Dreams in the Witch-House (2005)

Reviewed on May 02, 2007 under Horror |

Directed by Stuart Gordon
Written by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft
Starring
- Ezra Godden
- Jay Brazeau
- Campbell Lane
- Chelah Horsdal
- Yevgen Voronin

Years back, when I first read Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch-House,” I thought it was one of his most cinematic stories, or at least one which could best survive the transition from prose to film. It’s one of his most visually descriptive stories, and one in which most of the horror and suspense comes from events as they unfold, rather than documentary sources and a string of adjectives describing the protagonist-narrator’s mental state. Even so, I knew that there were three essentials to making any movie adaptation worthwhile:

The director would have to “get” Lovecraft and be willing to use film as a medium to bring the audience to Lovecraft’s story, rather than watering down Lovecraft’s story to take it to the people.
The original story probably couldn’t sustain a full-length feature film; rather than padding out the narrative with extraneous violence and sex, the story could best be told at a length shorter than the normal motion picture.
Filmmaking technology would have to catch up to the needs of the story to tell it as it needed to be told, with special effects which integrated with and supported the narrative rather than hamstringing it and calling attention to the mechanics.

Still better than my undergrad apartment.

It’s not often that the fates conspire in your favor, but it certainly seemed like the stars were right when this came together: (1) Stuart Gordon, who “gets” Lovecraft better than any director living or dead, being invited to (2) direct an entry in Masters of Horror, a series of short (just under an hour) features on Showtime, and thus as gory as they wanna be. And as for (3), hey — this is the 21st Century, right?

So if I express any disappointment at the result, it’s mostly because I expected an EXCEPTIONALLY STUPENDOUS version of the story, instead of one that is merely very well done. I suppose you might call that “praising with faint damnation.”

If you know the original tale, then the filmed version will hold very few surprises for you, as Gordon and co-writer Dennis Paoli adopted the ethic of not changing anything they didn’t have to (refreshing, isn’t it?). Walter Gilman (Ezra Godden, from Stuart and Paoli’s Dagon (2001)) is a graduate student at Miskatonic U. who needs cheap, quiet lodgings where he can study. The cheapest place in town is the cramped garrett room of a three-hundred-year-old house, now parted out for a variety of down-and-out tenants. Walter meets to of them right off: Old Joe Masurewicz (Campbell Lane), who lives on the first floor in a crucifix-crowded room and watches Walter with sad, fevered eyes; and Frankie (Chelah Horsdal), a single mother in the room next to Walter who’s desperately trying to get her life back together for the sake of her infant son Danny. Walter first meets her in response to her screams — a large rat won’t leave the baby alone, and the belligerent manager (Jay Brazeau) leaves it up to Walter to solve the problem.

It’s not just the angles — that’s eldritch wallpaper!

Despite the crying baby and screaming mother, Walter does find time to study his higher physics coursework. In fact, the room is particularly conducive to it, he finds, when he realizes that the 3-D diagram of intersecting dimensional “membranes” graphed on his laptop exactly matches the odd corner of his room where two walls and the ceiling come together at a bizarre angle. It may be a great room for study, but it’s also a room conducive to sinister dreams. He soon finds himself accosted by a rat in his dreams, a rat with a human face (Yevgen Voronin) which emerges from a violet glow in the odd corner of the room. Worse, the dreams start to impinge on his waking life in odd ways, as when he falls asleep in Frankie’s room, watching Danny while Frankie’s out, and wakes up in his own bed. Is he sleepwalking? Or is it something worse?

Already, we’ve got some significant changes from Lovecraft’s story, and dare I say that the changes are for the better. The character of Frankie was simply “Frank” in the original, a fellow student rooming on another floor who provided a convenient couch when Walter’s room got too weird for him. Here, though, more than the requisite love interest (or even a more egalitarian version of a story written by an avowed sexist), the change brings the cosmic but abstract horror of Lovecraft’s conception a little closer to home. In the original, the man-faced rat (”Brown Jenkin” byh name) and the fabled witch-ghost he serves (Susanna Uchatius) are linked to the regular disappearances of children and babies in the poorer parts of town every Halloween and Walpurgis Night, but as horrifying as the idea of ritual infanticide is, the victims are nameless and unrelated to Walter. Here, the witch’s target is Danny, and so her desire and attempts to snare Walter into complicity — into being her hands for the sacrifice — are monstrous not only in the abstract, but on a very immediate level.

I’M IN UR DREAMS
STEALIN UR S0ULZ

Similarly, the role of old Joe is built up from simple hints and window dressing in the original. With his characteristic ethnocentric prejudice, Lovecraft had assigned to the Polish immigrants in the rundown neighborhood the role of simple, superstitious window-dressing; Joe’s constant praying from the ground floor is a simple detail of setting. In Gordon and Paoli’s version, though, Joe is more than a spooked local. He knows what Walter is in for, because Joe once occupied that garrett room as a young man. He was himself an instrument in the witch’s hand, and has stayed a tenant in this house all these decades in order to push back against the witch and partially atone for the atrocities which he himself committed under her power.

Thus, where Lovecraft simply populated his witch-house with names and types to fill out the empty spaces, the movie turns these names into actual characters, whose presence and interaction with Walter lend depth to the human drama surrounding Lovecraft’s cosmic horror.

That’s always the way with shooting scripts…

But in proportion as Gordon and Paoli add to Lovecraft’s narrative, they also take away, mostly in matters relating to (3) above. A large part of the original story, and that aspect which had me so excited about modern moviemaking technology, concerns Walter Gilman’s dream excursions into a plane beyond our reality, an extradimensional realm of abstract forms which the old witch had discovered and into which she and Brown Jenkin had escaped centuries ago. Elevating the tale above the level of a standard ghost story, Lovecraft posited an intersection between standard “black magic” and higher mathematics, with “supernatural” powers being an expression of those unknown levels of reality beyond mundane existence which are more disturbing by their dissociation from the hoary old horror-story cliches. Before the present, there simply wasn’t the technology to visually present these extradimensional realms without animation, blue-screened psychedelia, or TRON-level computer effects, and the possibility of bringing Walter’s dream excursions to life on screen was what excited me about a screen adaptation of this story. Unfortunately, those concepts are almost wholly absent from this adaptation, apart from the angles forming the corner of Walter’s room, and there is no indication of the cosmic scope of the witch’s reality. Here, she can do little but walk through walls.

And Brown Jenkin… is probably as good as I should have expected him to look. It’s very easy, I realize, to say in text that a man-faced rat is horrific and unnerving. It’s another thing to bring that to life. Brown Jenkin is realized by a combination of a trained rat, cable puppets, a wee bit of CGI, and an actor in forced perspective wearing whiskers and sharp teeth. Too often, this supposedly-ghastly rat-being looks too much like a character who should be sitting at the Mad Hatter’s table in a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland.

The grapefruit knife — of DOOM!

But to varying degrees, these two complaints hold sway largely among those who know the original short story and wish to see its strengths translated intact to the screen. To the viewer who isn’t gauging the fidelity of the prose-to-screen adaptation, this short feature remains unsettling and perhaps even memorable.