Tag Archives: Lovecraft

I make a lot of plans. For example, I’ve got a long spreadsheet for this blog, listing things I know I want to cover – I don’t have it all scheduled, but I know what I want to devote my time to, and there are topics I’m really looking forward to eventually dealing with. But “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that…sometimes you just see something and have such a strong response that it jumps to the front of the line, and that’s what happened with today’s movie, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “From Beyond.” But hey, at least when my plans go askew, no one gets an eye sucked out…which only happens once in this movie, but it is memorable.

Now, I’d watched this before about nine years ago, but I think conditions weren’t right for me to really appreciate what was on offer. I was watching it in the background while I was in the kitchen, baking cookies, and though I remember basically enjoying the movie, it hadn’t done a whole lot for me – fair as I hadn’t given much to it, myself. But a few weeks ago, I got home on a hot Saturday afternoon, exhausted and desperately needing a bit of easy fun as a reprieve from the summer heat and my other responsibilities, and as this had just popped up on Shudder, I gave it another try and just LOVED it.

So let’s get into it. I expect this will be short (though that expectation is often wrong) as I mostly just want to shower praise upon the film, and I’m certain there will be spoilers…

From Beyond (1986)

An immediate follow up to his cult breakout hit, Re-Animator (also based on a bit of Lovecraft) from just one year earlier, this was Stuart Gordon’s second feature, bringing back Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs from the first film, as well as much of the creative team (he’d come up in the theatre and was accustomed to working with a company). The script was co-written by Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli, who had also co-written Re-Animator, as well as having worked before with Gordon at the Organic Theatre in Chicago. Gordon would go on to do three more Lovecraft films with Paoli: Castle Freak (1995) (arguably at least, inspired by “The Outsider” and again working with Crampton and Combs), Dagon (2001), and Dreams in the Witch House (2005) (for the TV series, Masters of Horror). While I haven’t seen ‘Witch House,’ the others are really enjoyable. But, I’ve gotta say, for my money, From Beyond is my favorite of his Lovecraft adaptations, hands down. In a few ways, it is just more “Lovecraftian.” Some of that is obvious – it’s a story of otherworldly creatures beyond our comprehension that breach reality and drive people mad. They’re squiggly and goopy. There are tentacles involved. It all fits a common perception of what Lovecraft’s work consisted of. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So first, a bit of a digression re: Lovecraft.

On Lovecraft

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is a peculiar case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I imagine it may not be all that dissimilar from others’. I really like his oeuvre, but I can’t praise all aspects of it. Even overlooking the disturbingly blatant xenophobia and racism (a negative trait which he was not alone in having – if you ever pick up Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm,” for instance, be prepared), I sometimes feel like he didn’t actually write stories. I mean, he did write. A lot. Probably more than 100 tales were published. But they don’t always feel like stories in the classic sense. He didn’t seem particularly interested in character, and protagonists seemed to rarely have much, if any, agency over the events that would play out (thematically appropriate for him, but not always dramatically satisfying). Rather, the recurring narrative would be that of a witness. Some “normal guy,” who sometimes knew enough about the odd things that went bump in the night to sensibly try to steer clear of them, would be thrust into a situation wherein he would discover/observe/experience some shuddering horror beyond that which could be understood by his meager human intelligence. It would shake him to the core, but by the end, he would generally get away, such that he could tell the terrible tale, and through this unlucky narrator, H.P. could lay out some horrifying concept he’d dreamed up.

So with character and plot so decentered, I think the primary appeal of his work exists in two complementary qualities: theme and style. When I first encountered his texts, it was as if he had managed to exactly pin down just what this idea of ‘horror’ was that I’d become so enamored with: an encounter with that which is beyond what we can accept, what we can endure. He generally wrote in a sci-fi/weird fiction mode, creating (in many, though certainly not all) of his works, an extended mythos of all manner of wild, trans-dimensional, ancient beings, godlike to us petty humans, who do not really seek to harm us, so much as they just don’t care about us at all, and in going about their endless, unfathomable, arcane pursuits, just so happen to mortally, psychically, and spiritually threaten and/or destroy us in the process. We inhabit a world far larger, darker, and more terrifying than we can imagine, suffused with alien threat (paralleling his own xenophobia) and if we could see reality as it actually is, our feeble minds and souls couldn’t hope to endure. The thing is, for me, I don’t think this “cosmic horror” of his needs “cosmic” elements, per se. Rather, he paints pictures of encounters with things that shatter our previous conceptions of reality, of morality, of scale, and in so doing, can break us – and not all of them need include massive beings lying in slumber, waiting to awaken and devour the stars. I think this encounter, this revelation of unbearable reality is what “horror” is in life and having an author focus so specifically on setting it down on the page was exciting for me when I first discovered his writing many years ago. Also, the mythos itself is fun and odd and specific – it’s so refreshing to have something that plays the role of the demonic without having to buy into a Judeo-Christian mythology and ethical-moral hegemony.

But the other thing he focuses on, and what really gives me pleasure in the reading, is his style. He is trying to do so much, to suggest things that test the limits of the imagination, and he will use every damn synonym in the thesaurus to do it. The phrase “over-the-top” cannot hope to capture his lexical abandon. An adherent of the school of thought that says what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, he wrote extensively of the narrator’s reactions, while painting around the edges of the thing itself, maintaining the implication that words couldn’t contain the truth of this horror. But, regardless,  along the way, he did use all the words. Hemmingway he is not. A favorite, thrillingly overwritten passage comes from his 1924 story, “Under the Pyramids,” in which Harry Houdini finds himself in Egypt, captured by sinister Bedouins (ah, the much mentioned xenophobia) and lowered by a rope into a hole in the ground, wherein he will discover ancient nefarious mummified beasties with crocodile and hippopotamus heads, carrying out their dark rites in worship of some eldritch, indescribable, god-like thing, rising into the chthonic darkness. But well before he gets to the horrific payoff, the process of being lowered under the earth just sings:

“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible—hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”

I mean, yeah. That there is a good time! Is it good writing? I don’t know. Maybe? But also, maybe I don’t really care. When I can put myself in the mood for it, his prose is just such a blast. This is writing that is unashamed to go big, and while it is as over-the-top as can be, I don’t feel it ever ventures into a realm of campiness. It is a blast exactly because it is “too much,” but the whole point is to take that “too much” totally seriously – and be broken by it. It’s refreshing in our modern, jaded times to encounter anything so dialed up to eleven, while still being entirely earnest.

So, with that, let’s actually come back to the film in question, which I think is an excellent adaptation of Lovecraft’s horror themes and exaggerated, but lovable style, while filling in some of the gaps his writing leaves open to make for a most satisfying viewing experience.

The Film

First off, the adaptation is, on one level, quite faithful. Most of what happens in the story makes it to the screen: in the text, the narrator goes to visit his friend and colleague, the scientist, Crawford Tillinghast who, in his attic laboratory, has created a sonic resonator that can tune the pineal gland to function as a kind of sense organ, perceiving layers of reality typically unnoticed. However when in the presence of the resonator, whatever lives in those other realms with which we are usually out of sync can perceive us as well – and attack. The mad doctor turns against our narrator, but when the police arrive in the end, Tillinghast is dead, our narrator has destroyed the machine, and he can go on, forever shaken by this encounter with that which came from beyond!

The film takes all of these details as a premise, as a starting point, but then it builds from there extensively. Now, Tillinghast (Combs) is actually the assistant to the mad (and we come to learn, also quite kinky) Doctor Pretorius (in a nod to Ernest Thesiger’s fabulously mad scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein). In a standout cold open, they get the resonator to work, discover the squiggly things beyond, and Tillinghast manages to escape with his life (though not his sanity), having destroyed the resonator, while his boss loses his head to something bigger, something worse.

Tillinghast is rescued from the psyche ward by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who believes Pretorius’s machine could help schizophrenia patients, and has Tillinghast freed so that he can repair the resonator, enabling her to carry out her own experiments. Once operational, Pretorius returns, now one with the thing that had consumed him, mad with power and lust (the machine’s effect on the pineal gland results in a heightened state of arousal, even as goopy monsters abound), and mind shattering horror ensues.

Past that, I don’t really want to go too much into the plot (and there is a surprising amount of plot – twists and turns and reversals of alliance all over the place). Suffice it to say that Yuzna and Paoli run with the initial premise of Lovecraft’s text, do justice to it, and then add in an actual “story” on top, resulting in a really engaging, colorful, gory, inventive horror flick. Most of all, without ever undermining its own seriousness, it is fun and oh so “Lovecraftian.”

Firstly, beyond just faithfully following the concept of the text, it features wild special effects that live up to most expectations viewers would have of a “Lovecraft piece.” There are all manner of slimy, fleshy creatures that defy logic. The Pretorius-thing is in a state of constant flux, flesh distending and becoming other as it seeks to consume and absorb. Monstrous, cephalopodic tendrils undulate through the ether, wetly grasping at victims. There is an unearthly, pink-purple glow (truly high 80s) permeating the “science” of it all. And there are some jaw dropping moments of gore and weirdness: Tillinghast returning from the gullet of a transdimensional beast, bald and scarred, his pineal fully awakened and rising out of a newly formed orifice in his skull to lead him on a murderous brain-devouring, eye-sucking rampage; the Police sergeant accompanying the experiment to keep an eye on the mental patient (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as countless others) being devoured by a swarm of insects from another dimension until he’s a quivering, meaty skeleton on the ground; and Pretorius eating Tillinghast whole, only for him to climb back up out of his mouth, beginning a goopy game of ‘whose body is this and whose hand is reaching out of whose chest?’ Fun stuff.

But in line with what I wrote above about Lovecraft’s prose, what really makes this feel so in the spirit of his writing is not the tentacles or the goopiness or the existence of horrors well beyond our ken. It is the style, and that best surfaces in the performances. Our three central characters are all obsessed and/or mad in one way or another, and their performances are so perfectly tuned – all achieving a heightened style without tipping over into self-parody. Ted Sorel’s Pretorius is sadistically menacing while also being quite playful and sardonic. He brings great intensity and focus to his madness – not ranting and raving, but deadly in his single-minded desire to consume physically, psychically, and sexually, anything or anyone he can lure into his orbit. Barbara Crampton’s Dr. McMichaels walks a fine line between personally motivated clinical interest and being wholly seduced by the power and allure of the machine, and her fluctuations between self-erasing compulsion and rational self-interest, between victimizing and being victimized are carried with a great deal of nuance. Both performers are excellent.

But the movie really belongs to Jeffrey Combs. While of course, I enjoyed him in Re-Animator (and also Bride of Re-Animator – but I never saw Beyond Re-Animator) as Herbert West, his performance here is just perfectly calibrated, threading the needle with exactly the right amounts of mania, terror, earnest feeling, and fragile humanity in the face of the unbearable, as well as periodically bringing a hint of humor which sells the horror without undercutting it, without diminishing its seriousness. When, after their first encounter with the newly, fleshily otherworldly Pretorius, in which Tillinghast just barely saves the sergeant from being devoured by turning off the machine at the last second, and he says simply, “that – will be quite enough of that,” Combs’s delivery elicits a genuine laugh from me every time – but this small comic moment works with the drama of it all, rather than detracting from it. Without jumping around a lot, he gives a rather physical performance, the play of different mental-emotional-spiritual tensions acting out in his body, his voice, his eyes, and breath. All three actors are on the same page with that Lovecraftian excess, but Combs absolutely shines, delivering moments that in their personal horror, are such a freaking delight. It is pitch perfect horror-melodrama (which really is harder than it sounds) and deeply satisfying.   

And there are some elements which don’t feel much like Lovecraft, but still bring something to the table. As mentioned, there can be occasional notes of comedy here and there. When it arises, though, it is just for a moment and doesn’t dominate the scene (a bit of a departure from the more blackly comic tone of Re-Animator) – still, old H.P. never really came across as a funny guy, so this is a change, but I think a welcome one.

But the most significant introduction is that of sex, something that Lovecraft didn’t generally touch on (if at all – I haven’t read his full catalogue, but I’d be genuinely surprised). The film adds the conceit that the pineal gland is responsible for regulating the sex drive (which, from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page, I don’t believe is true), and thus, when the resonator stimulates the pineal, allowing the veil to be lifted between worlds, the air is filled with a sexual charge. Furthermore, those who succumb to the call of the machine do so out of a kind of sexual obsession, an utterly non-cerebral, even physical drive – a hunger they can’t fully understand or resist – to see, to know, to experience – to possess. This can lead them to monstrous actions in pursuit of their new sensory addiction, and also result in their own violation (a warning, if sexual assault is something that will just ruin a movie for you, as in Re-Animator, in one scene, Barbara Crampton’s character is subjected to unwelcome, sexualized contact – before a giant, slimy, mandibled  thing tries to eat her head).

In a way, to connect to a different author, it made me think much more of Clive Barker than Lovecraft – the mutable body, blurred lines between minds and flesh and sexual need – desire and pain and compulsion all tied up in knots with some unknown quality of the spirit. The addition of sex takes the experience beyond the realm of the merely cerebral – the horrors now existing in an interpersonal space, between bodies and minds, just as it also invites creatures that tread between worlds. Unfortunately, this sexual element didn’t always land for me on first viewing (and I found myself thinking how amazing it would have been if Barker had somehow been brought onto the project to help develop it – but I’m pretty sure he was developing Hellraiser (1987) at the time) – sometimes it felt tacked on and underdeveloped – an excuse to include some ticket-selling titillation and put Crampton in leather gear, though having watched the film a few times in the last couple of weeks, I can now better see its integration through the whole film. Still, even if I think it could have been explored more deeply, it certainly augments the piece.

So that is From Beyond. If you are in the mood for something that goes big, that takes itself seriously while still having just a bit of room for humor, that has crazy physical effect work, that captures a truly “Lovecraftian” style of madness, of excess, of Horror (all on a tidy little budget at Charles Band’s Empire Entertainment in Rome), this is your movie. It sure made my day, and might currently be my favorite Lovecraft adaptation.

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A quick non-Lovecraftian aside – if you are a regular reader, I am sorry it’s been a couple of weeks longer than usual. Life got in the way. It’s even kinda funny. After watching this the first time, I thought, “Wow! Fantastic! Loved it! Let’s get a quick post up about that and not overthink things!” And then more time went by than ever before actually publishing. I’ve been preparing a performance for the cabaret I work with (among other things, finally making that “Youth Runs Wild!” 50s teensploitation act I wrote about months ago) and there has been a great deal of arts and crafts to do in order to build everything. Along the way, I have put this movie on in the background so many times while sewing or hot gluing or painting, keeping it fresh in my mind and always thinking, “Today will be the day I write!” though it’s been weeks since that initial hot Saturday on which I first watched it. Argh. I try to get a post up bi-monthly, but that’s not always feasible. Anyway, I have high hopes for what’s coming next – thanks for sticking around…