Shunned House, The (2003)

Posted on Apr 07, 2004 under Horror |

Directed by Ivan Zuccon
Written by Enrico Saletti and Ivan Zuccon, based on the stories “The Shunned House,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” and “Dreams in the Witch-House” by H.P. Lovecraft
Starring
- Giuseppe Lorusso
- Federica Quaglieri
- Emanuele Cerman
- Silvia Ferreri
- Michael Segal

Say what you will about the cinematic adaptations of Bram Stoker, Stephen King, or John Grisham; I still think that the author whose transition to film has consistently been least successful is H.P. Lovecraft. It’s the nature of Lovecraft’s writing; you can’t play to a writer’s strengths when those strengths include an overwrought vocabulary, and when the weaknesses include inattention to characterization and a tin ear for dialogue. Plus, just about every Lovecraft story ends with the narrator futilely trying to describe something indescribable, the sight of which has just driven the poor slob mad. How can you put that on the silver screen? As it turns out, the best movies to be adapted to Lovecraft are those which, like the Re-Animator movies, are least faithful to either the plot or the general tenor of Lovecraft’s fiction. (That’s assuming, of course, that where the producers decide to jettison the original, the don’t fill in the gap with the standard “horny teens trying to party” filler.)

It’s something of a mixed task, then, to make an adaptation of “The Shunned House,” as it’s one of Lovecraft’s least effective stories. It’s an amalgamation of the familiar tropes: a cobwebby New England setting, a multi-generational plague, a protagonist who discovers vague hints of mindblowing evil while doing antiquarian research… topped by the most giggle-inducing climactic revelation in the entire Lovecraft canon. (”The Shunned House” was the first Lovecraft story I read, after having heard him praised several times. Imagine my disappointment.)

“Boy, wait’ll I tell the guys about the neat clubhouse I found!”

All of which means that, while it won’t make great motion picture fodder, the resulting movie has a good chance of looking better compared to the original.

In this case, the movie version is actually an acknowledged amalgamation of elements from “The Shunned House, “The Music of Erich Zann,” and “Dreams in the Witch-House,” which at least gives us enough plot elements to fill up a screenplay without resorting to horny teens.

Alex (Giuseppe Lorusso), a writer looking for subject matter, has dragged his girlfriend Rita (Federica Quaglieri) along as he takes a multi-day excursion to explore the abandoned Crossroads Inn, hoping to find a clue to the inn’s unsavory history of statistically-improbable mysterious deaths. The first thing you notice when Alex and Rita open their mouths is that they’re Italian. Not surprising, considering that this is an Italian production, but it’s still odd (and more than a little tiring) to listen to English dialogue through such thick Italian accents. That holds true for the rest of the production, too; the actors are all either Italians performing in thickly-accented English, or Italians performing in Italian and subsequently dubbed in thickly-accented English.

“Yes, I AM the kind of guy who goes exploring abandoned buildings without a flashlight. So?”

Chief of the mysteries he’s looking into are the tales of two of the inn’s former tenants of several decades past: A young and obsessive mathematician named Luigi (Emanuele Cerman), and a brash young writer named Marco (Michael Segal). Their two separate stories are interlaced with Alex and Rita’s experiences as they stay a couple of days in the decrepit inn.

Luigi’s story is the one inspired by “Dreams in the Witch-House”: He obsesses over certain odd angles in the inn’s architecture, and stays up many a night drafting diagrams and analyzing correspondences between angles. He often finds himself in odd locations around the inn in the morning and becomes the laughingstock of the staff for his sleepwalking, the exception being the maid Nora (Silvia Ferreri), who is quite taken with Luigi and pursues him gently but insistently.

He begins to have bizarre nightmares involving black-hooded figures in a crypt-like chapel, of himself holding a cruel axe and using it to do unspeakable things to infants. His distress over his nightmares takes a quantum leap when he comes to himself one morning to find his face and shirt splashed with blood… the same morning that the village is abuzz with news of a murdered baby.

When the… um.. Sorry, what was I saying?

Marco’s story is a retelling of “The Music of Erich Zann”: The idealistic young man of letters has a room next to that of Carlotta Zann (Christiana Vaccaro), a mute violinist whose compositions, heard through the walls in the wee small hours, are so unlike anything Marco has ever heard before that they inspire his writing and his courage to speak to her. Carlotta is less than cheerful about the music she plays late into the night, and she’s very spooked at the way her window flies open while she plays.

Most impressive about this storyline is the perfection with which the violin music matches Lovecraft’s description of “fantastic, delirious and hysterical.” (At some points, I think the recording was actually played backwards to add an extra touch of not-quite-rightness to the playing.) It’s remarkable any time that the music for an indie genre movie makes a positive contribution; it’s even rarer when that music plays a substantive role in the story.

Almost matching the effectiveness of the music is the visual talent behind the camera. The movie was obviously written “of a piece,” instead of being shot as two separate stories connected by a third wraparound story. Not only are the three storylines edited together, but they were shot together; sometimes the transition from one timeframe to another is made simply by turning the camera and peering into a different doorway, in which lighting changes communicate the transition to a different storyline.

“Dammit, I bet it got under my contact lens and everything, too.”

Not that the three storylines are kept very separate at all — between the fluid transitions and matchcuts and the frequent conflation of dreams with the real world, the whole takes on a character that is surreally nightmarish.

It’s in that surreality that the most memorable sparks show through. The frequent use of disembodied arms — the body concealed by nothing but shadow — is subtle but chilling. And one nightmare image stands out distinctly: A woman with stitched-shut lips and a leather band nailed across her eyes, beating her forehead slowly against a bloodied spot on the wall. I’m guessing that that one grew out of a real-world nightmare image on the director’s part.

With all that I’ve said positive about this movie so far, then, it may seem like an about-face when I tell you that, as a whole, it never really works. Certainly the awkwardness of performances all in a second language is a huge contributor, but it’s not alone. Thanks to the concentration on surreal, dream-like timing, neither the individual storylines nor the movie as a whole ever feel like they’re moving to a point or a climax; the whole comes off as a collection of interesting visual storytelling ideas that never really built to anything.

“Mr. Fulci? I’m ready for my close-up!”

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the end of the movie. If there’s one thing that characterizes a Lovecraft story, it’s the all-importance of that final reveal, that shock which cements all of the nasty hints and suspicions into whatever pops the bubble of the protagonist’s sanity. But here, each of the three storylines ends noncommittally (to various degrees), like a dream that fades to wakefulness at the wrong time.

I see a lot of potential in the visual storytelling of director Ivan Zuccon; it’s certainly a level of artistry head and shoulders above most releases from Brain Damage Films. Hopefully for his next project he’ll have access to film equipment that can support those talents better than digital video, and he’ll spend more time on a screenplay whose structure can support its own weight.

(But in case you’re wondering… no, the hideous climactic moment from “The Shunned House” doesn’t make an appearance. Thank heavens for small favors.)