 Originally Posted by Mike70
like many of you, i have had a life long love for Lovecraft's work. i have serious doubts that anyone could bring that mythos to life in a way even close to the darkness and doom that it demands. even stuart gordon's films, as good as many of them are, don't really reflect Lovecraft's world very well.
i think the problem revolves around the near absence of dialogue in Lovecraft's work. a great many of his stories have almost no verbal interaction between the characters, some of them have none at all. it is his rich sense of description and the way he created what i would call landscapes of doom and gloom that make Lovecraft great.
This is a very good observation. There are also a few other obstacles I can think of that would make Lovecraft's work inherently difficult to adapt onto film:
1) Traditionally, much of the "action" is not participated in directly by the narrator. With a few notable exceptions, the narrator himself is usually not present for all the major events of the plot, but instead pieces together the plot through reading books and newspaper articles. In Call of Cthulhu, for example, the narrator finds out about strange dreams shared by people all over the world by reading his old uncle's notes, finds out about a raid on a Cthulhu cult through corresponding with a police inspector, and finds out about an encounter with Cthulhu himself in the Pacific by going through news reports and interviewing a dead guy's widow. No single character is physically present through more than one of the pivotal events. This COULD be done on film, using portmanteau style flashbacks in place of descriptions, but would be a very non-traditional narrative by Hollywood standards. I suspect Hollywood would try to take the easy route, and artificially inject the central character into all the set-pieces, turning him into Indiana Jones and depriving the film of the "armchair detective" element that was the main feature of most his books.
2) Connected to the above: so many of the most terrifying reveals in Lovecraft's stories are not big CGI moments, but a character simply piecing together information from different written sources after long study, and coming to a terrible conclusion. The horror is cerebral, just an idea. This is chilling on the page but would be difficult to do right on-screen. Once again, the easy option beckons: monsters, lots of monsters.
3) The great thing about the horrors of Lovecraft's imagination, what makes them unique for his time period, is that they were not simple, superstitious, supernatural creatures with magic powers, but instead borderline science-fictional cosmic entities, beings from elsewhere in timespace where the familiar rules do not necessarily apply, whose powers are essentially scientific but are so alien and so far in advance of our own as to be indistiguishable from magic in our primitive insect minds. Lovecraft goes to great lengths to describe how INDESCRIBABLE their appearance, technology and architecture truly are. Some of these features - non-Euclidean geometry, etc. - would be very, very difficult to represent in a visual manner, although it might be possible to pull it off using forced perspective and optical illusions. Other features - including, but not limited to, four- and five-dimensional shapes, and even whole new colours - would be utterly impossible.
|
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks