Tag: Kathy Charles

I Got A Lot to Think About: Travis Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Stagnation can last years, but the dead travel fast.

If I can summarize Jakob’s Wife, directed by Travis Stevens, and written by him, Kathy Charles, and Mark Steensland, it would be that bite-sized sentence above. I’ve been looking forward to seeing — and writing about — this film. Not only did Travis Stevens direct the brilliance of what misogyny leaves behind in Girl On The Third Floor, Kathy Charles write the Lovecraft Mythos remake of Castle Freak, and Mark Steensland co-write a twisted version of male sexual fantasies, addiction, and consequences in The Special, but this movie stars the renowned Barbara Crampton who plays Anne Fedder: an unhappy woman and wife of a small-town preacher who gains something that can be seen as both a curse, and a blessing.

I just want to say, as many other reviews, articles, and interviews have stated — including and especially in Meredith Borders’ “Waiting to Exsanguinate” as well as Barbara Crampton’s own “Scene Queen: The Journey of Jakob’s Wife” in Fangoria Vol. 2, Issue #11 — that the element of vampirism is only part of the overall theme of the film: which is that of a woman seeking to change her life in a stale relationship, and attempting to negotiate the boundaries of love while seeking her own freedom. 

Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it. Certainly, vampirism being besides the point in a vampire film is nothing novel. Joe Bego’s 2019 film Bliss comes to mind, if only because I said something very similar about it. But there is a difference between that psychedelic nightmare of drugs and self-denial, and Anne’s sudden thrust into a reality that is terrifying, but all too clear: something that, in some ways, has always been around her: and she’s only seeing it now. It’s poetic that takes Anne dying to actually realize that she wants to live. But does Anne actually die?

I am getting ahead of myself. If you want to actually watch the film — and I highly suggest you should — our fangs are out, and from them are dripping spoilers. You were warned. I would suggest, as Anne says to another in her film, that you run while you still can.

This whole film is nuanced. It’s true that Barbara Crampton’s previous horror roles in the 1980s — in Re-Animator, and From Beyond — were not always subtle, but in addition to the way she portrays those characters her skill has evolved. Certainly, by the time we get to her role in Andy Collier and Tor Mian’s Sacrifice, we see she can play a character who straddles the line between different sides of morality, and someone who struggles with their place in society, and their own desires. 

Barbara Crampton goes specifically into the correlation between herself having returned to acting later in her life after marriage and raising a family, and Anne being an older woman seeking to fulfill dreams she put on hold to find love and stability. However, unlike Barbara Crampton — who never really stopped working or chasing her own goals, despite the ageism towards women in the film industry — Anne let herself become subsumed by the doctrine, but mostly the routine of married life with her husband the Pastor Jakob Fedder: a seemingly unassuming man played by veteran actor Larry Fessenden. 

I’m getting back to my point about nuance. This film could have easily gone a few ways, and I found myself being wrong with almost every prediction I had. When the film begins, Jakob is preaching to his congregation in their small town, and after — when he’s approached by a young woman named Amelia — there is almost this red herring in the way it’s portrayed playing on your expectations that the young girl is trying to flirt with the pastor, or there is something illicit business going on. A part of my mind even considered the possibility that Anne had already become a vampire, and is the presence stalking the girl later: her sympathy towards the young woman’s alcoholic mother being an excellent mask.

But that’s not what this film is about. It also isn’t about Jakob, however mundane he seems at the beginning of the story, being a terrible or a violent religious fanatic, or being completely ignorant of what happens to his wife right towards the end of the movie. He doesn’t immediately turn on her, and he also isn’t killed by her as a plot point to liberating herself from him. These are all heavy-handed, easy plot solutions, but Jakob’s Wife never takes the easy way out.

It’s true that the town, in the middle of seeming nowhere, is ruled by a patriarchal system and social expectations towards women: something we see in the attitudes of Anne’s brother and sister-in-laws, and even her husband during their dinner scene when talking about whether or not Amelia ran away “due to a boyfriend,” as opposed to something having actually happened to her. There are certainly some class and even possibly racial connotations in those deliberations and gossip given that Amelia is Black and she and her mother live in a more rundown part that town, and definitely some of that is mirrored in the way that Jakob confiscates marijuana from two younger people of colour. This is the setting that’s seeped into Anne throughout the years, an ebb and flow: a sluggish pulse of inertia that Jakob can live with, complete with the expectation of having a dutiful wife that you can see in the implicit chauvinism of his brother of his brother’s wife, but not someone like Anne whose always sought to travel, to innovate, to just … do something more with her life.

Again, it would have been simple to have Anne leave her oblivious husband to have an affair with her lost childhood love come back to town, while renovating the old abandoned mill that is apparently a town landmark. Hell, having Tom — Anne’s mischievous rule-breaking former flame — be the vampire that turns her is another place that could have gone. But it doesn’t go there. Instead, Anne breaks off the moment’s indiscretion, despite her unhappiness, because we realize she actually still loves her husband: or at least feels loyalty to him. 

And then, everything begins to go to hell. Tom is consumed by rats, unsurprisingly, found in some crates the size of … coffins. They’re coffins, complete with earth and all of that Dracula and vampire Eastern folklore goodness. After that, Anne is attacked by what we find out is an old vampire called “The Master.” No, not the Master from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer with his collared leather jacket, and snide sarcastic remarks.

We are talking about — what we find out later — a Master that’s like Count Orlok from Nosferatu in the perpetual, final stages decay … who likes to play with her food. Or, in some cases, her toys.

A few vampire film inspirations are referred to in various interviews, one with Coming Soon’s Larry Fessenden on Unique Role in Horror Pic Jakob’s Wife, and Meredith Border’s Fangoria article as well. Films such as Ganja & Hess, Nosferatu, Salem’s Lot, Let the Right One In, The Hunger, and Possession are mentioned, but Dracula has also left its toothy mark on the vampires in Jakob’s Wife.

I really want to look at how vampires function in this world. At first, I thought Anne was a throwback to the way vampires used to be before Nosferatu: beings that are simply weaker, or less tolerant of sunlight, but can otherwise move around. However, what we find out is that she is — figuratively and literally — going through a transition. It’s like a less severe version of what happened to Lucy Westenra, or Mina Harker when they were being fed on by Dracula, and given his blood. However, Anne is already manifesting the hunger. At first, it’s just for animal blood but eventually she can’t even tolerate that. She already can’t eat solid food anymore, and she’s become photosensitive, but she’s changed more than this. Her physical strength has vastly increased, as have her five senses.

And, perhaps due to these new stimuli, Anne expresses a certain directness, with some coldness, that might have remained under the surface: with a fire that Barbara Crampton notes in her “Scene Queen” column. By not having to eat anymore, she also doesn’t feel the need to cook for her husband, who has taken all preparations for him as something for granted: an extension of that casual chauvinism that his brother expresses to him on the possibility that Anne is having an affair. 

But it is not a perfect, nor a permanent state. Eventually, Anne can’t feed off animal blood anymore without being violently ill, focused ultraviolet light becomes damaging to her, and the hunger begins to take its toll. It’s also clear that when she kills a human being — and she only kills one when the hunger becomes too much for her — that if she doesn’t finish off the body, even with its head partially torn off, it will reanimate as what seems to be another vampire. This is something I recall from, of all things, Blacula, where all a vampire like Prince Mamuwalde needs to do is feed and not give their blood to the mostly drained human. 

Yet it’s still more than that. Anne is not, apparently, a full vampire. And Amelia, the poor girl who hears “the Master” calling to her as well, is mostly a twisted, hate-filled bloody revenant of her former self. Even the poor man Anne kills in a frenzy comes back as a relatively mindless thing that she has to wrestle with, and it becomes hers, and her husband’s first kill together. 

Oh yes. That’s right. Remember how I said that Jakob doesn’t remain ignorant? Well, after he goes to, reluctantly as he isn’t a confrontational man, tell Tom to leave his wife alone he realizes that the old mill is home to vampires, and very nearly dies there due to the pitiable, terrifying thing that used to be Amelia. 

He returns, realizing that “the Master” is after his wife: to find his wife feeding off of her unintended victim. It might as well, in his mind, be him catching his wife with her pants down with the Devil in his kitchen.

And this is where the film gets interesting as we see, essentially, a priest and a vampire, a husband and wife, team up to hunt other vampires: to hopefully deal with the curse laid on Anne. On the surface, this is fairly bad ass: not just because we realize that Jakob’s holy items — communion wafers, cross, and water — actually work on vampires, and he even knows instinctively how to dispose of the remains of Anne’s aborted creation in the grave in their garden, but Anne has a new kind of ruthlessness in dealing with “the Master’s” other creations. The way she kills Amelia is a counterpoint to all the sympathy and compassion that she expressed to her earlier in the film: to a point where her husband, the priest, is horrified. He actually wanted to save Amelia, probably in his mind by killing her dark creator … if that’s how this species of vampire functions  of course, right?

But it’s here where their conflict really begins. This is where Jakob has to admit that Anne has changed, and not just because of her transformation. She is more independent and willful than she had been before: or maybe she had been that way before her mother died, Tom left, and all she had was good old solid Jakob and the never-changing faith of the church. But he is angry at her admitting she kissed Tom, and … basically blames her for “the Master’s” attack on her: like a spouse blaming their partner for their own rape which, given what “the Master” is like, and how Anne staggered up to the washroom to hide herself, blood-stained, violated, and screaming while her husband remained ignorantly downstairs, is more or less my read on that situation.

However, Anne is having none of it and actually calls Jakob out on his behaviour. Yet this is a fight between two people who don’t know each other anymore, who hadn’t for a while, but still at their core fiercely care for one another. Even when Jakob drives away, and goes to bed, he can’t quite stop himself from going after her, and when “the Master” uses her power to take control of Jakob, to make Anne feed from and kill him, Anne forces herself to save him instead, having come back to their home on her own. 

“The Master,” played by Bonnie Aarons, is twisted. It’s more than just her appearance. She has the ability to control and change herself into multiple rats. “The Master” also seems to have the power to fly, or at least move almost instantaneously from one place to another. She can even move objects without touching them. But more than that, she has great powers of mental domination: which she uses to not only control Jakob as a thrall, but Anne herself. There is something horrific about how “the Master” manipulates Anne like a puppet, moving her with her body’s movements. She plays with her, and she knows it, and Anne knows it. She can kill Jakob, or anyone Anne cares about on a whim. Amelia is just a plaything, perhaps a prototype to what she seemingly wants from Anne. 

“The Master” provides a lot of voice to what Anne is feeling, about being in the thrall of men, and what they have constructed. She claims she wants to help liberate Anne from being a “scurrying church mouse” as she had been when she had drunk of her own Master’s blood ages ago. This is apparently the thing: drinking your creator’s blood, in this world, liberates you from the hunger of the transition between human and vampire. This is the choice that “the Master” offers Anne.

Choice is a main component in this film. For years, Anne felt her choices taken away from her. Now she has agency again, or a new vital sense of it. She wants equality and a say in her life from her relationship with her husband. She wants to have a role again in their mutual decision making. It’s clear, when the two work together, they are a force to be reckoned with: when they kill the vampire in the kitchen, when they dispatch Amelia, and even taking that poor deceased old woman’s body for Anne to slake her hunger for a time while Jakob hunts for “the Master” during the day.

There is even one scene, after their fight at the mill, where we find out — hilariously enough — that pot takes the edge off of vampiric hunger as Jakob takes his confiscated drug and shares it with Anne. It’s here that they have a heart to heart, and she tells him that she didn’t feel valued, and he apologizes. That is the gist of their conversation. And there is this moment, where Anne seems to feel validated, and get her say in all of this: in her own fate. 

But “the Master” keeps escalating the situation. “The Master” claims to want to liberate Anne from her husband. She asks her “Were you ever really you, or were you just Jakob’s wife?” The film title drop aside, she has some valid points. Certainly, the discussion about Amelia at the beginning of the film is predicative of Jakob’s go-to behaviour along with the victim-blaming element of Anne’s current situation. He has taken her for granted for years, fulfilling her role as her sister in law does. Hell, he doesn’t even consider that “the Master” is a woman: just another man that his wife let take advantage of her, like Tom. And he’s only cooperating with her now to make her “normal” again: to make her “back the way she was.” 

Jakob’s sermon at the beginning of the film, which is Ephesians 5:28: “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself,” and in the middle, which is 1 Corinthians: 7:16 “For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” speaks volumes about how he views marriage, and his relationship with Anne. Anne is just an extension of him, as Eve comes from Adam’s rib.

Oh, and “the Master’ gets to that. Even while the latter proverb is almost a rebuke to Jakob about not knowing his wife anymore, mirroring his own fear of her changes, “the Master” talks about how Eve was deceived well before Adam by the Serpent, and how she deserves better. And here is where I begin to disagree with the sentiment that “the Master” is trying to “liberate” Anne.

You see, she is still using the metaphor of Eve, Adam’s wife, comparing Anne to her, and her relationship — or dependency — on Jakob. It’d be so easy, again, if this film — as Meredith Borders puts — had been stereotypical and about Anne as Jakob’s extension, as his wife. Or perhaps, to make another Biblical reference, Anne or what she represents now can be the angel that Jakob has to wrestle with to get his life back. That angel has been referred to as Lucifer, as the Devil, but in the Old Testament that angel still works for God: to test Jakob’s resolve. 

But while their relationship is central to the film, this story isn’t about Jakob, or angels. It is about demons. You see, if we go into apocrypha, Adam had two wives before Eve. His second wife had been constructed, from the bones and ligaments up, to being a full human being: an act that horrified Adam so much, God had to remove her. The parallel between a being constructed, all bloody and messy and imperfect, to a man realizing a woman has bodily functions and needs — and indeed possesses growth reminding him of his own imperfection — is not lost here. But perhaps Adam’s first wife, Lilith, is more appropriate in this theological discussion of sorts:  being not made of filth, but the same mud and dust that Adam was created from, and who refuses to be subservient to her husband. 

Lilith discovers the powers of the world, she is emboldened by them, and she leaves her husband to ascend to Heaven, and descend to rule in Hell. I think this is a lesson that Anne might have taken more to heart. The problem is “the Master,” as Amelia worshipped her as a god, or a god-surrogate — being her creation — is petty. She likes to play with humans, tormenting and hunting them. Amelia is a diversion, some poor girl who just wanted to take care of her sick, alcoholic mother, for “the Master” to manipulate: even as she preyed on her the same way she did Anne. And what she does to Anne: not just killing Tom in front of her, but also attacking her, and then controlling her body — even going as far as to make Anne masturbate in front of the window — does not look like the independence she promises.

Here is a possibility: what if Anne had chosen to drink “the Master’s” blood, it solidified the older vampire’s claim over her instead of liberating her. What if Anne is just an extension of “the Master” just as she claims Eve had been of Adam, and Anne of Jakob, or her town? What if the choice had already been a false equivalent and Anne had almost been tricked into exchanging one Master for another. Indeed, even if all of those acts were sadistic lessons to give Anne a taste of potential freedom and more supernatural example of the slavery with which she already labours and can escape, either way I think the Master is a cruel, bloody mistress.

What is the ultimate tragedy is not that Jakob kills “the Master,” it’s that he takes that choice away from Anne. She doesn’t have time to make it. “The Master” is — seemingly — gone. A stake through the heart is enough. She is muck and dust, and one rat on the ground. Instead of reverting to a human, Anne is stuck — supposedly — as a bloodthirsty ghoul. Perhaps she could have been liberated, even gaining the shapeshifting, telepathic, and telekinetic powers of her creator. We don’t know. Neither does Anne. And this seriously pisses her off.

It’s fitting: that the man who hesitated in killing, who hated what he believed his wife made him become in destroying her own vampire in the kitchen, who didn’t want his wife to kill a young woman, doesn’t even hesitate to destroy a monster — but that’s not the point. It’s that the divide between them is too great. It’s more than just mortal and immortal, vampire and human. It’s a fed up woman and a clueless man too steeped in his ways.

That last scene between them is so telling. I think … I could have seen it going another way. I can picture it, after they discuss selling the house, with Jakob having an epiphany and realizing that it is not his place to dictate to his wife anymore: that it never was. He can’t help her anymore, but he won’t stop her. He has to trust that she will find her way. And Anne has to let him go. I think what Jakob robs Anne of is something I anticipated so much in this film: that she would face up to her would-be creator, and utterly defy her: to break her bond with her, and make her own way as a vampire in her own right, and not a tool with the illusion of freewill: unbeholden to anyone, or anything.

But Jakob killed “the Master” and took that choice away from her. She’s stuck in transition, a frustrating and angering process indeed, for anyone to be in. This could have ended with them going their separate ways, kind of like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, except the Girl and Arash leave each other.

Yet this is not what happens. It is left, like life, ambiguous. Did Anne want to destroy or refute “the Master” herself? Was she going to be liberated? And will Jakob the priest, and Anne the vampire destroy one another? Is it their last spat, or just the beginning of another conflict that will lead to something more?

I think it all goes back to that glorious scene, when Anne realizes it’s blood she needs, and after pouring herself a cup, she dances to a remix of Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting”: also known as “The Vampire Song,” one of the most epic moments in this entire film. I think whatever happens, Anne has a better grasp of herself now, and she knows where she stands — in this moment — as Barbara Crampton did in her role in this film, a penultimate achievement, with more accomplishments — in acting and production — to come, I’m sure. 

The Shadows of Tate Steinsiek’s Castle Freak

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I so desperately wanted to call this “The Shadows Over Castle Freak,” but I would be mixing metaphors, and inaccurately too.

In my post “An Outsider’s View of Castle Freak,” which focuses on the original Stuart Gordon 1995 film and its tenuous foundation from H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Outsider,” I talked about a possible Cthulhu Mythos remake of the movie by bonding it with the cannibalistic lineage of a family like the last scion of it in “The Rats in the Walls” along with the ghouls of “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” But director Tate Steinsiek and writer Kathy Charles take another Mythos track entirely in their re-imagining of the film.

I had a few ideas for remaking Stuart Gordon’s film, a cinematic piece that I still think is good in its own right but as I was writing it all out for myself in an attempt to say something somewhat original about Castle Freak, I took a look at a preview of Steinsiek’s film and realized they actually made the central protagonist Rebecca Reilly.

When I first saw Castle Freak, I always thought the character of Rebecca was a wasted opportunity. Rebecca is a character who is made permanently blind by a car accident caused by her father John in the original film, and taken to her family’s ancestral Italian castle. More often than not, she was helpless and completely ignorant of what was going on all around her when she wasn’t wandering away, and endangering herself. In the 1995 film, Rebecca is very much her parents’ girl: used in a tug of war between both grieving adults to hurt each other, and threatened by the titular freak.

I remember, watching Gordon’s film that I would have liked to see Rebecca have more agency. She is blind, but she has other senses and she can still ask questions and assert her own personality. In addition, I wondered what her interactions with “the Freak” would have been like given that she can’t see. I considered that she would potentially perceive “the Freak” — her secret uncle Giorgio Orsino — differently, much in the way that the blind man did without prejudice with regards to Frankenstein’s creature. But Gordon decided to make part of the terror a character couldn’t see being victimized by a being she didn’t know, and to whom she was vulnerable. But I am glad to see that Steinsiek and the rest of the production made a different choice with the remake.

I think that while this is a film that can be seen on its own, I am more fascinated with how it can be properly appreciated in parallel to its 1995 predecessor, along with its own literary source material. In my last post, I talk about how several characters in the 1995 film are shadows of each other, especially John Reilly and Giorgio Orsino, and the late child J.J. and Giorgio. In this work, the characters are more shadows of Gordon’s work, and H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dunwich Horror.”

The film begins in Albania as opposed to Italy, with a woman flagellating herself in the name of the Christian faith while abusing her deformed offspring in a dungeon chamber. What we found out is this woman, this recluse not unlike the older Duchess D’Orsino in Gordon’s film, is Lavinia Whateley (played by Kika Magalhães) who keeps her deformed daughter as a prisoner. For those readers who recognize that name and saw the story I reference, I think you might already begin to know where this is going.

Unlike Giorgio (played by Jonathan Fuller), who escapes the dungeon after a week of starvation and breaking a finger to release himself from his chains, the unnamed “Freak” (whose actor is strangely seems not to be credited) is released from her bonds (her female gender being something I only realized later into the film) to find her mother already killed. In some ways, it almost feels like a poetic justice for what the Duchess did to her son in the spiritual predecessor to this film: especially when you see “the Freak” both hold and whip her dead mother and tormentor’s body into so much pulp. However, like I said, if you know “The Dunwich Horror” you realize the story is already radically different.

Lavinia Whateley is a character that lived with her father in Dunwich, Massachusetts. Lavinia comes from H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dunwich Horror” is a girl used in her father’s — the Wizard “Old Whateley” — ritual from an incomplete version of The Necronomicon to summon the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth to impregnate her. Poor Lavinia has two twin children by Yog-Sothoth: the deformed but brilliant Wilbur Whateley who attempts to steal a complete edition of The Necronomicon from Miskatonic University to summon his alien father, and fails — and an invisible, giant monstrosity that consumes a lot of cattle and runs rampant and killing whatever is in its way when his brother dies before being stopped by Miskatonic University’s Professor Henry Armitage and his fellow faculty members. Lavinia herself is portrayed as being albino with some cognitive issues, and she disappears by the time the story truly begins: either having been killed by Wilbur, or consumed by her other invisible son.

Lavinia Whateley in Castle Freak is the exact opposite of her literary counterpart. She is darker skinned and haired, and while she is also terrified over what happened to her — made to bear those children of Yog-Sothoth by her father — she sends one of them away to another family for a better life, and keeps “the Freak” bound: all to make sure the twins never unite. Unlike the Duchess from Gordon’s work, she doesn’t do this completely out of grotesque vanity and a mad sense of petty spitefulness, but to make sure that the two sisters don’t summon their father into the world and endanger it. Of course, it’s not all altruism even then. Lavinia is the victim of rape from her father, who had summoned and been possessed by the entity — whose own father seems to resemble her deformed daughter, and is perhaps indicative of some “tainted bloodline” as one villager tells the protagonists later in the film (and reminiscent of the De la Poers from “The Rats in the Walls”) — and probably sees her daughter as everything she hates in her own bloodline, hence her own self-flagellation and her rapist.

Whereas we see the Duchess whipping Giorgio with her flail to punish his disloyal father, we see this version of Lavinia punishing her daughter for what her own father did to her and the daughter later using the same flail on her corpse after she is freed, on the people that try to kill her, and having it used on her again by the man she sleeps with later. There is a different trajectory of generational pain and horror here that seems to say something about female trauma and survival which varies from Gordon’s film, and is non-existent in “The Dunwich Horror.” A fascinating thing to note is Whateley being a vessel for Yog-Sothoth to impregnate his own daughter is similar to a plot point in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ comic series Providence: where the analogue to Old Man Whateley, Garland Wheatley also commits incestuous rape on his daughter Lavinia counterpart Leticia to create Wilbur and the invisible terror John Divine.

And then we get to the protagonists. Rebecca Reily — or Reilly (played by Clair Catharine) — is different from her counterpart in Gordon’s film. She is more independent, and assertive. She’s still young, but she’s already lived a life of independence and hard living. Rebecca later explains that she was adopted into the Reilys, a nice nod to the original film, but we hear nothing further about them. She is with her boyfriend who, also on alcohol and cocaine leaves a party with her and almost promptly crashes their car: blinding her permanently in the process.

This is where a fascinating dynamic begins. Rebecca’s boyfriend’s name is John, an obvious parallel to the original Rebecca’s father John Reilly from Gordon’s movie. There is no mother or father in this film, Rebecca’s own mother being dead and the entire reason the apparent representative of her birth family — the Whateleys — gets her to go back to her ancestral castle in Albania.

John (played by Jake Horowitz) is a hard-partyer, as Rebecca used to be. He also has issues with control. He flirts with other women to make Rebecca jealous, he is addicted to alcohol and drugs, and he likes to make decisions on Rebecca’s behalf: especially after their accident. Like John Reilly of the 1995 film played by Jeffrey Combs, he seems to have issues with personal responsibility, but unlike him he wants to dominate everything and doesn’t even bother listening to what Rebecca has to say. He, too, feels like Rebecca blames him for their car accident and — while admittedly she was also under the influence when she asked if she should drive instead — his vices seem more the result of superficial influences than anything else as opposed to John’s whose came from a broken home.

If anything, Rebecca’s former life of hard partying comes from a sense of loss that she didn’t understand at the time, having been separated from her birth mother and not particularly fitting in with the Reilys. She knows, already, that there is something different about herself: if even on an unconscious level. Much of the film is Rebecca attempting to find out more about her mother and the Castle she never knew her family had. Rebecca desires to know her roots, and why her mother gave her up so many years ago, sending her all the way to America. John keeps dissuading her of this, and attempt to expediate the process of selling her ancestral property, all the while downplaying the fact that she knows that someone else is in the Castle with them.

Whereas John Reilly’s temptations overcome him after his wife Susan, played by Barbara Crampton who also is the producer of Steinsiek’s Castle Horror, rejects him utterly due to their death of their young son in their accident, Steinsiek’s John doesn’t attempt to commit suicide or see a sex worker in the Castle but he does use the contacts of Marku — the apparent Whateley family lawyer — to get a drug dealer over, who ends up being stabbed to death with heroin needles by the Freak as opposed to being mauled horrifically like the sex worker did by Giorgio in the original film. He does, however, begin to have sex with his friend Shelly after a fight with Rebecca about seeking her family history — and lying to her — reaches a head.

That is another fascinating aspect about John and Rebecca’s dynamic: that Rebecca wants to trust John in literally telling her what is going on around them, and John either glosses over details such as finding her mother’s flail, or outright lies about the colour of her mother’s robe that she ends up wearing. Whereas Susan and John Reilly’s martial problems are the result of his impulsive actions and her inability to forgive him, Rebecca and John’s relationship problems are the result of trust issues: with Rebecca wanting to know more about who she is, especially now that her life has changed so much, and John wanting to go back to controlling her, and having a sense of dominance with the money he plans to get with her from the ancestral estate.

Rebecca herself adapts to her ancestral home relatively quickly. I love how the film shows that because she’s lost her sense of sight, her other senses have increased: such as her auditory senses that allow her to hear the being that is her sister clicking and clacking as she maneuvers herself through the walls. She can also trace her steps, presumably through tactile input, to move around the Castle unassisted and with an idea of where she’s going. It isn’t perfect. Rebecca does get lost, and even injures herself — almost fatally — before her hidden sister actually catches a statue from falling on her.

But there is also doubt as to whether or not Rebecca’s senses are just the result of a woman adapting to her loss of sight. For instance, she begins to have dreams of her mother’s last moments, and parts of her life. Sexuality, and shame also figure into it as well. There is some synchronicity that begins to happen as a result of sexuality: with a vision of her mother masturbating with her flail and Rebecca also climaxing during the dream. And the Freak herself is seen masturbating while watching Rebecca and John have sex through a hidden passageway — and then killing John’s friend Shelly during intercourse with him, after he’s blindfolded to essentially rape him. But Rebecca also sees her mother dealing with her grandfather, and a cult, and sometimes hears her talking to her: warning her.

Rebecca is a shadow of her mother, slowly beginning to realize what she went through in these walls, while also finding out about her sister. And, unlike John Reilly and Giorgio Orsino, she doesn’t reject her sister. Rather, she wants to find her, and understand what is going on. It is the Freak, still unnamed throughout this entire film, who avoids Rebecca for the most part. Rather, the Freak only kills a man who intrudes on her home, the man who killed their mother and robbed her of the chance of doing so — while also having threatened John, whom she had sex with — John’s friends that are hunting her, and then John after he tries to kill her, and Rebecca at the climax of the film.

What we find out is that Rebecca and the Freak have a visceral reaction to being played together, or even physically touching. Their reunion marks the passage of Yog-Sothoth — the Key and the Gate — into the world of humanity. Essentially, Rebecca Whateley and her sister are the equivalents of Wilbur and his invisible, hideous brother respectively, though obviously while Wilbur knew what he was and sought knowledge to bring about his father into the world, Rebecca just wanted to know who she was, and ultimately seems to succeed where Wilbur failed. The Freak herself is cannibalistic, possibly like Wilbur’s brother, though it seems she is only starving: even though much of her physiology seems to be the result of her father — or extra-dimensional parent — as opposed to Giorgio’s deformities being created out of torture. Rebecca definitely takes after their mother, as “The Dunwich Horror” to paraphrase the terrifying concluding sentence of that story.

So what does all of this mean? Well, Lavinia Whateley is more sympathetic in this film and you realize there is something of a reason as to why she performed these actions outside of petty cruelty. The Freak is the result of that torment but also of neglect and physical and sexual needs unmet: not unlike an archetype of the grotesque feminine. While one can argue that the Freak is the physical representation of abuse of women, and the resulting internalized self-hatred, Rebecca is also part of that legacy: who attempts to come to grips with it, and show empathy but in the end is not only almost made a victim of that misogyny by John — who equates her to her sister as a “freak” — but because of her own biology.

In the end, their parent — their “father” — does manifest, and it awakens a mutation in the both of them … and it is something that Rebecca definitely does not want. The cult that their grandfather led, even though he is long gone, still exists. The man that released the Freak and killed their mother, who attempted to curry favour and use the Freak for her bloodline with the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth, is dead, but one of Rebecca’s friends — a young man named The Professor — has the Whateley copy of The Necronomicon and helps Yog-Sothoth to come into the world whether the sisters want it or not. The cults also all appear to be men. And as for Yog-Sothoth — it is hard to ascribe a gender to this being as it seems to resemble a meshing of two beings, of male and female — which is mirrored by the Freak, and eventually Rebecca. They seem to be, at the end of the film, reaching maturity — a form of horrifying growth or transformation, a parody of puberty as far as human female Great One hybrids go. They lose their agency to the cult, and more than that, their own bodies.

I feel like there is so much to say about that in particular, about these gender relations and sexuality and doubles — specifically the synchronicity between mother and child, and twin sisters, and male exploitation of such, and the horror of realizing one’s life is not one’s own and that perhaps that feeling of being “The Outsider” — the story both films were arguably based from — or not fitting in, or feeling like you are different isn’t just a psychological one. Really, I think the body horror at the end might have mixed those metaphors.

It isn’t perfect, this experiment of grafting “The Outsider” and “The Dunwich Horror” into an Albanian setting. Whateley sounds more like a British surname as opposed to a Southeast European one, which took me a little out of immersion. I wish they could have made an Albanian equivalent to that surname. I also wonder why the cult was so hands off aside from one exception in securing the twins, and how one of them — just one of them — had been able to pose as the legal representative. They make such a big deal about the Great Old One cult having so many connections as well, and they do almost nothing until the end of the film: practically being all pantomime like the followers in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.

But there are definitely some awesome Lovecraft Mythos moments, and respectful nods to the original Castle Freak film. For instance, one of the characters finds some vintage wine from Casa Orsino, dated 1926, while Dunwich itself appears on a town sign when John and Rebecca are driving. Also, the Whateley copy of The Necronomicon is far more fortunate than the one in “The Dunwich Horror” which is an incomplete copy inherited from Wilbur’s grandfather that forces him to attempt to steal a whole one from the Miskatonic Library. In Castle Freak, it seems the Whateleys were able to steal a whole Latin translation of the book from the Library back in the 1920s.

And the young Professor? Well, it turns out he has a name. In the mid-credits, he meets with an older man in an office, and another young man whose back is turned to the viewer. He is called “Armitage.” This is a completely different analogue to Henry Armitage, an older man who attempts to thwart Yog-Sothoth’s release and his children, whereas this version of him is a young scholar — enlightened by a tentacle grown from the Freak’s womb not unlike the mutated pineal gland from the head of Jeffrey Combs’ Crawford Tillinghast in Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond — who wants the power and knowledge of the Great Old Ones. He also calls the other young man “West,” who has a vial of glowing bright green fluid, perhaps … some re-agent on the desk nearby.

Could this be a hint that there will be a Re-Animator remake? I will admit, I cackled at that scene. It also makes me think. Robert Stanley, who adapted “The Colour Out of Space” into Color Out of Space, is interested in also adapting “The Dunwich Horror” into film, which has some overlap with what Steinsiek does with Castle Freak. There is definitely room for different interpretations, and I would love to see them compared together should Stanley create his own take on it. After watching Color Out of Space, I’d hoped for a Lovecraft adaptation of similar quality. And Castle Freak is definitely a creation that fits that parametre in my mind, with more emphasis on sexuality in the squamous and horrifying manner that Lovecraft himself always hinted on in his “nameless and blasphemous rites” and Stuart Gordon all but plugged into his own work through titillation and spectacle. As such, it’s not only a love letter to Lovecraft, but to Gordon as well, and if this is an indication of a cinematic shared Cthulhu Mythos universe, I definitely want to see where this goes next.

After all, the thing about Yog-Sothoth being the Key and the Gate, aside from some sexual innuendo, is that it can be both the language that familiarizes audiences with that world, and the story that audiences also want to see: a gateway into some eldritch cinema.