “From Beyond” is strictly one act. A faithful screen version would run no more than a half hour, and that’s if Crawford had a serious stutter and wanted to show off his etchings. If you’re shooting for much more than a punchline, you need to expand on the central premise—and if you’re making a movie, you need to find a way for Lovecraft’s standard unimaginables ("Oh god … I see it … the all-seeing eye, the endless awful shifting— Ooop, damn, I’ve been driven mad. Purple monkey butterscotch.") to be as effective visually as they are on the page.

Stuart Gordon, the man responsible for one of the few truly excellent Lovecraft adaptations out there (Re-Animator), chose a unique approach to the problem. Like Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Gordon’s From Beyond seeks to exploit the connection between terror and physical attraction on a level that goes largely unvoiced in most genre films. But where Barker was using his own work—a novella already hugely concerned with the extremes of sensation—Gordon merged his intentions with the prim and proper musings of horror fiction’s greatest prude. The results, while not as consistently brilliant as his previous film, still make for an entertaining, freaky picture. And it’s got Barbara Crampton in fetish gear. Huzzah.

Instead of using the short story as the movie’s climax, the filmmakers (Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna and screenwriter Dennis Paoli) position an altered version of the events of “From Beyond” in the film’s prologue. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) is now the name of the “narrator” figure, while the story’s Crawford has transformed into one Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel), a fifty-something sado-masochist with a taste in old flags and chains. Crawford is living with the doctor and assisting him in his experiments; during the pre-credits sequence, we see them crossing that fabled line between Man and God Forbid. Crawford flees in mortal terror, and Pretorius (note the nod to Bride of Frankenstein) just plain loses his head.

Definite echoes of Re-Animator here, with Combs once again in attendance for an older colleague’s gruesome death; but while the sociopathic Herbert West manages to give authorities sufficient explanation to avoid incarceration, Tillinghast is so disturbed why what he’s seen that he’s promptly arrested and thrown in an asylum.

Enter Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton). An expert in criminal psychology, she’s called in to determine whether or not Crawford is mentally capable to stand trial. After speaking briefly with him, she becomes convinced that his story has some elements of truth in it; his comments on the stimulation of the pineal gland especially interest her. McMichaels decides that the only course of action is for her and Crawford to return to Pretorius’s home. There, under the watchful eye of Officer Buford “Bubba” Stevens (Ken Foree), they’ll attempt to reproduce the experiments, both to clear Crawford’s name and satisfy Katherine’s curiosity.

Unsurprisingly, this is a Very Bad Idea. During the last abortive test, Crawford took an axe to the Resonator, the machine he and Pretorius used for their explorations; but it doesn’t take too long before he’s got the thing up and running again. Bubba makes some unsavory discoveries about the headless man’s private life—lots of S&M, lots of whipping, and everything on video tape—but that’s only a preview of the main attraction: the triumphant return of the man himself. Buck naked and apparently none the worse for wear, Pretorius appears before Katherine and Crawford while the Resonator is running. Crawford is confused, and Pretorius insists that Crawford “touch” him; when Crawford does, Pretorius’s skin sloughs off and he starts turning into something else.

Crawford turns off the machine, but the damage has been done. Something’s happening inside Katherine’s mind, and a compulsion she barely recognizes is growing. She becomes more and more interested in the Resonator and its potential; and she seems to be increasingly more sexually aware. Despite the objections of Tillinghast and Bubba, she re-activates the machine, and in the ensuing carnage, Crawford is devoured by a monstrous worm in the building’s basement. When the Resonator is turned off, Crawford re-appears, covered in bruises and completely bald. Apparently, this is a turn on for Katherine; while Crawford lies unconscious in Pretorius’s old rec room, his psychiatrist becomes entranced with the dead man’s “toys,” ultimately putting on a dominatrix outfit. In perhaps the movie’s signature scene, she straddles Crawford and starts rubbing him up and down … and down … and down…

It’s supposed to be a good thing that Bubba breaks up the scene before things get too serious, but I’ll be damned if I can explain why.

Things get worse, as Pretorius (or whatever it is that’s calling itself Pretorius) has now figured out a way to turn on the Resonator himself. Can Katherine, bald Crawford and Bubba stop him before he oozes in to our reality? And more importantly, do they really want to? And even more important than that, will Crampton ever get back into that fetish gear?

Sadly no on that last count; much like Re-Animator’s infamous “head giving head” scene, the bondage outfit lingers on in memory long after its brief moment has past. Still, it’s a pretty great moment, and a fairly shocking one at that; while From Beyond is full of truly excellent monster make-up (lotta goo, lot of giant tube worms), the air of sexual deviancy is perhaps its most surprising element, if only because it’s not something you expect to see in this sort of film.

When we learn early on that the pineal gland, in addition to moderating what we see, is also connected to the sexual impulse (busy ####ing gland), it’s inevitable that there will be at least some level of naughtiness on display. Crampton’s lascivious entry into the world of S&M is at once over the top and entirely logical; it’s the sort of great scene only a horror movie can give you, and it’s made all the more powerful because it’s the transgression of a taboo.

At its heart, horror is an intensely conservative genre. We fear death and misery because of what they are, but also because they represent a change in the acceptable status quo. Horror revolves around the danger of that change—a monster isn’t just a physical threat, but a psychological one, especially a monster that exists outside our understanding of the natural world. While From Beyond isn’t exactly a whole-hearted embrace of sexual sadism, it does unmoor us enough by speaking to the private urges that we try to hide; urges which make the danger of change largely an internal one.

It’s not a perfect movie, despite these excellent qualities. There’s no question it’s an enjoyable one; even apart from the bondage scene, there is some inventive creature work, and the plot itself remains unpredictable and involving through-out. The acting is solid: Crampton is as game as ever, although I find her first scenes as the apparently “repressed” doctor (ie, her hair is in a bun and she’s wearing glasses) unconvincing. Ken Foree is probably the most obviously comic character, but he never sinks into caricature. And Jeffrey Combs is, of course, excellent—although it’s strange to see him play a somewhat “normal” character.

That actually brings me to one of the movie’s few flaws—while it has a sense of humor, unlike Re-Animator, it lack a particularly strong driving force. Where Herbert West managed to be both the hero and the villain, here we have the grimacing, grunting Pretorius in the baddie role, spouting one liners and drooling while his body mutates into some new horror. It’s just not as memorable; gone is Combs’ arch wit and iconic misanthropy. The heroes are far too earnest to be much better. There’s a moment near the end when Katherine bursts out with an “I love you, Crawford!” and I still can’t tell if it’s intentionally a joke. It certainly feels like a joke. While Re-Animator’s conclusion is surprisingly affecting, here, we just leave feeling vaguely creeped out. Oh, and thinking about handcuffs.

The pacing is slightly off, too. I watched the newly released “Director’s Cut” DVD for this review, and while it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original, it looks like they just added in a few more gore scenes. Much as I love gore, at times it feels sort of self-indulgent, especially in the last act—a couple of murders are largely gratuitous, as once you’ve seen once person get their brains sucked out through their eye socket, you’ve probably seen them all.

There’s also a weird bit in the climax when Katherine somehow gets ahold of a homemade bomb. Now, I have no problem with anyone wanting to blow stuff up, but this is a seriously professional looking bomb—five or six sticks of dynamite wired together under a digital clock, all neatly arranged and organized. Is this a talent of hers the screenplay forgot to mention? Is it the work of a former patient? Or did she just put on her leather doodads and seduce someone into building it for her? (If it’s the last, damn them for not including the seduction scene in the final cut.) Realistically it would’ve made more sense for her to show up with a can of gasoline and a box of matches; having an explosive device straight of a Chuck Norris movie is stretching credulity.

But these are just minor quibbles. While it’s never a particularly scary film, From Beyond is a ton of fun, and its willingness to go as far with its premise as it does raises some intriguing issues. Our sexual yearnings are generally a mystery, operating at a subconscious level where we can only judge the stimulus and not the response. But if someone (or something) were to start manipulating those impulses, how would we know? If I woke up tomorrow morning with a sudden lust for brunettes dressed like turn of the century carnival barkers—and if that afternoon I ran into just such a woman—should I be suspicious? Grateful? Who knows how far things might go. We can’t control what we find attractive, we can only control how we respond to it; and if even that control is taken away, what manner of creature might we become?

According to Stuart Gordon, it would probably involve laytex and a lot of grunting. I can live with that, even if Lovecraft most likely couldn’t.

SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQQ
It looks like we have a new contender for TMBOLWTWHHTMIHESI.

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“1408,” by Stephen King

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1408, directed by Mikael Håfström

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
A few years ago, a friend of mine came into Portland with his new girlfriend. I drove down from Lewiston to meet them on a Saturday night; we went out to dinner and then did some barhopping. Eventually, we all got drunk enough that I wasn’t going to be able to drive home. So we found a Motel 8 just off the turnpike and rented two rooms—one for them and one for me. There was more drinking, a bit of talk, and sometime after one, I made my way next door to crash.

I woke up at eight the next morning, and for a few seconds, I was very confused. This was not my beautiful bed by a long shot. But then I heard noises from the other room; I remembered the night before, recognized my reflection in the mirror over the dresser and realized the sounds I was hearing were my friend and his girl having (fairly enthusiastic) hangover sex.

Breakfast was awkward.

Mike Enslin, the writer cum paranormal investigator of 1408 tells us that hotel rooms are scary places. He’s not far off; but while Enslin talks about the people who’ve used the room before you, how the person who last slept in the bed you lie on could’ve murdered his whole family and you’d never know, I think the situation is more complex. What bothers me about hotels—about the neat homogenization of human needs, the sterility that resists even the slightest hint of permanence—is that they pretend at intimacy without ever truly achieving it. It’s a bedroom, and that’s where you sleep, but it’s not yours. The hundred small gestures we use to make a space our own become irrelevant in a room where furniture placement follows a rigid conformity; where toothbrushes come in plastic bags and shampoo in personal sizes.

That impermanence leaves you vulnerable. Those noises I heard were nothing to worry about, but what if they had been? And what if after a few moments, those noises had turned into screams?

As Stephen King himself admits in its introduction, “1408″ was a story he never intended on finishing. He wrote the first ten pages as a way to demonstrate some of the principles he’d been laying out in his non-fiction book On Writing; but the story turned out to be less disposable than he’d initially believed.

Which is interesting, because that opening is easily the least compelling thing about the piece. Mike Enslin, as described above, arrives in the lobby of the Hotel Dolphin where he is immediately pulled aside by Olin, the hotel manager. Olin takes Mike into the manager’s office and does his best to convince him not to stay in room 1408. Clearly, Olin would like to forbid the use of the room entirely, but due to an obscure civil rights law, if a room is open, a hotel has to let it to anyone who specifically requests it.

We learn that Enslin makes his living by visiting supposedly haunted locations, like graveyards and mansions and writing about them in lurid (and often trumped up) detail. But he has never seen an actual ghost; he doesn’t believe they exist. Olin thinks this arrogance makes Enslin uniquely ill-prepared to face whatever’s waiting for him upstairs—something that isn’t a ghost, exactly. Something that’s much, much worse.

Structurally, “1408″ is relatively straightforward, and this first scene is no exception. The “Don’t dare go inside the abandoned house/factory/bumper cars” speech is one of the hoary standards of horror writing, and the conversation between Olin and Mike does nothing to subvert our expectations. Olin brings out the body list, tells Enslin a whole host of bad things, and Enslin does his level best to Scully them all. Of course he refuses to leave. They always do.

This feeling of familiarity isn’t helped by the fact that King himself has already written a very similar scene in the first chapter of The Shining. The relationships are somewhat changed—in the novel, the manager is talking to a prospective employee, neither man likes the other very much, and Ulman (the manager) doesn’t go into the same depth as Olin does. But it’s still a hotel, there’s still a lot of foreshadowing, and it’s still one man trying to convince another where his best interests lie after all other recourses have failed.

“1408″ suffers in comparison because the writing simply isn’t very good. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what’s wrong (Enslin’s explanation for the cigarette behind his ear is clunky, but that’s the most specific example I can think of); it’s more the sense that you get in a lot of King’s late-period work that everything is going on longer than it needs to. A set-up works best when the writer gets as much of its way as possible: hook the reader, give the premise, and then move on to other things. Here, it just drags.

We learn that Mike considers himself to be slumming with the kind of work he’s doing; that he used to be a “real” writer, but now just sticks to fake spook hackery. He’s defensive about it, too—always jumping to the wrong conclusion if there’s any chance Olin might insult him. This is decent character building, until you read the story a second time and realize that it never actually goes anywhere. Clearly, Enslin is being set up as the traditional skeptic who must learn the Error Of His Ways, but once he goes inside 1408, he could be anybody. All the talk about the room’s deadliness is nice, but it’s so rote that it’s not really scary; you can’t help but feel that King wrote the scene not because the story demanded it, but because it’s tradition.

Still, one reason sequences like this are so common is that they work, and even with all its problems, this one isn’t a total loss. I especially liked Enslin’s surprise when he learns about all the supposed “natural” deaths in the room—he’s done the research, he knows about the six or seven suicides, but he never thought to take into account simple heart attacks. The sheer volume of mortality takes him (and us) off-guard.

Things really kick in once the exposition gets out of the way, and when “1408″ gets going, the pay-off is surprisingly excellent. King makes an effort to subvert the usual haunting tropes; there are no specters, no rattling chains, nothing that ever was or could ever be human. Just a terrible randomness that only makes sense when it runs down your spine.

It’s worth getting into in more depth, but we should probably talk about the film version first, so as not to repeat ourselves. (Not sure why we slipped into first person plural there. Should probably consult an exorcist.)

1408 starts strong. We watch Mike Enslin (John Cusack) spend the night in a supposedly haunted bed and breakfast; ghosts and goblins fail to make an appearance. We then follow Mike to a signing for his 10 Nights at 10 Haunted Spots series, where an audience proves just as elusive as the previous night’s ghouls. Maybe three people show up. One of them asks Mike to sign one of his pre-ghost novels, an achingly “serious” thing called The Long Road Home. He asks her how much she paid for it; somewhat embarrassed, she tells him, “not much.”

All of this is nicely done; in quick sketches, we get an idea of who Enslin is, what he does, and how he may not be entirely satisfied with doing it. There’s a surfing sequence that practically screams, “This will be important later!” but the first real sign of trouble comes when Mike picks up his mail. He finds a postcard with a photo of the Dolphin Hotel on the front; on the back, the message, “Don’t go into 1408.”

This was when I started to adjust my expectations.

A closed room story works best when operating under its own inherent limitations; the rule is, the hauntee is only in danger when actually inside the affected room. We never learn who sent the note. Since there’s no indication that Mike had plans on to visit the Dolphin before he got the postcard, it’s doubtful that Olin or anyone else involved in the hotel would’ve tried to contact him. The most likely suspect, given how the rest of the movie plays and the surprisingly artful handwriting on the card, is that the room–or whatever malicious force resides there—somehow managed to mail a postcard for the simple purpose of luring Mike inside.

That’s about an 11 on the idiometer, honestly. (Though it’s only a rough 7.2 on the You’ve Got To Be #%*@ing Kidding Me scale.) All you need for a follow-up is to learn that 1408 already killed Mike’s father, and that Mike’s grandfather was the hotel’s original architect.

Fortunately, things never get that bad. Instead, we get an in-between movie—one where the best impulses are in constant struggle with the worst.

1408 is in many ways a one man show, so it’s a lucky thing that one man is the film’s greatest asset. Much like Johnny Depp in Secret Window, John Cusack is the sort of actor who can be called on to make the best out even the most dreadful scripts. (Hell, I actually dug him in Identitiy.) Here, he’s able to redeem a good number of the movie’s less than inspired choices; and when there’s a choice that does work, he more than rises to the occasion.

The rest of the cast doesn’t fair quite so well. In their defense, apart from Samuel L. Jackson as Olin, their characters are largely superfluous. (I suppose the screenwriters would disagree when it comes to Mike’s wife, played by Mary McCormack, but we’ll get to that.) Even Jackson’s role is beefed up unnecessarily; he appears near the beginning, as in the story, but comes back for two later scenes, once as an apparent hallucination and then again after the climax, in a moment so poorly conceived it’s hilarious.

The conversation between Enslin and Olin that began the short story remains much the same for the film version. It actually felt a bit less effective, oddly enough. While some bits (like the cigarette thing) play better when spoken, much of the dialogue falls flat, and the blocking for the two actors is distractingly labored. (Lots of getting up and sitting down for no more reason than the director wanted the shot to have more action.) Plus, you can’t completely disregard the suspicion that Jackson—generally a dynamic screen presence—is miscast in the role of handwringing middle management.

However, much like its source material, 1408 picks up considerably after the preliminaries are dispatched. It never quite achieves consistently the excellence of its best moments, but it’s better than its worst moments suggest.

In the story, Mike Enslin’s trip into 1408 lasts seventeen minutes. The effect of whatever presence is in the room on a visitor is described as being similar to poisoned gas, and few people are able to stay inside for very long without suffering long term adverse affects. For Mike, things start to go wrong almost immediately; when he arrives outside the room, he finds the door is crooked. The jamb is even, but somehow the door itself is off-kilter. The moment passes—sort of—but we’ve just been given a glimpse into the nature of the evil we’re about to face. It’s not something that can be directly handled. Fighting through it is like wrestling a particularly vivid fever dream.

The seventeen minutes that follow are extremely creepy stuff, although not in a way I feel comfortable describing explicitly. There are three paintings on the wall of the room, and all three are hanging wrong. Mike fixes them. They go wrong again. He talks into the microphone of his tape recorder and speaks rational assessments that slowly degrade into gibberish. (My favorite line: “My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut turnpike.") The phone rings and a disembodied voice shouts numbers at him ("Five! The number is five!") Then the walls start melting and he hears the sound of something coming for him—something that will rend him utterly, but will leave behind a corpse that looks remarkably like it died a natural death.

That’s basically it, but I’m getting a chill even writing it down. (Doesn’t help that it’s near on midnight, and I live alone.) The speed with which events deteriorate once Mike enters 1408 takes you by surprise, especially after the somewhat stately build-up that proceeds it. The “poison gas” description gives you something specific to connect with, and it’s disturbing the way you can never tell how much of what Mike sees is hallucination—how he keeps speaking into the microphone with utter confidence while his mind betrays him—and the final deep down terror that what’s real and unreal no longer matters.

Any movie attempting to do a strict adaptation of such material would need a particularly visionary director at the helm; I’m thinking of something like Eraserhead-era Lynch on cocaine. Mikael Håfström, director of 1408, chooses to go a different route. While I can’t exactly blame this decision, I can’t help but feel a little let down by the result.

While story Mike’s fate is decided less than twenty minutes after he enters the room, movie Mike is inside 1408 for a full hour before things climax. This changes the nature of the experience altogether; instead of a immediate and total break-down of perceptions, we get a gradual build-up of weirdness.

This weirdness can be said to fall into two broad categories: general environment warping and attacks specifically targeted at Our Hero. Of those two, the former (inevitably) works the best. Mike suffers through temperature changes, a bed that makes itself (leading to one of the greatest lines in any movie ever—I’ve quoted it at the end of this review), a psycho with a hook popping up at the darnedest times, visions of the room’s previous occupants, and the ever changing spatial geography of the hotel room itself. Not all of these are actually frightening; the appearance of the other guests is too predictable, and the phone conversation Mike has where a perky female voice tells him he has to take his life “of your own free will” was a little too on the nose for my taste. But the hook-wielding flannel dude was always good for a jump, and there’s a great bit where Enslin starts signaling for help to someone in an apartment directly across the street from his—only to realize that the other person isn’t just responding to his gestures, but copying them.

Besides, any movie that uses the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” as a cue for bad mojo has its heart in the right place.

It’s the other kind of attack that gave me the most problems—the scenes which are intended to play on Mike’s personal history and drive him to eventual suicide. There’s a brief sequence where Mike sees his father (Len Cariou!), hospitalized and confused, but for the most part, the room chooses to focus it’s Freudian malevolence against Mike’s ex-wife (Mary McCormacK) and, perhaps most importantly, the daughter whose death ruined his marriage and killed his more idealistic writing career.

One thing I will say in the movie’s favor: we don’t actually learn about the dead girl until Mike’s well into the mind-screwery. We know Enslin’s troubled, and when his publisher asks him if he’s sure he wants to come back to New York, we get a sense of some history there; but it’s only when the room starts showing Mike video of his previously happy family that the whole picture comes clear.

Too bad that picture is so thuddingly unoriginal. The trouble with having a plotline like this is that it allows you to distance yourself as an audience from the main threat. I’ve had some unpleasant things happen in my life, but I’ll freely admit that none of them come close to the horror of losing a child. While I can pity and feel for Enslin (largely due to Cusack’s excellent performance; the scenes with the kid are generally lousy, but Cusack sells them well), once 1408 starts hitting on such a localized trauma, I’m no longer threatened. There’s nothing in my past that would cut me this deeply. The situation becomes less about the room’s dangers and more about Mike’s unresolved issues, and those issues are just not that compelling.

(To give the devil his due, this does lead to one good scene near the end of the film where Mike confronts his daughter’s ghost. It’s not scary, as such, but the desperation in Cusack and the eerie calm of his child are actually surprisingly moving.)

The movie’s other big mistake is making Mike’s ex-wife Lily an active participant in the plot. As things in the hotel grow increasingly worse, Mike becomes desperate to contact someone from the outside to help him. Somewhat implausibly (since Olin told us at the start that “electronics don’t tend to work in 1408″), he’s able to get a wireless ‘net connection on his laptop, and go into a video chat with his ex. The presence of an outsider immediately ruins whatever claustrophobic momentum the film had been building. We can briefly hope that this is just another illusion—until we realize that the room has intentionally let Mike get a hold of Lily, so it can trick her into coming out to the hotel to rescue him.

It’s stuff like this that drives me insane, because it’s so thoroughly useless. You can argue that putting his ex in danger forces Mike to fight the room more proactively, but isn’t someone struggling for his own sanity and soul enough? Throwing in Lily just makes it all so safe, as though 1408 wasn’t a place where people lose everything, but a place they go when they need some really aggressive therapy. A haunting isn’t effective unless you’re truly alone; there’s a reason that Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is as much about social alienation as it is about bumps in the night. 1408’s clearest intention is to drive its occupant to a state of ultimate despair, and reminding Enslin he has someone out there who loves him enough to rush to his aid isn’t exactly a smart play.

(One last thing before we wrap up, but since it involves big ole spoilers, I’ll give you a chance to skip the next paragraph, should you be so inclined.)

Both short story and movie end in fire. But while in the movie version, Enslin uses an incredibly expensive bottle of booze to start a conflagration in 1408’s bedroom, thus “killing” whatever force is driving the room and saving his wife, story-Enslin sets himself on fire. The difference shows the crucial change in philosophy between story and film. One has a man ultimately triumphing over evil; the other has a man confronted with such an overwhelming doom that his only option is to damage himself in order to get free. I don’t know if I can say whether one approach is explicitly better than the other, but I damn well know which scares me more.

A hotel room can be an off-putting place because it reminds of us our relative unimportance. We are not the first person to use this room, and we will not be the last; but in terms of effect and consequence, who we are while we’re there matters hardly at all. “1408″ exploits this by giving us a threat whose attacks are devastating and entirely impersonal. 1408 uses some of the same tactics, but in the end, its central conflict is more about a hero desperate to redeem himself than a monster that likes to play with its food.

Which is too bad, really.

SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
“Let’s Encyclopedia Brown this bitch.”

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“The Call of Cthulhu,” by H.P. Lovecraft

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The Call of Cthulhu, directed by Andrew Leman

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

COMPARE/CONTRAST:

Context can be a terrifying thing.

Imagine—a room. Just a regular old room. Which isn’t scary, until you realize the room is full of people. Of course, that’s not all that scary either; except most of the people don’t look quite right. There’s the guy with the hockey mask and the machete. The woman with the severe facial burns and finger knives. The pale man with fangs and a yellowed tuxedo shirt. The wolf on two legs with the ragged brown hair.

Still not exactly the horror to end all things, but it’s certainly something, right? Especially when you notice the little girl hiding in the corner. She crouches in the shadows, staring in all directions. Nobody’s noticed her yet, but dear god, it’s not that large a room, and sooner or later, heads will turn. And then—ah Christ, it’ll be terrible.

But it’s not quite done yet. Because you haven’t noticed the orange and black streamers. Or the punch bowl. Or the Jack O’Lantern on the window sill. The guy lifts his hockey mask to take a drink, the woman takes off her finger knives to give a friend a hug, and you relax. The vampire’s fangs keep popping out, and the werewolf has a zipper down his neck. Somewhere, someone screams, but you recognize it coming from the television down the hall.

The little girl is fine. Just up past her bedtime, is all.

Except… Her eyes don’t quite fit her face. She leans into the light. She’s perfectly normal—but there’s a zipper down her neck, too.

By themselves, few things are inherently horrifying. The knife troubles us only because of the arm that wields it; the dark infects our dreams because of what we suspect may be lurking inside. The trick of any good horror writer is to provide a context for a threat that resists assimilation. Perhaps no other writer of fantastical fiction understood this quite as well as H.P. Lovecraft. Much has been said of Lovecraft’s ability to conjure up ancient gods and gibbering beasties, but the single most important unifying fact of his oeuvre, at least in terms of its effectiveness, is his contextual genius—knowing that presentation and circumstance are at least as important as the event itself. The gloom beneath your desk isn’t nearly as awful as the darkness of a moonless night; only Lovecraft could combine the two, and present us with some terrible day when we look down from our work to see inky blackness spreading across our legs, a blackness that can neither be accepted nor repelled.

The Cthulhu mythos is the perfect example of this narrative knack, providing us with just enough information to suspect what’s at stake, but never enough for us to be sure. While most horror fiction is content to show creatures operating behind the scenes of a recognizable world, Lovecraft works to reverse the standards, inducing a queer sort of vertigo; humanity becomes a mere afterthought to the existence of beings so monstrous and ancient that we can barely begin to comprehend our danger, let alone confront it.

The typical Lovecraftian narrator is a man who, for reasons never precisely described, has striven to touch the face of God—and having succeded, become immediately desperate to forget the existence of his own hands. Francis Wayland Thurston, the protagonist of “The Call of Cthulu,” is no exception. In fact, the story in many ways represents the Platonic ideal of Lovecraft’s work; it’s certainly his best known piece, and the titular nasty his most infamous creation. “Call” give us the rules, so to speak: there are beings old as the stars themselves called the Great Old Ones, who slumber beneath the sea in cities of hideously aberrant architecture, worshipped by the criminally malformed, awaiting only the correct conjunction of the cosmos to awaken and lay waste to our presumption of civilization. Cthulhu itself has achieved a level of fame nearly beyond that of its creator; but no matter how many plush dolls are made in its likeness, the bewinged octopoid monstrosity still possesses at least some power to shock. There’s something unsettling about its very design—so clearly ludicrous and yet undeniably affecting. Like the infamous anti-Euclidian angles which compromise its home, Cthulhu works because it shouldn’t work, and that paradox of nature unmans us.

Or it unmans Francis Thurston, at any rate. While he may be the quintessential Lovecraft “hero,” Thurston has the rare distinction of never coming in direct contact with any of the mystery he unravels. Despite a good deal of globe-trotting, Thurston spend all of his time playing catch-up to the research and adventures of those who’ve gone before him. In the end, all he has are notes, some newspaper clippings, and the accounts of near madmen. The closest he comes to the Big Bad itself is the bas relief left him by his grand-uncle. But these bits and pieces prove enough to drive him to despair; because once combined, the picture they form is of a universe where man is an after-thought, and beings of unfathomable awfulness lurk just past the edge of sight.

This particular vision is what makes Lovecraft’s work so memorable; but it’s also why adapting his fiction to film has proved such an elusive prospect. We have certain expectations when we watch a movie, and primary among those is that we get to see. You can play games, you can be oblique, you can imply and hint, but at some point, you’re going to have to show us something—as soon as we see the giant moving pyramid things of “The Shadow Out of Time,” we’re going to start giggling, and the whole experience is ruined. Unquestionably, a writer whose work which relies so heavily on the terror of concepts which are beyond human comprehension is going to suffer in a medium that demands explication. But part of the problem as well is our modern expectation for special effects. We’ve been spoiled by technology into believing that anything that can be imagined, can be represented; so once Cthulhu makes his appearance, and it’s just a slightly weirder-than-usual looking kaiju, we fail to be impressed.

The Call of Cthulhu looks to solve this problem by ducking it entirely. Shot entirely on video and running just under fifty minutes long, it posits a rather clever “what if”—what if, after “Call”’s original publication in Weird Tales in 1926, it was optioned by filmmakers and made into an early silent feature. By changing the rules, expectations are subverted. It’s simply another bit of context trickery; while we know that modern movie makers have access to any number of tools, the silent era was forced to work within a stricter set of guidelines. Camera movement was limited, acting required already hammy theater-trained professionals to over-sell every unheard line, and, most importantly, the effects required a more aggressive suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience than the films we see today. If the standard Lovecraft theme is of Man faced with horrors which he is utterly unequipped to deal with, why not make a movie in a time where the director and crew are nearly as unable to render the horrors of their story as the story’s narrator?

First, the drawbacks: no matter how much digital distress is done to the image, video does not look like film. From the opening minute, any illusion you might have that this really is some sort of lost classic is shattered—not only are the movie’s digital origins exceedingly clear, the director (Andrew Leman) chooses to begin with a camera movement that seems sorely out of place for the intended time period. Also, the actors, while not terrible, look modern. It’s hard to describe it otherwise; it’s like the old saw that certain faces go out of fashion as time passes, and without a bit of effort, it’s impossible to imagine any of them existing in the same period as Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney.

But to the good, once that effort is made—and since this movie is a bit off the beaten path, one can assume that any viewer will be going in with at least some willingness to cut slack—the rewards are surprisingly rich. While the actors might not seem quite chronologically appropriate, their performances are aided immeasurably by the conceit of silent film; what would seem hammy or flat in a sound picture works quite nicely, due largely to the written dialogue and direction. (Which isn’t to say the actors themselves are poor. Only that, like the special effects and everything else, you end up judging them by different standards.)

The music, constant through nearly the entirety of the running time, is excellent, both period appropriate and wonderfully evocative. It lends each scene a weight they might not otherwise have. The script, hewing very closely to Lovecraft’s original story, keeps the pace moving briskly, and (at least partly helped by the running time) the movie doesn’t lag or seemed particularly padded. There’s no forced love interest, no attempt to alter the source material into a more conventional structure. While working outside a studio meant money was that much harder to come by, it also gave the filmmakers more creative lee-way, and the results are there on the screen.

As for the effects work, it’s quite neat. There’s a lot of green screen, some on-camera effects and a bit of nifty stop motion at the film’s climax; it’s not exactly seamless (the green screen in particular is impossible to ignore), but rather that throw you out of the story, noticing the strings (so to speak) in this case actually involves you deeper. Having willingly accepted the film’s chronological conceit, as well as understanding the real world somewhat humble origins, one find’s one’s self much more willing to see faults as virtues. Besides, it’s not as though cheap (or cheaper) effects can’t be spooky in their own right. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but something about the gap between what I’m watching and what’s being hinted at behind the clay and sets, is sort of eerie.

Adaptation-wise, as previously mentioned, the movie plays straight pool. Thurston is still following in the footsteps of his deceased grand-uncle’s investigation; we still learn of the terrible swamp rituals interrupted by Inspector Legrasse and his men, and the film climaxes, like the story, on an island in the ocean that simply should not exist. While I haven’t seen all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, I don’t feel all that uncomfortable going out on a limb and saying this one is the most faithful. It’s a nice change of pace, really; one hopes (in vain, most likely) that other filmmakers might follow screenwriter Sean Branney’s example in the future.

Still, there are a few changes worth mentioning. There’s a framing device that shows Thurston (referred to in the credits as simply “The Man") in an asylum, passing his work to another and pleading that it be destroyed. It’s a hoary enough cliché that I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary; on the one hand, it shows us how much Thurston has been affected by his travels, but on the other, we’ve seen this sort of thing so many times before that it’s lost what little power to shock it might have had. It does make for a rather nice shot near the end where Thurston is wheeled away into darkness, though.

Thurston’s involvement with the Cthulhu cult is altered slightly as well. While he still never comes in direct contact with any cult member, his studies do drive him to a nightmare not entirely unlike the dreams recorded by his grand-uncle. While the sequence itself is inventive (I especially liked the giant, slightly burned books), it again feels overly familiar. The implication in the short story is that original dreamers, suffered largely by artists and poets (ie, the more traditionally “sensitive") over a specific period of time, were experiencing visions because of events on the other side of the world. Thurston’s dream happens after the most immediate danger is past, and while you can argue that it’s a dream more inspired by his nature of his current research than by any true psychic phenomenon, it still somewhat undercuts the power of the recorded visions.

Both the story and the film climax with the ill-fated crew of the Emma and their discoveries on the Pacific Ocean. In the story, the Emma finds its way blocked by the aptly-named Alert, a gunship manned by dangerous, vicious men who order the Emma to return the way they came. The Emma refuses, and after the Alert opens fire, her crew is forced to board the attacking ship. Due to the abhorrent nature of the Alert’s crew, the men of the Emma murder every crewmember to a man; then the captain decides to continue on their way as before, sailing the newly acquired Alert (the Emma having been sunk) in the direction the criminals were so desperate to keep them away from.

In the film, the Emma is set on by a tremendous storm, and just happens to bump into the abandoned Alert. The Emma is again sunk, this time by the weather, and the captain decides to visit an area on the maps as indicated by the Alert’s logbook, largely because he’s found a statue of Cthulhu and he’s curious.

This seems sort of clunky to me. I’m willing to bet that the filmmakers didn’t have time to shoot a tremendous ocean battle, but the timing of the storm is all wrong; the big storm in the story happens after the Emma’s crew has stumbled onto Cthulhu’s island, being an indication that the island has sunk back into the sea. Plus, having the captain decide to go on a new course just because he’s curious as to what killed an entire ship’s crew seems sort of unmotivated. At least in the original, the island was in the way of their original path. Here, everyone goes significantly out of their way to die horribly, and it’s a little silly.

One last minor complaint: as I mentioned, the acting works quite well, but I do think there was one slight misstep. Part of the point of “Call,” as with most Lovecraft’s stories, is the decent of the narrator from a position of skepticism to one of haunted, doomed certainty. In the film, however, the main character doesn’t have all that steep a slope to fall down. As played by Matt Foyer, he seems wasted and ruined even before he realizes what he’s dealing with; comparing the first scene of him in the asylum with him later in the movie, and there’s no real difference between the two. It’s somewhat traditional to present Lovecraft’s protagonists like Edgar Allan Poe’s—all twitches and nerves and bad dreams. But Lovecraft’s work is most effective when you can clearly see how it convinces and destroys even the heartiest of minds.

Still, these are all quibbles. Call of Cthulhu is a labor of love aimed squarely at Lovecraft enthusiasts, and on those terms it succeeds without question. Its faithfulness does it credit (they even have the wonderful moment on the island where a sailor falls into angle which should not exist), as does its cleverness. Whether not it entirely rises above its central gimmick is a matter of personal taste; speaking for myself, it’s an enjoyable curiosity, more notable for the potential it represents than for the film itself. I’m not sure I’d want to see more adaptations of Lovecraft “set” in that time period, but it does put lie to the assumption that his work can never be translated to the screen.

I can’t help but wonder if more could’ve been done with the concept. If Cthulhu and his ilk are beyond the ken of human experience, how creepy would it be to have their presence in a film prove beyond the experience of the film makers? What if you spent forty minutes with slightly cheesy Dr. Caligari sets and goofy fake moustaches, only to have the last ten minutes become something else entirely? The giant door pulls back, and we caught the actors being “scared”—only there’s a sound. A terrible sound. And the actors panic and realize they’re trapped, and the camera starts to shake, and inexorably we are drawn back to the open space. Where something rises up to blot out the sun.

Regardless, the movie is worth checking out. It’s one of the few adaptations I’ve seen that might actually have gotten Lovecraft’s approval.

SOURCE: QQQQ
SCREEN: QQQ
“Ph’nglui mglw ‘nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

When one is about to delve into the works of Clive Barker, one must keep certain things in mind. There are things you’re going to find and there are things you’re not going to find. You’re not going to find super-eloquent prose or particularly likeable characters. What you ARE going find, however, is sex and violence in sick and twisted forms. You’re going to see disfigurements of body and mind that are as imaginative as they are frightening. You’re going to see sexual desire inextricably linked with sublime agony. You’re going to see slavering monsters lurking just beyond the pale of human perception, but those monsters are all too human. In a way he’s the punk rocker of horror writers: his works are not philosophically deep, but they come at you hard and fast and leave an impact. And that has its appeal, too. Barker has no interest in being genteel. He’s not going to waste time explaining WHY this horrible thing he’s describing exists; he’s just going to lovingly describe the horrible thing, and hope that he’s made you unable to sleep tonight.

And sometimes that’s all I need, frankly.

Like any ambitious horror writer, Barker has tried to craft an overlying mythos for his work, a set universe that all his characters share. It’s perhaps a grand irony that the most enduring mythos associated with his work is the one he perhaps re-visited the least: the world of Lemarchand’s Box, the Cenobites, and the Gash. It’s hard to believe that Pinhead, one of the icons of modern horror film, got his start in a small modest novella that went mostly unnoticed among Barker’s more ambitious works. But that’s life, I guess.

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The Hellbound Heart

Our story begins with a young man named Frank, fiddling with a puzzle box. Frank, we are to learn, fancies himself a hedonistic adventurer, having travel the world over in search of pleasures. Along the way he’s committed crimes, he’s sampled drugs, and he’s seduced more women than he can remember, but now he’s bored. Firmly believing he’s sampled every pleasure this world has to offer, Frank is now seeking the pleasure of other worlds. To that end he’s acquired a magical puzzle box known as Lemarchand’s Configuration, which, when solved, will open a gateway to the realm of the Order of the Gash. According to legend, the Gash is a place where a group of ancient hedonists went to explore pleasures unavailable to them in this world, and Frank wants to join them.

When he finally solves the puzzle box, and the Cenobites of the Gash appear to take him back with them, however, Frank realizes that limitless pleasure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With endless time to experiment with physical sensation, the Cenobites have become twisted and sadomasochistic to the extreme, and before Frank realizes what he’s gotten himself into, he’s spirited away to spend eternity in their company.

Months later, Frank’s younger brother Rory brings his wife Julia back to the old family home, hoping to fix the place up and have a fresh start to his troubled marriage. He and their friends – among them Kirsty, the frumpy “pity friend” of the group who harbors a futile love for Rory – move them into the house, none of them aware that Frank had solved Lemarchand’s Box up in the drafty room on the second floor and still dwells there, trapped between dimensions, helplessly longing to escape the eternal torment the Cenobites subject him to. Another thing that no one else is aware of is that, before her marriage to Rory, Julia and Frank had a short passionate affair. To Frank it was just another conquest, but to Julia it was her last moment of physical passion before her marriage to decent but dull Rory. During the course of fixing up the house, Rory cuts himself and winds up bleeding all over the floor of the drafty room. This proves to be a happy accident for Frank: that blood, in combination with a tiny bit of living matter of his that still remains in the room, is enough to crack open the door between dimensions and give him a hope of rebuilding a physical body. Realizing that Julia is living in the house now, and hoping he can manipulate her just as easily as he did before, he appeals to her to bring him more blood. Julia, remembering the passionate affair she once had, and also turned on by the idea of Frank actually owing her something, agrees. It’s not long before she’s luring men up to the room and killing them, so Frank can suck their bodies dry of fluids and use them remake himself. Unfortunately, what neither of them count on is Kirsty dropping by one afternoon and finding out what’s going on…

The Hellbound Heart is an unlikely supernatural horror novel, as its primary focus is on the sexual soap opera between its human characters, rather than the horrible monsters waiting beyond the pale. This is to the best, as it’s the humans of the piece that are the real monsters, not the Cenobites. Both Julia and Frank are motivated by selfishness and lust. Frank could care less about Julia; she’s a means to an end, the end being his escape from the Gash. Julia, on the other hand, wants to “tame” Frank. To possess him, by making him dependent on her. And both of them are willing to murder relatively innocent people to further their goals. That makes them worse monsters than the Cenobites, who are at least honestly depraved and make no excuses for it.

The flaw of the book, however, is the flaw of Clive Barker as writer. Given that he started as a playwright, Barker is very good at crafting an image and evoking a mood. What’s he’s not as good at is backstory. He presents the reader with his characters, but makes only a perfunctory effort to provide motivations for their actions. Barker only gives you enough to get the story going, and a reader is left to infer a lot about the relationships between them. The character of Kirsty is the most glaring example. All we know about her is that she’s part of Rory and Julia’s circle of friends, and that she’s the mousey depressed one. We don’t know who she is, or why they bother to keep her around if no one seems to really like her (then again, I suppose every circle of friends has one of those…). She becomes a central character in the story – the heroine by default – and we don’t know a single damned thing of consequence about her. She’s a convenient plot device, is all. We’re not given enough to really identify with any of the characters, actually; they’re just there to move the plot along.

This makes the story more about theme than character, and at least the theme is a good one. The Hellbound Heart is a tale about desire and obsession gone wrong, about hedonism taken to a horrifically logical extreme (after all, what physical sensation does NOT simply become pain after a certain point?). It’s almost a dark fairy tale, a cautionary tale about not letting pleasures of the flesh get out of control. And at the same time, it’s a very small and intimate story. There are no vast-reaching cosmic machinations at work here; just the unraveling of the obsessions of a small group of people (granted, some of those people aren’t quite human anymore, but still…).

That being said, it’s an odd thing to consider that this book became the basis for Clive Barker’s most well-known – and most often-explored – fictional universe, a thing he probably never consciously intended. How did this happen? Through the movie adaptation.

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Hellraiser (1987)

The story in Hellraiser doesn’t waste much time getting going. Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) gets his hands on Lemarchand’s Box, solves it, and gets dragged into the Cenobite’s dimension by barbed chains within the first five minutes. Months later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andy Robinson), his wife Julia (Claire Higgins), and Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry’s daughter from a previous marriage, move into the old home. It’s clear from the very beginning that this family is disintegrating: Larry is desperate to “make things work” with Julia, and to at least try and have Julia and Kirsty get along well enough to be the same room together. Julia is cold and distant from the first time we see her, however, so it we’re pretty sure Larry is doomed to fail.

In the explorations of the long-abandoned family home, Julia finds the room where Frank was staying, and some of his personal possessions. While she has a surprisingly graphic flashback to her brief violent affair with Frank, Larry cuts himself on a rusty nail while moving furniture. After Julia and Kirsty ferry him off to the hospital, the floorboards of the room drink up the blood he’s spilled. Some time later, a pool of fluid – oddly, and no doubt intentionally, reminiscent of semen or afterbirth – is spewed out of the floorboards, and a skeletal wreck of a human being crawls out. Frank (now being played Oliver Smith with Sean Chapman’s voice overdubbed) has returned.

Later that night, Frank and Julia entertain guests who get drunk and tiresome very quickly, and Julia excuses herself early. Something compels her to return to the room where Frank waits for her. Frank begs her to help her, to spill more blood in the room, to heal him so he can finally escape the Cenobites forever. Remembering her passionate affair with Frank with fondness, Julia agrees to so do, and soon she’s luring lonely businessmen up to the attic room, where she bashes their brains in with a hammer and then lets Frank have his sustenance. As Frank recovers, he tells Julia about the Cenobites, and what they did to him, and impresses upon her the need to hurry with their work, so he can finally have a complete body and be free at least. Their arrangement works for a short while, but then Julia begins to crack under the strain. Having to commit murder on a regular basis is bad enough, but that combined with the stress of keeping the increasingly impatient Frank hidden from an increasingly curious Larry causes her to break down one day. Still clueless as to what’s really going on, Larry thinks she’s just stressed out by the relocation, and he urges Kirsty to visit with her and try to make nice with her. But when Kirsty finally does so, she comes at the worst possible time: right when Frank and Julia are dispatching their latest victim. She barely escapes, and somehow manages to get away with Lemarchand’s Box in hand. Playing with the Box later on, Kirsty accidentally solves it and releases the Cenobites. The horrific Cenobites are quite willing to drag her back with them to their dimension, but Kirsty offers them a deal instead…

Hellraiser occupies a revered niche among cult horror movies, largely due to good timing. By 1987, the horror genre had gone stale. Gone were the days of serious supernatural horror; by the mid-80s the slasher film was king, and even they were going downhill. By then there had already been six Friday the 13ths and three Nightmare on Elm Streets. Movies about wisecracking killers hacking up horny teens in creative and ironic ways were par for the course. To have a movie like Hellraiser come ou