Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.
The truth is... I have a real love-hate relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. I love him for the reason everyone else does: his incredible, vast imagination in creating alien terrors beyond human comprehension. He even wrote an actually good story every once in a while. The reasons I hate him are the flagrant racism that makes even his better-written stories horribly uncomfortable sometimes (it's a bit hard to take The Shadow Over Innsmouth seriously when its main theme is basically "ooo miscegenation is spooky"... and we all know what the guy named his cat); and the fact that he's lauded as a much better writer than he actually was. I do admire his creativity, but his actual writing skill was rather far behind it: I can't help but be allergic to his overindulgent purple prose and badly-written women (if he ever actually bothered to write a woman at all), even when he does manage to scare the bejezus out of me.
I should duck all those rotten tomatoes flying at me, shouldn't I?
Lovecraft adaptations, on the other hand, are... diverse, to put it gently. From the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent Call of Cthulhu silent movie and the devastating Dagon to the recent Colour Out of Space that I'm still planning on watching, there have been a handful of actually watchable Lovecraft movies—and a lot of horrible crap, let's not kid ourselves. I suppose that's the case with every household name in horror (let's play a game: name the best and worst Stephen King movie that comes to your mind, and keep the "worst" down to one), but so far I can call myself lucky in that I've only seen the better Lovecrafts. And a fairly unique one that I'm not sure where to put on the scale.
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imdb.com
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H. P. Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror and Other Stories is a 2007 Japanese claymation movie that adapts three of HPL's short stories, some better-known and some less so: The Picture in the House, The Dunwich Horror and The Festival. I'm not actually a fan of any of these stories (racism, purple prose, see above; my personal favorites are Pickman's Model and Cool Air), but I'm always up for some novelty value, and the combination of claymation with cosmic horror is definitely a new one. Alas, the movie really underperforms in some ways, despite all the potential in the concept.
The first segment,
The Picture in the House, is probably the best-adapted of the three stories, with slowly mounting dread escalating into a crescendo as
the blood begins to drip... Movement is scarce: most of the story is told through small gestures, still images and dialogue, adding to the oppressive atmosphere. The art style of the movie is incredibly stark and grotesque, with even normal faces appearing gaunt, distorted... haunted. Whether this is a clever stylistic choice or just ugly is up to the viewer. (I'm leaning towards the former.) But to my great annoyance, the movie leaves out my favorite Lovecraft quote ever, from the beginning of the
story proper:
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausoleums of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
Why wouldn't you put this into your Lovecraft movie?! It's an iconic quote!
The second story, The Dunwich Horror, is where things start to fall apart a little. Told through narration, the story begins with Wilbur Whateley's dying moments, then rewinds to the beginning of the actual short story before plunging into the action-packed finale. The bizarre animation style really lends itself here to the horrors of the tale, but claymation and "action-packed" rarely go together well, and with the way the segment sprints through the plot of a pretty lengthy short story in barely ten minutes, there's little for the viewer to actually engage with.
The third story, The Festival, is easily the weakest of the trio. Even if I'm not a big fan of Lovecraft's Dramatique™ purple prose, without it this story—the eyewitness account of a bizarre eldritch celebration—really falls apart. With almost nonexistent narration, this segment mostly comes across as an exercise in set design: the horrific visuals really are great and would make for a stellar short film with a little more meat to it, but if you don't know the original short story, you probably won't even know what the hell you're looking at and why. There's very little character, plot, anything to hold the viewer's attention beyond "ooh, pretty!" (well... in a certain definition of 'pretty')—I was mostly nodding off through this segment, to tell you the truth.
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He clearly doesn't approve.
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Too bad about this movie, folks. I really do feel like there could have been more done here: maybe with a better selection of stories to work with, a longer running time, or just more effort to translate the stories to animation, this could have been an absolutely terrifying Lovecraft movie. As it is, it's mostly memorable for the sheer novelty of it; as far as Lovecraft adaptations go, there are definitely better-executed ones out there.
Writing: Not much to speak of, sadly. 2/5
Visuals: Probably the strongest aspect of the entire short film, but still not enough to carry it through all 46 minutes. 4/5
Do I recommend it?: For Lovecraft connoisseurs only—newcomers would probably just find it confusing and boring. 2/5
