In Which We Follow Every Bump In The Night

Morbid Curiosities

by CHRIS MORGAN

Our world gives us easy passage to most of our desires, but we are still haunted by satisfactions not yet met. For all the talk of innovation and the future being very much now, it is all for nothing, it seems, if we cannot attain the following: (1) the knowledge whether or not love is truly enough and (2) the knowledge of being dead; and if not (2) then (2.5) eye contact with death. There are, some insist, reasons enough for us not having access to these things. "We don't deserve it" likely ranks as the highest, perhaps alongside the Lovecraftian fancy that we would not be able to handle the truth we might find. But leave it to us to kindly overlook these warnings and plough forth into all things black-shrouded and a little musty! We’ve become content with leaving love to unsupervised children with only the faintest feeling of shame, letting our search of death amass its own proportions even in the face of the sternest, longest, plumpest wagging fingers.

Death adventuring is not what it seems at first blush. Maybe, at the peak years of the Reagan era, some people would have been content to go base-jumping blindfolded or engage in autoerotic asphyxiation, but this hasn’t been the case since we sobered up and started pining for a quiet place into, and perhaps beneath, the wilderness.

The new adventuring comes out of the popular idea that there are two versions of America. People say this all the time, of course: “rich America” versus “poor America,” “white America” versus “not white America,” “red America” versus “blue America,” and so on, but the new adage frames it as a “living America” versus “dead America.” The America of the living we know well enough. Full of splendor, laughter, and relatively clean air and water. The American land of the dead, by contrast, offers none of these amenities. But it is attractive in its own way if one is eager and does not mind risking the conveniences of basic comfort and physical safety.

America has plenty of entryways and shelters where all things deceased convene and assume brotherhood, whether they be dead spaces, cultures, ideas or people. In many ways they are like our pyramids, mausoleums that seem to force land in the shape of their own contours rather than the other way around, that harbor relics of a time and things that bear no relation whatsoever to how we understand the world and ourselves. If they bear names at all, they are innocuous and bureaucratic, they sprawl over hundreds of acres and hide a labyrinth-like infrastructure below. They were once heavily populated and overly depended upon, but now have no other use besides satisfying our own curiosity and amusement. They are not the only type of derelict structures around, but few other types are obsessed over quite like the psychiatric institution.

Psychiatric hospitals (lunatic asylums, whatever you want to call them) were the peculiar institutions of the 20^th century. They lived and died according to a given amount of knowledge we had about the problems they were meant to solve. In other words, the less knowledge we possessed, the greater they thrived. In the 1980s we had reached full knowledge, or at least the full knowledge that the many decades the asylum system had spent underserving its larger purpose was several decades too long and cost billions of dollars too much. And for decades more they remained, ceding much of their ground back to the elements, housing squatters and vandals. The death tourists would follow soon enough, whether in the form of ruin pornographers, TV producers, or filmmakers. They were ready as ever to scour every inch for secrets and other related knick-knacks that could not be found in mundane, laughter-filled places.

We cannot blame them for being so attracted to these places that have barely a tenuous connection to normalcy. Hospitals like Danvers in Massachusetts or Greystone in New Jersey, with their bat-like Kirkbride design, are more alien than earthly. Unless you end up studying, say, social work in college, it is possible that you will never learn about them, what they did and why they are in the state they’re in. It is not hard, then, for the desire to rummage through an asylum to become an imperative. Suddenly we have a right, no, an entitlement to stare in the face of something — anything — dead.

So, let's not blame these seekers for relying so often on the tropes of horror. Whether it is a narrative film, any kind of documentary (be it a YouTube video or a reality show) or a photo essay, its makers are continuously tempted to frame their findings within elements of dread, uncertainty and especially repulsion. The asylum system never offered anything less, almost to the point of insisting upon its own horror. Accounts from Titicut Follies, to the LIFE article “Bedlam 1946”, to Geraldo Rivera’s report on the children of Willowbrook do not reflect the quirky, generation-actualizing worlds of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Girl, Interrupted. What quirks are there in being restrained for hours on end, being force-fed through a nasal tube, or being flippantly quizzed about one’s masturbation habits? What actualization could be gained by being strewn about the halls of Byberry, with little to no clothing and about as much humanness as a half-formed, long-clawed blotch in one’s nightmares? This is, to some degree, the summation of horror, or at least certain strains thereof, that progress had failed to make "normal" those who were abnormal.

Blame it then, if you must, on The Blair Witch Project for prioritizing thrill-seeking above all else. The 1999 no-budget film’s final minutes had the protagonists running up and down a gutted house in the middle of the woods. The only lighting source was from their cameras. The set design was largely by nature. The quickened pace and already hectic cinematography made it obviously the most frightening part of the film; some would say the only frightening part of the film. The non-resolution piqued, rather than satisfied, interest.

This would be capitalized upon in short order. MTV produced Fear in 2000, in which random young people were sent into the bowels of allegedly haunted locations in search of answers. The second episode was filmed at the Fairfield State Hospital and featured what appeared to be a fake cadaver. It lasted two seasons but geared up momentum for other filmmakers and “paranormal investigators” to intrude upon similar spaces. Before Ghost Hunters, et. al. there was Scared!, a Staten Island public access show that trespassed onto Danvers and Pennsylvania’s Byberry, two of the worst-run hospitals in American history. Not to be left out, narrative films took part with Session 9, also filmed at Danvers, a remake of The House on Haunted Hill, The Devil’s Chair and most recently Grave Encounters, as well as a slew of other low budget “found footage” films.

These films are always on the search, with the grace and focus of an oil drill, for a revelatory source to help them process the magnitude of the place, as if something other than the creators' most recent life choices pulled them along. Paranormal investigators follow (rather unsafely) every bump in the night. Characters in The House on Haunted Hill and Grave Encounters find themselves pitted against some force of evil that had corrupted the institutions to their core: lobotomy-friendly sadism or the occult, generally. This would be pure entertainment if the plots weren’t so often rehashed, and the same assumptions reached. It has become routine in all instances that the surface be scratched just a little regarding what actually happened in these locations. Glib exposition gives enough to the viewer to understand that lobotomies, hydrotherapy, ECT, abuse and overcrowding happened, and their harm greatly outweighed their good, but not so much so as to clarify that it was not because a legion of American Mengeles (or actual Mengeles, in the case of American Horror Story) made it so.

Regardless of the means, adventurists find their ends unreachable. They look for death, or something like it, so as to see it on what they assume is their own terms. But nothing they see is quite dead. Yes, they see what it is like for buildings to go years without occupancy and they see the end result of healthcare becoming indistinguishable from public storage. That’s failure, kept alive but beaten by the fact that the problem it had been put in place to solve not only remains, but festers all the same.

Healthcare generally in the United States has always had a landfill mentality, but special distinction goes to the treatment of the mentally ill, care for which remains ever inadequate and underfunded. After deinstitutionalization, those patients who weren’t sent off to those few hospitals still active or community-based centers were sent off on their own. Today’s answer to deinstitutionalization is the prison system, wherein (as of 2006) an estimated 1.26 million mentally ill inmates are incarcerated at the state, federal and local level. With the prison system itself already an institutional travesty, surely some cannot wait for their mass closure and deterioration as well. Horror abounds, it seems, with little need to record it, whether it is the horror of ignorance or the horror of repetition. There is never an overcrowding problem in Hell.

Chris Morgan is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New Jersey. He last wrote in these pages about adapting Lovecraft. You can find his website here. He twitters here.

In Which Lovecraft Is Nowhere And Everywhere

Adapting Lovecraft

by CHRIS MORGAN

In a culture that ascribes to authors no small amount of neuroses, however true or untrue they may be, H.P. Lovecraft is its banner example. He was a man of many dysfunctions; he was a sexually repressed homebody (for the most part anyway), possessed with an intelligence and virulent racism, both of which rivaled Thomas Jefferson, and all of which permeated his work whether by implication or fact. It was his phobia of doctors that was his ultimate undoing.

Lovecraft lived to the age of 46, having died from a neglected — and thus very excruciating — case of intestinal cancer. He did not live long enough to make any real money off of his writing, he did not live long enough to see it bashed by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker, and he certainly did not live long enough to see it steadily, if not subtly, seep into the voice and style of modern horror and science fiction until it became a stamp of artistic quality, if not a general rule, for both genres.

H.P. Lovecraft is a writer who is at once nowhere and everywhere. His gaze, at all times unassuming, awkward and painfully Anglo-Saxon, is unrecognizable to most and unknowable to all. Yet by contrast few have been able to avoid his influence. His break from the gothic tradition of Poe, Bierce and M.R. James, into something far more terrifying and imaginative, like a greyscale proto-psychedelia, has given this personally anti-modern writer a very modern appeal. For a while it was limited to books, starting with younger acolytes like Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch, continuing through to Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti and others. Even Borges saw fit to rip him off at least once.

Those confines were broken soon enough into other media with a legion of filmmakers easily entranced by his borderline misanthropic fiction, brimming with monsters terrorizing earth simply because they could. Films like The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness, The Evil Dead, Alien, Prometheus, It, The Mist, and The Cabin in the Woods have visualized Lovecraft most successfully, but they have done so in pieces. For all the possible willingness to take on the whole, it is not easy.

howard phillips lovecraft

Lovecraft was himself a fan of the cinema and saw movies when he could, yet his writings were about as uncinematic as writing can get, rivaling even the inadaptability of the work of postmodern icons like Ballard and Burroughs. His stories are dense blocks of arcane British English with hardly any dialogue. The philosophical and thematic foundations were brutally amoral and anti-humanist. His protagonists are virtually identical to one another: sexless white male academics, essentially prototypes of Fox Mulder. His antagonists, on the other hand, are famously distinct, but too distinct, almost hallucinogenic in appearance.

At the Mountains of Madness (the plot of which bears a striking enough resemblance to Prometheus that Guillermo Del Toro essentially gave up on his own adaptation) talks of a race of “barrel-shaped” Elder Things that lived on earth well before mankind. The citizens of the titular town in “The Shadow Over Insmouth” show varying degrees of ancestry to an amphibian-like race. The color in “The Colour Out of Space,” Lovecraft’s favorite story (and indeed his best), could not even be described specifically. It is no wonder that Cthulhu, with its batwings and octopus-shaped head, is the most accessible Lovecraft creation.

Direct adaptations of Lovecraft stories, that is, those that bear Lovecraft’s name in the credits of the film, have a consistent track record for failure, both as adaptation and as art. The Haunted Palace, a 1963 Roger Corman-directed Vincent Price vehicle was one of the earliest. Based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it took second-billing to an Edgar Allan Poe poem which provided the film’s title and nothing else. Corman followed up with a similarly budget adaptation of The Dunwich Horror, setting a pattern of Lovecraft’s “psychic biographies” (as Joyce Carol Oates described his work) into mediocre schlock. Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator would seem an exception to this rule, perhaps because “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a modestly humorous story of a mad scientist raising the dead, is the least Lovecraftian of all Lovecraft stories. And the less spoken about Beyond the Wall of Sleep the better the world shall be.

Lovecraft’s unusual imagination and the challenging style in which he rendered it make the idea of a casual fan, let alone wide commercial viability, all but impossible. Adapting Lovecraft is not so much a worthy commercial venture as it is an act of tribute, made or broken by the terms set by Lovecraft himself. In a way it is an extension of the kind of cults one sees surrounding most genre authors, the kind that produces roleplaying groups and fan fiction (Lovecraftian fan fiction, in fact, is notable for its participation from major horror authors.) This, at least, is the kind of energy that drives ventures like the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), which produces films exclusively based on Lovecraft’s work.

The people at HPLHS know their way around Lovecraft’s oeuvre and are always finding ways to apply that knowledge. Their roots go back to the 1980s when they were a group of live-action roleplayers; now they are running a business which produces all manner of Lovecraftian merchandise from Miskatonic University t-shirts to Lovecraft-inspired “solstice carols” to Mercury Theater-style radio dramatizations of Lovecraft stories. The Call of Cthulhu was their first full-length film, released in 2005. Its source material was Lovecraft’s most famous but most complicated work, with a web-like structure of diaries, newspaper clippings, and other found accounts from all over the world, often retold secondhand by a single protagonist after finding some weird stuff among his dead great-uncle’s papers.

Taken apart there are hints of compelling, if shallow, conventional movies — based on the mad cultists in the middle of the New Orleans swamps, for instance, or on the sailors marooned on Rl’yeh. HPLHS’s Andrew Leman and Sean Branney (Leman as director and both as writers and producers), however, managed to condense most of the story into a 47-minute silent, black and white film, mimicking the state of the art in 1926, the year the story was written. It was as inventive as it was quirky, solving both their budgetary limitations as well as Lovecraft’s narrative limitations. It played at Slamdance and at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Stranger called it “an absolutely gorgeous telling.”

Six years after Cthulhu’s release, HPLHS followed up with The Whisperer in Darkness, pursuing the same retro concept but with the added ambition of sound and a longer running time. At the time of its source material’s publication in 1931, Universal had released Dracula and Frankenstein, from which Leman and Branney took as inspiration in authenticating their vintage talkie, despite those two films representing the gothic horror establishment just as “The Whisperer in Darkness” broke away from it.

by Ruud Dirven

“The Whisperer in Darkness” is one of Lovecraft’s last stories. By that time in his career Lovecraft had come into his own stylistically, his self-proclaimed “weird fiction” having evolved into what is now more chillingly called “cosmic horror.” The story was inspired in part by the discovery of Pluto (referred to as Yuggoth) in 1930, the plot (as usual) concerns a stiff Miskatonic professor, Albert Wilmarth, who gets in way over his head in a small Vermont town, the caves of which are populated by an alien race called the Mi-Go, “pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.” Unlike other Lovecraft creations, the Mi-Go seem to have peaceful intentions towards humanity, offering long life and space travel once their brains are transplanted from their bodies and into a special cylinder. Though as the story progresses their sincerity becomes more questionable.

Lovecraft’s plot, as in the first film, is retained almost entirely, but not without some tampering needed to suit the medium. In this case Branney (now serving as director) and Leman had to add those elements of story that Lovecraft habitually avoided, such as dialogue, action, multidimensional characters and a climactic ending. Whole characters and scenes were required to accentuate rather than obscure the story, creating action around the otherwise vacuum-like interactions, mostly in letters, between Wilmarth and a Vermont farmer (Barry Lynch). Some additions were more radical than others, such as giving Wilmarth a wife and family (and ergo, a sex life), adding in an adolescent female character to give Wilmarth previously unheard of levels of emotional depth, and a climax in which Wimarth does battle with the Mi-Go on a small aircraft. Such additions would have been seen as useless by Lovecraft, who neither had a mass audience nor sought one out, but his core concepts have been butchered far worse than in this film.

As a film itself The Whisperer in Darkness is at least admirable. On the one hand this is the kind of film in which production design goes unnoticed the least. The film is not a period piece, but a piece made to look as if it came out during a certain period. Extra pains are taken to reduce the instances of anachronism, and budget limitations deny them certain technological and logistical luxuries. The “making-of” segment of the DVD extras reveals, for instance, the effort to film a few minutes of train travel using a vintage train that runs through New England, but on its own schedule and as it served tourists. Meticulous lighting and costuming, too, cannot be taken so easily for granted. It helps, though, to have a crew of consummate Hollywood professionals working on this out of sheer enthusiasm. Regrettably the filmmakers relied on CGI in creating the Mi-Go rather than the stop motion animation that was used in The Call of Cthulhu, though considering Lovecraft’s design of the Mi-Go is vastly more bewildering than Cthulhu this is excusable at least in part.

On the other hand one can find certain discrepancies in the actual performances, at least in tone if not in ability. Foyer and Lynch are commendable leads playing the straight, earnest and overly articulate characters as envisioned in the original text. Others performers are tasked with simply trying to recreate the acting styles of the times, with the heavy inflections a la James Cagney, which sometimes has a hammier, campier effect than might have been intended. Daniel Kaemon’s turn as P.F. Noyes, a human antagonist to Wilmarth, for instance, lays on a thick New England accent and a shifty glare and speech pattern that barely conceal the intentions he is trying to conceal. At one point Noyes admits to Wilmarth of a “frustrating brush with amateur dramatics in my youth,” much to my amusement, and possibly the writers’.

The Whisperer in Darkness is, overall, a curious film, just as curious as The Call of Cthulhu was. But it is all the more curious for me as to why they chose to adapt “The Whisperer in Darkness” to begin with. It is a good story, one indicative of the new territory Lovecraft was exploring before he died, but because of that the material does not seem entirely suitable. “The Whisperer in Darkness” was a little too ahead of its time for filmmakers of the Universal period, let alone the Depression-era audiences they made movies for. One could imagine Lugosi, Karloff or Tod Browning being at least a little more receptive to the idea of adapting “The Rats in the Walls,” a mid-period story that’s every bit as unsettling as Lovecraft’s best but still tethered to his gothic influences. It even takes place in an old mansion. Perhaps, though, Leman and Branney are saving it for a Hammer horror-style adaptation which would be just as effective.

Regardless of what I say, however, The Whisperer in Darkness comes with a built-in audience of Lovecraft fans, retrophiles and a good helping of people who are likely to be both. They will love this film for it is itself a labor of love; a tribute to what the filmmakers feel is the best Lovecraft has to offer. It is a love on par with the love fans feel for J.R.R. Tolkien, but one that is stifled by the author’s aggressively fatalistic and amoral vision. We are far from assured of, say, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath getting the sweeping Peter Jackson-style treatment it deserves, even requires. It is a fine film dedicated to Lovecraft, but not the most Lovecraftian one by any means.

For all their picking and choosing of Lovecraft’s themes for their own purposes, I can’t help but think that The Thing, Alien, etc. are at least closer to the spirit of his work. These are the most terrifying, most visually challenging films in horror and science fiction. They defy easy answers and are indifferent to the audience’s ability to comprehend any of the questions posed. “I admire its purity,” says Ian Holm’s Ash of the titular antagonist in Alien, “A survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Though it’s not as florid as Lovecraft would have put it, it is his flag of conquest placed deep into the shores of horror, leaving no question as to who governs the territory now.

Chris Morgan is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New Jersey. This is his first appearance in these pages. You can find his website here. He twitters here.