Word: lovecraft
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...quite live down to its promotion. And like many a horror movie touted by the hip critical fringe, it falls just short of delivering on its artistic promises. Director Stuart Gordon has fun trying to slice it both ways, though. Fleshing out a story by Horror Aesthete H.P. Lovecraft, Gordon finds florid visual correlatives for Lovecraft's eldritch prose, then adds a heavy dose of '80s psychosexuality. One messy kiss from the late Dr. Pretorious (Ted Sorel), and a cool blond psychiatrist (Barbara Crampton) gets tarted up in dominatrix leather to revive Nerdy Genius Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs...
Obviously, Lovecraft here was exploring those tenebrific estuaries of the occult that had barely been mapped by Jung, Fraser and Arthur Machen. He even equipped the ancient demons with names - mindless Azagoth, Soggoth, Ib, Nyarlathotep and, above all, the great dread Cthulu who, in his sole appear ance, seems to be a "gelatinous green immensity" that slobbers. To recall these alien creatures from their hideous hiding places (the arctic wastes, unfathomable submarine chasms, New Eng land), the intrepid have but to practice rituals recorded in dusty, blasphemous old tomes like the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred...
...true that some of Lovecraft's stories on the Cthulu Mythos - The Call of Cthulu, At the Mountains of Madness - rank high among the horror sto nes of the English language. But Great Cthulu only knows why perfectly good, independent writers from the late Au gust Derleth to Colin Wilson have seized and elaborated on the Mythos in their work...
...bats beat the air around my face, and chittering hordes of toadlike things chortled in infandous rhythms of ululation in dissonances of extreme morbidity and cacodemonial ghastliness. As I somehow anticipated, the cowled figure, his face ever hidden, approached and tugged my pajama sleeve, pulling me toward the open Lovecraft tomb. Forgetting danger, cleanliness and reason, I ventured into the yawning Stygian recesses of the inner earth, down inclined passageways whose walls were coated with the detestable slimy niter of the earth's bow els. My whole being choked on the stinking confluence of incense fumes, and a cancerous...
...write this report, for whether my heart can stand one more night of dreams is most uncertain. As the cowled figure grinned and gibbered, I saw his unmistakable prognathous jaw and wide, habitually surprised eyes. And I knew why so many writers have so assiduously emulated How ard Phillips Lovecraft, for hidden in the glistening convolutions of the eldritch imagination, he lives and he commands...