Poe, Lovecraft, and The Movies: Part VII

The Masque of the Red Death is a 1964 film starring Vincent Price as the evil Prince Prospero. The Poe story is a mere five pages long, so expanding that into a ninety minute film required the writer of the screen play to insert some new elements into the narrative. The narrative here is interpolated, the new material required to make a film of the master narrative joins seamlessly with the information we are given by Poe. The vast majority of this additional material focuses on Prospero and portrays him as a truly evil Devil worshipper. Played by the ‘suavely menacing’[1] Vincent Price, from the opening, Prospero is portrayed as a despicable person. Roger Corman makes his adaptation of Poe’s tale a commentary for the purpose of film. Corman has to alter the narrative to give us a protagonist in order to keep the story interesting for the audience. In the short story, Poe refrains from passing judgement on the Prince. Although the idea of isolating yourself from your people in order to survive while they suffer would seem evil, Poe does not imply this is the case. Nor does he state the opposite, saying only that Prospero gathers a thousand people from his court and ‘retired to the deep seclusion of one of the castellated abbeys.’ (p. 269). The opening scene sees him ride into a village neighbouring his castle, and threatening to kill two of the villagers that oppose him, before ordering for the entire village to be ‘burnt to the ground’ after discovering someone suffering from the red death. Prospero offers no sanctuary to the villagers and simply leaves them to burn in their own homes. This is one area in which the film betters the book. Lovecraft said ‘Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing.’[2] Vincent Price makes Prince Prospero his own, creating a truly horrible character that creates emotion in the audience. When he finally gets what he deserves, the audience cheers his demise. As the credits roll however, the audience is challenged to ‘look inside himself,’[3] recalling a technique visible in Poe’s prose, leaving an uncomfortable feeling in the audience as they leave the cinema.

One of the main tactics used by the director to create fear is to carefully choose the characters which are placed in danger. Throughout the film, it is women and children who are placed in danger more frequently than their male counterparts. It is usually the scorn of Prospero himself that is the cause of their anguish. When Prospero learns that his wife has betrayed him he orders one of his trained hawks to attack her until she bleeds to death in front of the congregation at the party. This is just one of many scenes where Prospero is built up to be seen as evil as possible. Although it is argued ‘discerning writers often evoke the fear response through the power of suggestion rather than with graphic descriptions’[4], this is difficult to pull off on the big screen, and the violence committed against Prospero’s wife is certainly graphic. However it works to great effect in this instance as it is the only real scene of violence in the film, and contrasted to the other graphically tame crimes in the film it leaves a lasting impression. This results in the audience feeling ‘drawn into the violence, we want it to be over because it lingers too long.’[5] However the scene does not last forever; and herein lies one of the problems with horror on screen ‘to see, to endure, such a shocking spectacle of violence enables us to overcome the horror, to enjoy it and expel it in a moral sense’[6]. Actually seeing these events is scary at the time, but films have helped us become desensitised to such horrors. Coming at the start of the final act of the film, it raises the fear level amongst the viewer as they know events are building to a crescendo.

 

Suspense is used to great effect at the end of the film. The Red Death appears at Prospero’s masquerade ball, and after a lengthy scene of the prince trying to catch up with him, they have a confrontation in the black room. Prospero is lead to believe that he is the only one who will survive by the personified Red Death, however when he is told that he too shall perish, he panics. Not knowing the face of death becomes too much for Prospero, and he rips the mask off his tormentor, only to reveal his own face. This is an interesting technique, as though it is not used in the hypotext, it runs with the common theme of Poe’s work that forces the audience to look at themselves and their own reactions to the narrative.

 

Film has a tendency of aging quicker than literature. Prose creates an individual image in each of our own minds. Film has to rely on special effects, cinematic techniques and even the quality of the print to create an image. The Masque of the Red Death has unfortunately aged faster on film than it ever could in print. Though The Mist is relatively young compared to the aforementioned, it is hard not to imagine it also ageing to its detriment in decades to come. There is nothing stopping either film from being enjoyed decades after release, movies such as The Exorcist[7] and The Shining[8] are still regarded by some as scary despite being released over thirty years ago. Yet social fears change over time, and as image in film is definitive, it is harder to reapply changing fears to the same text. As popular as Vincent Price was in the horror genre, his acting, whilst remaining sinister at points, has an exaggerated style that could garner more laughter than fear from a modern audience. The same can be said of the special effects in The Mist. These effects will not be as advanced in decades to come, and may look unrealistic to an audience in future decades. Again this would result in the audience failing to take them seriously. Both films use techniques popular in horror; the isolation of the shoppers and Propsero’s revellers, and the threat of something which we have no control over and little understanding of. However the fear created by these texts can be taken away over time a lot quicker than the fear instilled in us by writers such as Poe, Lovecraft and King.

 

[1] Peter B. Flint, ‘Vincent Price, Noted Actor Of Dark Roles, Dies at 82’. New York Times, 27, 10 (1993), p. 23

[2] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 23

[3] Richard Badenhausen, ‘Fear and Trembling in Literature’. Studies in Short Fiction, 29, 4 (1992), p. 491

[4] John Edward Ames, ‘The art of terror: Tap into readers’ fears with 5 techniques for an emotionally rich story’. Writer, 123, 5 (2010), p.22

[5] Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)’. Gothic Studies, 1, 2 (1999), p. 147

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Exorcist (1973) Film. Directed by WILLIAM FRIEDKIN, USA: Warner Bros. Pictures

[8] The Shining (1980) Film. Directed by STANLEY KUBRICK, USA: Warner Bros. Pictures

Poe, Lovecraft, and The Movies: Part VI

Cinema has undoubtedly overtaken literature as the most popular form of entertainment in the last century. Academics agree, stating ‘film is a better medium than fiction for the delivery of gothic sensationalism.’[1] On the screen however it is harder to accomplish the restraint in horror beautifully accomplished by Poe and Lovecraft in literature. The audience has a visual representation of horror now, and although it is possible for the director to pull the camera away at the scariest moment, some directors choose not to, showing blood and gore in excess. This removes the tool used most effectively by Poe and Lovecraft. The Mist[2] is a 2008 film directed by Frank Darabont, and is an adaptation not of a H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe story, but one by Stephen King. King was however strongly influenced by the aforementioned, and Lovecraft’s influence is strongly felt in this adaptation of his novella. In contrast, The Masque of The Red Death[3] is an adaptation of the Poe story[4] already analysed. In ‘Dark Dreams’ it is stated horror films;

represent not only a rebellious rejection of adult values, but also a titillating glimpse into the forbidden contents of the id, especially the sexual and violent impulses that so dominate the contemporary genre.[5]

 

This attitude seems to contradict the restraint and poetic prose employed to create terror in literature. This contrast between mediums opens up new approaches to creating fear in an audience, which is evident in the two aforementioned films.

Stephen King makes no secret of the fact that he was heavily influenced by Lovecraft, which is evident in Frank Darabont’s 2008 adaptation of his short story The Mist. Though not an adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s works, it is certainly an appropriation of his literature that dealt with creatures from another time, such as Dagon[6] and The Call of The Cthulhu[7]. The film shares many traits with the work of Lovecraft. The doorway to another dimension is opened up due to military experiments, and the creatures that inhabit the other dimension cross over into our world under the cover of a thick mist that engulfs a whole town leaving people trapped inside a supermarket. Both the film and King’s novella can be considered analogies of The Call of The Cthulhu according to Wagner’s taxonomies. All three stories focus on what happens when unfathomable creatures from another age or dimension are awakened and interact with the human world as we know it. All three also deal with how vulnerable mankind actually is, and the weakness of the human mind to correlate events of this type if they were to happen.

The most Lovecraftian elements of the film relate to the monsters. The audience first sees evidence of what is in the mist when large tentacles enter the store through a rear shutter door, dragging one poor character into the mist. We are not shown what the tentacles belong to, but their size hints at something much larger than anything that lives on Earth. This links in with Lovecraft’s use of monsters that are of incomprehensible size, with his characters in The Call of The Cthulu confessing ‘acute fear of the giant nameless thing’ (p. 145). It is a smart move on behalf of the director too, by implying the size of the creature but not actually seeing it, the audience is able to conjure up the worst thing imaginable in their mind as the source of this terror. Lovecraft himself said ‘A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror.’[8] If Darabont had shown the whole creature, the audience wouldn’t be able to imagine anything other than what was given to them. This is a common problem when moving a horror novel from page to screen. Words on a page can create an image of horror, but as it can’t actually show the reader what the terror looks like, it is left to the reader to imagine what they can from the words they have been given. The best horror films are the ones that do a similar thing, and leave horrible events to the audiences’ imagination. This is especially true of outdated horror films, where special effects were less advanced, resulting in unconvincing monsters, or creatures with zips visible on their costumes.

The film also plays into the human fear of isolation. The people trapped in the supermarket cannot see out the windows due to the thick mist enveloping them, and the few people who leave the supermarket to try and get home can be heard screaming in agony once they leave. There are elements of the uncanny at work here, but what makes the situation much worse is that as the film progresses, the smaller creatures in the mist try to enter the supermarket through its entrance side, which is mostly made up of glass. This creates a terrifying situation where what is outside can see the people trapped in the supermarket and easily get to them through the glass, whereas the humans cannot see what is outside. One of Stephen King’s greatest skills as a writer is creating characters that we can empathise with. Darabont manages to transfer this onto the screen, leaving the audience feeling the fear that our protagonists face, another element of literature that isn’t always successfully transferred onto screen.

There are also reflections of Poe visible in the story too. One character at the beginning of the film leaves and goes to into the mist to get back to his family at home, however, much like when Prospero goes alone to confront the Red Death ‘none followed him on account of a deadly terror which had seized upon all’[9] (273). This is not the only parallel that can be drawn with Poe’s works. A character bitten by an uncanny insect develops symptoms very similar to those of the Red Death, and perishes in a similarly short time frame. Despite the dangers waiting outside, the humans on the inside manage to split themselves into two groups, one side descends into madness, much like our narrator in The Black Cat[10] resulting in one group murdering a member of the other, and throwing him outside with the monsters. This proves that ‘all horror stories are really about the incursion of disorder on order.’[11] A group of shoppers who were behaving as society expects one moment, suddenly act completely differently as soon as things begin to stray from the status quo.

The ending forces the reader to reflect on themselves, in the same way The Black Cat does. The protagonist, his son, and two people he has bonded with drive out into the mist hoping for the best. Eventually, tired, and out of petrol, they resolve to take their own lives. With only three bullets available to them, the protagonist bravely volunteers to leave himself at the mercy of the mist. However shortly after he has taken the lives of the others, including his young son, the mist begins to disappear and he is taken to safety by the military. The true horror in the film comes from this ending. Using his best judgement he resolved to kill those closest to them in what seemed like the kindest, most humane act at the time. However had they waited a short time longer they all would have survived. The film forces you to look at yourself and consider what you would have done in the same situation.

[1] Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)’. Gothic Studies, 1, 2 (1999), p. 141

[2] The Mist (2007) Film. Directed by FRANK DARABONT. USA: Dimension Films.

[3] The Masque Of The Red Death (1964) Film. Directed by ROGER CORMAN. USA: Alta Vista Productions.

[4] Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 269-73

[5] Charles Derry, Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of The Modern Horror Film From the 1950’s to the 21^st Century, (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009), p. 22

[6] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 1-6

[7] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p.139-69

[8] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 8

[9] Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin Books, 1982),p. 269-73

[10] Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 223-30

[11] Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, (eds), Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror With Stephen King (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 203

 

Poe, Lovecraft, and The Movies: Part IV

Poe’s stories focus on realistic fears all humans have. HP Lovecraft said ‘Poe…worked with an analytical knowledge of terror’s true sources which doubled the force of his narratives’[1]. This is shown in the previous two stories. We are all vulnerable to disease, and the older we get the more some of us will worry about losing our sanity due to our advancing age. Poe’s frequent use of the uncanny in his literature helps to exaggerate these fears and elevate their reality within the mind of the reader. Poe largely neglects his characters; instead he ‘excels in incidents and broad narrative effects,’[2] this is the strength of his work. The reader can easily place themselves in the story in the narrators place. This allows them to almost experience the fears first hand. Poe’s stories have infiltrated pop culture, the television show The Simpsons[3] adapted his poem The Raven as part of a Halloween special, and they have also referenced his other works in various episodes. A film is to be released this year entitled The Raven[4] but featuring Poe himself as a character forced to help the police when a serial killer starts copying his work. Poe’s techniques have made his literature timeless. The grounded fears he uses to inspire terror are however, in contrast to a big admirer of Poe’s work; HP Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a divisive figure in the literary world. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction[5] omits all mention of an American writer who shaped the world of gothic and horror as we know it today. In stark contrast to this, Stephen King claims that Lovecraft ‘Opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.’[6]

Lovecraft’s fiction is most widely known for his Cthulhu mythos. The mythos is a collection of stories concerning monsters of unimaginable size, described by some scholars (but never Lovecraft himself) as ‘Elder Gods’. The mere sight of these creatures is enough to drive anyone who beholds them to madness. However this mythology is a product of the media, one that S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz describe as an ‘anti-mythology’ in the H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. They go on to state that

the careful readers of his mythology will realise that it is no mythology at all, but a cycle of events intended to be perceived by only the more primitive or impressionable characters as real in the context of fiction[7]

 

Lovecraft’s fiction consisted mostly of short stories published in pulp magazines. These stories explore the human condition, with five key themes central to his work: madness, isolation, unfathomable horror, human insignificance, and the question of whether we can fully accept the story being told to us by a narrator who has first-hand experience of one or more of the previous four themes. Through an exploration of two of his most famous works, it will become apparent how Lovecraft effectively creates fear.

Madness rears its ugly head throughout the works of Lovecraft. The unfortunate narrator of each of his tales usually has experienced an inexplicable horror that has stolen away his sanity, leaving him to pen a cautionary tale warning the reader not to follow in his footsteps. The first-hand recollection that we are given as a reader makes the story more personal. Instead of hearing a narrative from a third person perspective where the audience is distanced from the action, the first person style makes it appear as though the protagonist is writing a letter directly to the reader. This direct address immediately forges a connection between reader and protagonist. The first person narrative used by Lovecraft gives his protagonist a direct passage to the reader, forcing them to empathise with the protagonist as they are seeing the narrative from his perspective.

The question of just how much of what we read can be believed recurs frequently with Lovecraft. His tales are so extravagant, to the point that his narrators have gone insane. This raises some doubt as to whether the protagonists have experienced these events first hand, or whether the stories are merely a product of their madness. In Dagon[8] potential seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of our protagonist are placed immediately, with him writing ‘I am writing this under appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more’ (p. 1). It is quickly revealed to the reader that our unfortunate narrator has been on medication to help him cope with the horror he is about to reveal to us, and he has exhausted his supply. This instantly tells the reader that we are not dealing with someone in a healthy mental condition, subtly raising doubt about what we are about to be told, a technique also used by Lovecraft in The Music of Erich Zann[9] . Lovecraft then proceeds to tell the story of what happened from the viewpoint of the narrator. This structure is extremely common in Lovecraft; an introduction from our narrator hinting at what is to come, the story itself, and finally it is revealed how these events have negatively impacted the protagonists’ life.

Dagon follows the aforementioned structure. Once the story has been told, the writing style continues to be a stream of consciousness, with the writer hearing the sounds he heard on his terrible journey across the ocean, and ending on ‘The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!’ (p. 6) This chilling conclusion is extremely effective. We can assume the reader is horrified by the fact that the creature our narrator saw out in the middle of the ocean has made it to Lovecraft’s fictional American town of Arkham, however as this is the last sentence of the story, we are never quite sure what happens to our narrator. The narrator has experienced Burke’s sublime[10], he is unable to complete the story due to the fear he is experiencing. It is implied that he is to be killed in some terrible way by Dagon, but it is possible he managed to throw himself out of his window as planned. There is also the third possibility that his insanity got the better of him and he was unable to write anymore. However as he has stopped writing, rendered helpless by his emotions, drawing on Burke’s theory of the sublime, we will never know.

However, on further reflection, given what we have been told, and the fact that although based within a fictional town, the story takes place in contemporary America, doubts are raised about the authenticity of our narrators story. The withdrawal from heavy use of valium, coupled with the narrators’ previous allusions to having visions of the creature, presents the theory that he has imagined the creature at his door. His screams of ‘The window!’ could either mean that the creature has appeared at his window, or that he is trying to reach the window in order to plummet to his death. Whilst the creature is described as being ‘gigantic’ (p. 5) if he can see the creature at the window, the likelihood of him not noticing the creature until it was so close is slim. This enigmatic ending however only adds to the strength of the story.

Another point of note is that of course, if Dagon had appeared before him, our narrator would probably stop writing immediately. Rather than using this as an argument for his narrator’s insanity, I feel this is simply a literary method used to give his stories a powerful conclusion. As has been said of Lovecraft, he ‘would open the door…but only a crack,’[11] and this is a perfect example. The tale of Dagon raises more questions than it answers, leaving a terrifying image in the readers mind.

Isolation is also a prevalent theme within all of Lovecraft’s writings. Using this to create fear is a popular feature of horror since it began, dating to well before Lovecraft was writing, such as in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)[12], where Ambrosio is left alone for six days until he dies at the conclusion of the novel. The use of this technique continues to this day. This taps into the human fear of being alone, something that affects us all on a base level. When isolated we are left helpless, with no one to help us should we fall ill or encounter danger. In Dagon our narrator finds himself isolated, and this could contribute to the narrators’ possible madness. At the beginning of the story, our narrator finds himself stranded out at sea, and after several days he ‘began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.’ (p. 1) The narrator is made to feel insignificant by the expanse of the sea around him, relating to another theme of Lovecraft’s that is prominent in The Call of The Cthulhu. In The Call of The Cthulhu[13], Lovecraft writes, ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.’ (p. 139) and this works as a metaphor for the narrator in Dagon. He has travelled the oceans further than he has meant to, and found himself adrift and despairing at his situation.

The horror that features in Lovecraft’s stories focus on horrors that are unfathomable to the human mind. Lovecraft consciously avoids too much description of what his characters witness, often stating that the narrator is unable to describe what he has seen or heard. This applies even when his stories are relatively grounded in reality. Lovecraft’s visions were ahead of their time. Today we have Godzilla (1954)[14] and the recently released Cloverfield (2008)[15] depicting giant monsters, yet even these pieces of cinema don’t come close to capturing the scale of horror Lovecraft tells of.

[1] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 20

[2] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 23

[3] The Simpsons (1990) Season 2, Episode 3, Treehouse of Horror. TV. FOX. 25^th October.

[4] The Raven (2012) Film. Directed by JAMES MCTEIGUE, USA: Intrepid Pictures

[5] Jerrold E. Hogle (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

[6] H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon, The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), sleeve.

[7] S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2001), p. 51

[8] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 1-6

[9] H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon, The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), p. 58-64

[10] Edmund Burke (1757), Of The Sublime. [WWW] Bartleby. Available from: http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html [27/4/2012]

[11] Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), p. 135

[12] Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

[13] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of The Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 139-69

[14] Godzilla (1954) Film. Directed by Ishirô Honda, Japan: Toho Film Co. Ltd.

[15] Cloverfield (2008) Film. Directed by MATT REEVES, USA: Paramount Pictures