Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales

  For many years, August Derleth was acknowledged as the foremost authority on Lovecraft with his introductions to various collections of the author’s work. New York publisher Ben Abramson issued Derleth’s H.P.L.: A Memoir in 1945 as a slim hardcover volume of 1,000 copies. A further study, Some Notes on H.P. Lovecraft, appeared as a 1,044-copy chapbook under the Arkham House imprint in 1959, while in 1963 Derleth annotated Lovecraft’s Autobiography of a Nonentity, which was published for Arkham by the Villiers Press in England as a 500-copy booklet.

  California’s The Futile Press had produced The Notes & Commonplace Book Employed by the Late H.P. Lovecraft in 1938 as a 48-page booklet prepared by R.H. Barlow, and Lovecraft: A Symposium (1964) was a transcription of a discussion between Arthur Jean Cox, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Sam Russell and Leland Sapiro, recorded at the October 24, 1963 meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS).

  As a companion to his influential ‘Adult Fantasy’ series for Ballantine Books, Lin Carter’s ground-breaking study Lovecraft: A Look Behind the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (1972) presented details of its subject’s life and works to a general readership for the first time. It was followed by Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) by Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft at Last (1975) by Willis Conover, and L. Sprague de Camp’s controversial Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). French writer Michel Houellebecq’s long essay H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre le vie (aka H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, 1991) was equally disputable.

  Anybody looking for a definitive biography of the author would do no better than pick up a copy of H.P.Lovecraft: A Life (1996) by renowned Lovecraft authority S.T. Joshi, while Lovecraft Remembered (1998), edited by Peter Cannon for Arkham House, is a thorough collection of reminiscences and memoirs by friends and fellow writers.

  ‘Lovecraft, I suggest, never took himself as seriously as do the idolators who have made him a cult-object,’ succinctly observed his friend and correspondent E. Hoffman Price.

  In recent years, Lovecraft scholarship has been boosted to an almost pathological level, and writers such as Joshi have created entire careers around dissecting the minutiae of the author’s literary output. This has led to a burgeoning industry of specialty press titles dedicated to Lovecraft’s life and works. Along with such fan publications as Book of Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction and Lovecraftian Horror, Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Codex, Cthulhu Sex, Dagon, Joshi’s Lovecraft Studies, Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries, Midnight Shambler, Mythos Collector, Nyctalops and Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, to name only a few, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror was a fiction periodical launched in 2003 by Wildside Press.

  Lovecraftian academicism reached a high point in 1990, when the H.P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference was held at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

  It was inevitable that as H.P. Lovecraft’s popularity increased, so his work would be adapted into other media.

  Although Lovecraft enjoyed seeing movies (the 1933 time-travel romance Berkeley Square was one of his favourites), he did not have a very high opinion of the cinema industry: ‘Virtually all so-called weird films are simply infantile nonsense,’ he told Willis Conover.

  ‘I shall never permit anything bearing my signature to be banalised and vulgarised into the infantile twaddle which passes for “horror tales” amongst radio and cinema audiences!’ Lovecraft famously wrote in a 1933 letter.

  The first official adaptation of the author’s work on film was American International Picture’s The Haunted Palace (1963), starring horror film icons Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, Jr. Based on the author’s posthumously-published short novel ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, the movie actually took its title from the eponymous poem by one of Lovecraft’s favourite authors, Edgar Allan Poe.

  ‘I fought against calling it a Poe film,’ director Roger Corman recalled, ‘but AIP had made so much money with Poe films that they just stuck his name on it for box-office appeal. To me, I was just making a Lovecraft picture.’

  Veteran actor Boris Karloff returned to his native Britain to star in Monster of Terror (aka Die Monster Die!, 1965), director Daniel Haller’s loose version of ‘The Colour Out of Space’, and despite top-billing Americans Gig Young and Carol Lynley, David Greene’s The Shuttered Room (1966) was also filmed in England. Based on one of Derleth’s ‘posthumous collaborations’, a young Oliver Reed portrayed sadistic thug Ethan Whateley. However, there was not a Lovecraftian ‘Deep One’ in sight.

  Despite starring such horror heavyweights as Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and Michael Gough, almost nothing remained of an uncredited Jerry Sohl’s adaptation of ‘The Dreams in the Witch-House’ in Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult, 1968). Meanwhile, former teen star Sandra Dee found herself about to be sacrificed to The Great Old Ones by Dean Stockwell’s Wilbur Whateley in Daniel Haller’s updated psychedelic version of The Dunwich Horror (1969), which author and Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp summed up as ‘While not bad fun, the movie came nowhere near the original in force’.

  With Stuart Gordon’s outrageously gory Re-Animator (1985), loosely based on ‘Herbert West - Reanimator’, Lovecraft’s work received something of a cinematic revival over the following decade. ‘Compared with Lovecraft’s other work, it’s a very explicit story, very action-packed,’ explained Gordon. ‘The problem with Lovecraft is that he often gets into this “unspeakable and indescribable horror” stuff, which is hard to portray on screen.’

  The director’s next Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond (1986), fell squarely into that category as Gordon was reunited with his Re-Animator star Jeffrey Combs, who this time transformed into a brain-eating monster.

  Directed by actor David Keith, The Curse (1987) was another version of ‘The Colour Out of Space’, while Mark Kinsey Stephenson portrayed a contemporary Randolph Carter in Jean-Paul Ouellette’s The Unnamable (1988). The actor reprised his role in the same director’s 1992 sequel Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolf Carter (aka The Unnamable Returns).

  ‘As a film-maker, I’ve often gone to Lovecraft to get inspiration,’ revealed Brian Yuzna, director of the sequels Bride of Re-Animator (aka Re-Animator 2, 1989) and Beyond Re-Animator (2003), ‘and when you read Lovecraft I would defy you to tell me exactly what the story is about. It’s very elusive, but the feelings of dread and horror are always there, and very palpably so.’

  Despite having the film taken away from him during post-production, Dan O’Bannon’s The Resurrected (1991) remains an impressive modern adaptation of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ starring Chris Sarandon in the dual role. H.P. Lovecraft himself (in the guise of Jeffrey Combs) turned up to link the anthology movie Necronomicon (1993), directed by Christophe Gans, Shusuke Kaneko and Brian Yuzna. Two of the three episodes were loosely based on ‘Cool Air’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’.

  Combs continued his connection with Lovecraft films with roles in C. Courtney Joyner’s Lurking Fear (1994), filmed in Romania, and Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak (1995), shot in Italy and loosely inspired by both ‘The Outsider’ and ‘The Shuttered Room’.

  Although never credited as such, Peter Svatek’s Bleeders (aka Hemoglobin, 1996) was also based on ‘The Lurking Fear’ (only previously filmed two years earlier). Rutger Hauer played a drunken doctor who saved an island community from ghouls. Stuart Gordon’s Spanish-made Dagon (aka Dagon - La recta del mar, 2001) may have contained elements of Lovecraft’s title story, but it was actually the director’s long-planned version of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.

  From Italy, Ivan Zuccon’s shot-on-video The Shunned House (2003) combined incomprehensible adaptations of the title story, ‘The Music of Eric [sic] Zann’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch-House’, which would have had H.P. Lovecraft spinning in his grave. Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2004) had even less to do with its source material, while Serge Rodnunsky’s Chill (20
06) starring James Russo, Thomas Calabro and Ashley Laurence, was a contemporary reworking of ‘Cool Air’ set in Los Angeles.

  Lovecraftian references could also be found in such films as Harvey Hart’s TV pilot Dark Intruder (1965), Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (aka La paura nella citta dei morti viventi/The Gates of Hell, 1980) and The Beyond (aka E tu vivrai nel terrore . . . l’aldila/Seven Doors to Death, 1981), Martin Campbell’s inventive TV movie Cast a Deadly Spell (1991), J.P. Simon’s Black Magic Mansion (aka La mansion de los cthulhu/Cthulhu Mansion, 1992), John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Ivan Zuccon’s The Darkness Beyond (aka L’altrove, 2000) and The Unknown Beyond (aka Maelstrom, Il Figlio Dell’Altrove) and even Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy (2004).

  ‘His use of suggestion and allusion might seem beyond the reach of most film-makers, ’ observed Ramsey Campbell, ‘but I submit The Blair Witch Project (1998) as the most Lovecraftian of films, not least in the documentary realism he urged upon serious artists in the field and in the inexplicitness with which it conveys, to use his phrase, dread suspense.’

  The annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival was started in October 1996 by Andrew Migliore to promote the author’s works through film adaptations by student, amateur and professional film-makers. ‘I have found that student and amateur films are far more faithful to the spirit of Lovecraft and his macabre stories,’ explained Migliore.

  Numerous short movies have been made from Lovecraft’s stories, many of them quite effective despite the low budgets. One of the most impressive film adaptations of the author’s work to date is Andrew Leman’s The Call of Cthulhu (2005), a silent short filmed in ‘MythoScope’ by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

  ‘It’s as faithful an adaptation of a tale of Lovecraft’s as we’ve yet seen in the cinema,’ wrote Ramsey Campbell.

  Although Lovecraft died before it became a household fixture, he revealed in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith that he had seen an ‘interesting’ demonstration of television in a local department store in 1933. However, despite the obvious advantages of adapting the author’s short stories to the small screen, there have been precious few TV versions of his work.

  Rod Serling’s Night Gallery was an anthology series that ran on NBC-TV from 1970-73. Each story was represented by a macabre painting and introduced by host/creator Serling (of Twilight Zone fame). In December 1971 the show presented Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’, directed by Jack Laird and starring Bradford Dillman as the nineteenth-century artist who painted from life. The following week, Serling himself adapted ‘Cool Air’, which was directed by Jeannot Szwarc and featured Henry Darrow as a scientist who had managed to cheat death by keeping cold.

  The previous month, the show had presented director Jerrold Freedman’s fun-filled ‘Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture’, in which the eponymous teacher (Carl Reiner) debunked The Great Old Ones in front of a class that included students Bloch (Richard Annis), Heald (Louise Lawson), Derleth (Larry Watson) and a geeky Lovecraft (Johnnie Collins, III).

  ABC-TV’s The Real Ghostbusters was a children’s cartoon series based on the 1984 movie Ghostbusters. In the 1987 episode ‘The Collect Call of Cathulhu’ [sic], scripted by Michael Reaves, the Ghostbusters teamed up with the Miskatonic University’s occult scientist Alice Derleth to recover a stolen copy of the Necronomicon before it could be used by an ancient cult to open a dimensional portal for the Great Old Ones.

  Stuart Gordon was an obvious choice to direct a modern reworking of ‘Dreams in the Witch House’ (2005) for the first season of the Showtime Network’s anthology series Masters of Horror.

  There were also television adaptations of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ in Japan (1992) and ‘Pickman’s Model’ in Chile (2000). The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a 1999 French documentary about the author, while a Canadian biography made the following year, Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, cast Christopher Heyerdahl as the author and Art Kitching as Randolph Carter.

  In 2006, Night Shade Books reissued Andrew Migliore and John Strysik’s wide-ranging 1995 study Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft in a redesigned and updated edition with a Preface by the ubiquitous S.T. Joshi.

  It has often been argued that horror is more effective when it is heard and not seen. This may be especially true of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

  Possibly the first media adaptation of one of the author’s stories was a special Halloween presentation of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ on the CBS radio show Suspense. Hosted by Ronald Colman, it was broadcast on 1 November 1945.

  Since then, Lovecraft’s fiction has been widely adapted for audio, including Fungi from Yuggoth: A Sonnet Cycle, which was the first release from specialty publisher Fedogan & Bremer in 1989.

  In 2001, Britain’s Rainfall Records released Strange Aeons, a two-disc CD collection inspired by Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. This audio anthology was produced and directed by artist Steve Lines and featured contributions from writers Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Simon Clark, Joel Lane, Robert M. Price and Tim Lebbon.

  During the 1960s there was a psychedelic rock group from Chicago called H.P. Lovecraft, whose songs included ‘The White Ship’ (1967) and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1969). The band split up after vocalist Dave Michael left to return to university, but they briefly reformed and changed their name to simply Lovecraft, releasing two albums in the early 1970s.

  Taking their name from Lovecraft’s story ‘The Tomb’, comedy Canadian band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets was formed in 1992 and have recorded such albums as Cthulhuriffomania! (1994), Cthulhu Strikes Back (1995), The Great Old Ones (1996) and The Shadow Out of Tim (2007).

  In December 2006, BBC Radio 3 broadcast Weird Tales-The Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft. Geoff Ward, professor of literature at Dundee University, presented the forty-five minute show about the influential author with contributions from Neil Gaiman, S.T. Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Miéville.

  In the early 1950s, the controversial EC horror comics line published a number of stories that, probably due to copyright restrictions, did not credit Lovecraft as the source material, yet still appeared to be unauthorised adaptations of his work.

  Among the more obvious strips inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction were ‘Experiment . . . in Death’ (aka ‘Herbert West - Reanimator’, Weird Science No.12, May 1950), ‘Fitting Punishment’ (aka ‘In the Vault’, Vault of Horror No.16, December 1950) and ‘Baby, It’s Cold Inside’ (aka ‘Cool Air’, Vault of Horror No.17, February 1951), while other tales mentioned the Necronomicon (‘The Black Arts’ in Weird Fantasy No.14, July 1950) and ‘Cthulhu’ (‘Who Doughnut?’ in Vault of Horror No.30, April 1953).

  For the following two decades, Warren Magazines were a successful successor to the old EC comics, and their Creepy title featured two official Lovecraft adaptations: ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (#21, July 1968) and ‘Cool Air’ (#113, November 1979). Meanwhile, the thirteenth issue Warren’s companion title Eerie (February 1968) reprinted Russ Jones’ graphic version of ‘Wentworth’s Day’. Adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth story in The Survivor and Others, it was originally published in the paperback collection Christopher Lee’s Treasury of Terror (1966).

  Although both EC and Warren were published outside the Comics Code Authority, Marvel Comics’ horror titles of the early 1970s were restricted by what they could show. However, that did not stop them adapting such Lovecraft tales as ‘The Terrible Old Man!’ (Tower of Shadows #3, January 1970), ‘The Music from Beyond’ (aka ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, Chamber of Darkness #5, June 1970), ‘Pickman’s Model’ (Tower of Shadows #9, January 1971) and ‘The Haunter of the Dark!’ (Journey Into Mystery #4, April 1971).

  A number of these strips were later reprinted in Marvel’s 1975 graphic magazine Masters of Terror, while Robert Bloch’s Cthulhu Mythos stories ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ and ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ appeared in Journey Into Mystery #3 (Febr
uary 1973) and #5 (June 1973), respectively.

  West Coast ‘underground’ publisher Last Gasp designated the fourth edition of its ‘adults only’ Skull Comics (1972) a special Arkham House and H.P. Lovecraft issue and dedicated it to August Derleth (‘for his life-long interest in the medium of the comic strip and his encouragement to us in this special project’). It included black-and-white adaptations of ‘The Hound’, ‘Cool Air’ and ‘Pickman’s Model’, along with original material.

  The following issue contained graphic versions of ‘The Rats in the Walls’ and the poem ‘To a Dreamer’, along with ‘The Shadow from the Abyss’, an original tale inspired by Lovecraft’s work.

  The October 1976 issue of Heavy Metal magazine was an H.P. Lovecraft special. As well as a photo-illustration cover by J.K. Potter, it included an adaptation of ‘The Dunwich Horror’. P. Craig Russell adapted ‘From Beyond’ for the May 1994 issue of Heavy Metal, while a coloured version Richard Corben’s ‘The Rats in the Walls’ from Skull Comics No.5 was featured in the March 1999 edition.

  Dell comics had released a tie-in to the American International movie Die, Monster, Die! in March 1966, and from 1991-92 Adventure Comics published two three-issue series of comic books based on the 1985 movie Re-Animator. From the same publisher, the four issues of H.P. Lovecraft: The Master of Horror! (1991-92) contained adaptations of ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’, ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Alchemist’.