Experiences From Beyond

July 17, 2020July 17, 2020 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I suppose we’ve been spoiled since Robert Stanley’s Color Out of Space when it comes to Lovecraft film adaptations. I don’t think I really have to explain that Lovecraft stories are notoriously hard to turn into cinematic narratives due to the fact that their prose rely on the olfactory sense (smell), and strange, non-Euclidean descriptions combined with things that readers are not allowed to see in their entirety.

So, when I found out that From Beyond had been made into a film, I just had to check it out. From Beyond is a 1986 science-fiction horror film directed by Stuart Gordon, and written by Dennis Paoli one year after Gordon’s other main Mythos movie Re-Animator. It isn’t so much that I wanted to see how the 2019 Stanley film compares to the Gordon 1986 one, even though both are derived from Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories and his idea of cosmicism: of a reality where humanity is a small piece of a larger and more uncaring and malicious universe. It’s seeing how those ideas are explored in the 1980s under another director: specifically the one who made Re-Animator that really caught my fancy.

The challenges between the two couldn’t be more different. While “The Colour Out of Space” is a novella, “From Beyond” is a fairly focused and standalone short story about an unnamed narrator who visits his friend Dr. Crawford Tillinghast and not only sees how badly he has physically and mentally degenerated due to his obsession in exploring another dimension, but also encountering the horrors of it himself. So how do you make a film about a fifth or an extra reality around us filled with alien existences that we can’t perceive ordinarily?

Well, while other essays and articles created by genuine horror scholars have gone into it more I’m sure, I think the key here is sex.

In both the short story that is its inspiration, and the film, stimulation of the pineal gland: a gland that creates melatonin that modulates sleep patterns in the brain, and has been historically considered to be a centre of spiritual and metaphysical development. The idea is that in “From Beyond” an electronic device that creates resonance waves can stimulate that gland to allow humans to see different planes of existence of which their usual five senses are not capable. The function of the gland itself is only partially understood even now after all this time.

So Stuart Gordon takes this premise, and realizes that perceiving these other realities, along with the stimulation of a part of the brain in an unusual way, would probably create unusual sensations in those that are exposed to the device that he calls the Resonator.

He takes out the servants that Tillinghast exposes to the machine, placed into the other planes, and left to the auspices of the creatures summoned by it. And he goes further to remove the unnamed narrator, and make three characters take his place: including Tillinghast who is demoted to a protagonist assistant doctor, played by the excellent Jeffrey Combs, to the unstable and eccentric genius Dr. Edward Pretorius — whose name is a reference to the Doctor Pretorius that blackmails and enables Victor Frankenstein to continue his creature-making experiments in James Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein — who is played by Ted Sorel, and is the true creator of the Resonator.

Dr. Pretorius is also a major BDSM practitioner in Gordon’s From Beyond: seeking to achieve the ultimate experience in physiological pleasure in creating the Resonator and activating his pineal gland to its nth degree: at least from my understanding. It’s this combination of hubris and addiction to stimuli that creates the Resonator, and its resulting consequences on the protagonists.

The premise isn’t bad. From Beyond is supposed to be all about scraping away the seeming of reality, of appearances, for the planes of experience that truly exist around us. The extra-dimensional creature special effects are all right for the time, and they are not the things that make this film more than a little awkward, and clunky.

The problem, for me, is the narrative itself. H.P. Lovecraft is all about “the fear of the unknown” and considering that there is a strange and unseen alien environment around and within us, should be an utterly terrifying prospect. What Stuart Gordon attempts to do, which he succeeded in with adapting “Herbert West – Reanimator” which had already been created a serialized pulp narrative, falls a little flat in places with “From Beyond.” Gordon’s efforts in adding “what you fear is what you desire” to “a fear of the unknown” and its consequences that lends itself to Re-Animator in the form of gore, black comedy, and spectacle itself, overshadows From Beyond as opposed to accentuating it.

There are gaps in logic and narrative progression. Why would the overly idealistic and obsessive Dr. Katherine McMichaels, played by the legendary Barbara Crampton be allowed to force Dr. Tillinghast into repairing the Resonator, and recreating the experiment that traumatized him? How would this prove his innocence to the authorities who believe he murdered his senior Dr. Pretorius?

Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with these characters. Even Katherine McMichaels, who is stated to have controversial psychological views, is seen as holding sheer curiosity and need to genuinely explore behind the thin veneer of a barely existent professionalism and white lab coat. She seems repulsed by the monitors held in Dr. Pretorius’ BDSM dungeon room with screaming women in leather being flogged, but you can see her intrigue, and her predisposition towards the exploration of that state of mind. Seeing her is reminiscient of a Harleen Quinzel before ever meeting the Joker: a highly controlled but curious mind needing only permission to set her own sensual nature free. And this iteration of Crawford Tillinghast, whom she has more than just an intellectual fascination towards — or something that forms from that intrigue — is both terrified and attracted to the power of the Resonator that brings out something within him that he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

I think the film’s issue is that it tries to shame those flirtations with kinks and sexuality, which should be its strength to this regard. Bubba Browns, yes, Ken Foree’s character is called that is an officer assigned to Tillinghast and McMichaels who immediately grabs and shames her once she puts on the leather gear in Pretorius’ room, and berates her: asking her if this is what she wants to be.

Barbara Crampton as Dr. Katherine McMichaels in Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond

But what if it is? What if Crampton’s character is now exploring that aspect of herself, away from clinical trappings, and there is actual progression from that point? Instead we have this poltergasmic apparition of Pretorius occasionally manifesting when the machine is turned on as such like of fleshy mutated amalgamation and Jeffrey Combs’ Tillinghast developing an antenna from his pineal gland that requires him to eat human grey matter (because he rarely, if ever plays a character that doesn’t become a monster or antagonist of some kind): including from a particularly dour doctor named Bloch: who is probably named after Lovecraft’s friend and long-time correspondent Robert Bloch who went on to write Psycho.

Do you see what I mean? My tangent aside, and despite the story ending in Lovecraftian horror and madness, the film kind of runs off the rails with the original source material and its theme.

But what if we did something different? Neil Gaiman’s age-old admonition of a story most likely needing rewriting if something is wrong with it, and everyone else pretty much being wrong about how to actually edit aside, let’s do something different. Let’s make another adaptation of From Beyond.

Let’s use Clive Barker as an example of what can be done. I’ve already referenced his “what you fear is what you desire” earlier on in this article. Ironically, he had published The Hellbound Heart, the novella that would become the basis of Hellraiser a year later, in 1986: the same year From Beyond was released. Sexuality, and its obsessive perversion had been applied to Re-Animator, so why not go even further with From Beyond?

Imagine Dr. Crawford Tillinghast is the antagonist as he had been in the short story. Perhaps the story takes place after he’s gone, and Doctors Bloch and … let’s say Katherine Waite, along with a team from the authorities in conjunction with Miskatonic University, are sent in to his building to find out what happened to him, and his research. We see that the house has different rooms within it, almost Jungian-themed, and each chamber has a theme. Tillinghast has left video or recorded journals of himself as he experiments with making the Resonator.

Bloch could have been that friend of Tillinghast’s who had seen his experiments and what they did to him over time. He could be there to help the police find all those missing personnel, including mutual friends of theirs. Waite, because I too love Lovecraftian references, is there to find his research and she has an attraction to this while pretending to be professional. These goals tend to clash with one another as they go on. We see evidence of a sound and idealistic Tillinghast becoming more extreme. There are videos of him in BDSM dynamics with women, or men, or both on video. Bloch sees this as issues with his deteriorating body and mind, while Waite sees it as evidence of an alternative exploration of sensation and experience. She is also highly turned on by this against, perhaps, her own better judgment.

I see Tillinghast as a combination of what Lovecraft intended him to be, though perhaps more of the standard symmetrical handsome man turned into something else, combined with him adopting some charismatic mannerisms not unlike Robert Suydam from “The Horror at Red Hook,” or basically the reverse of Suydam to that regard.

The degeneration, or perhaps better yet, the change and evolution of the characters as they discover and repair the Resonator should be gradual as they try to find the missing personnel in this other plane. They begin to transform as they go along. Some of them die. Some are consumed. But the worst are the creatures they encounter. Think of the Resonator as Barker’s Lamentation Configuration, and the extra-dimensional violet entities that bite and consume as Lovecraft’s night-gaunts that arouse every time they touch a human being. Consider these repellent creatures passing through human bodies and arousing them, and mutating them. Add to the sexual tone of the entire thing. Make it uncomfortable and arousing as you see these changes happening to these characters. Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows do this, they play with Tillinghast’s creatures as erotic elements between characters in their limited-run Lovecraft Mythos comics series Providence.

Then you can have Bloch transform first as he has been exposed to the Resonator the longest. Perhaps there is mention of his physical and a tumour developing in his pineal gland. Maybe then he develops that antenna that doesn’t look like something from Sega Dreamcast’s Seaman. Or maybe it does grow that way, and something sexually suggestive happens with it as this film changes from a scientific expedition trope into a surreal LSD horror. I like the idea of Bloch encountering a transformed Tillinghast who has reached the inevitable conclusion of his increasingly amoral and inhuman experiments in another plane, and being consumed by him. Maybe Waite has her encounter with Tillinghast and it goes … badly. So badly, like a terrible hallucinogenic trip that she escapes and just barely destroys the machine … but not before she is left stranded back in reality, partially transformed into something not unlike a Deep One, some retroactive evolution triggered, broken, screaming, and without aftercare: seeing something in reality and herself … beyond her understanding that ruthlessly destroys her, and yet keeps others fascinated in knowing more.

This feeds back not only into the story, but also into the Lovecraft Mythos with other nods and Easter-eggs. Consider this an alternative adaptation, a mutation of how I might have made this story with the right space-time and resources at my disposal. Gordon’s From Beyond has some fascinating ideas, taken from Lovecraft. I think, while the challenge is buttressing a very short tale into a cinematic narrative, there are enough elements there to make it all about the terror of that thin membrane of identity and knowing being torn apart to reveal something else entirely.

But as a false Doctor of Horror, this is just a creative observation and suggestion, not a prognosis

Like a Flower: Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space

June 13, 2020June 27, 2020 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This particular specimen is the result of another detour on my part. Not the creation of the 2019 film by Richard Stanley, obviously, or the story it was derived from “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft, but rather that I was going to talk about more vampires, or perhaps even The Evil Dead, until a friend of mine reminded me that this film exists, and I wanted to watch it.

So after watching The Evil Dead, and rewatching Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight as preparation for an endeavour upon which I want to detail in Works in Progress and twist into life within my Reanimation Station, I finally got to sit down and see this latest cinematic adaptation of Lovecraft’s story.

I will try to include as much detail as I can, but I am not as scholarly as the writers of Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence, so you will need to settle for my enthusiasm instead.

I read the original short story, or novella, a long time ago and I recall it feeling more like a science-fiction narrative instead of Lovecraft’s usual occultic Cthulhu Mythos stories, to be outdone only by “At the Mountains of Madness” that I would read later. As others have pointed out, “The Colour Out of Space” was also unique in that it detailed, in full, the effects of the colour entity itself on the farming family — the Gardners — that lived in the area where the meteor strikes. These aren’t scholars, or scientists, or specialists. They are just people trying to make a living, and maintain their land before something beyond their comprehension, and their control slowly and utterly destroys their lives.

Stanley’s film itself takes the narrative of Lovecraft’s short story and uses it as a framing device to introduce the plot: beginning with a voice-over from the perspective of the surveyor to start off the film. It is a throwback to the short story which is told from the first person. The surveyor himself is actually, in the movie, a hydrologist and graduate from Miskatonic University Ward Phillips: whose name is a combination of the surname of Lovecraft’s Charles Dexter Ward from his own “Case” story, and Lovecraft’s own middle name.

However, this isn’t Ward’s story. And unlike his unnamed counterpart in the short story, he isn’t relating to us the story of Ammi Pierce who finds the Gardners and the corruption of their property. This is no pedestal narrative — the story of another told by a protagonist — even if it’s all framed to have happened in retrospect: which is funny, when you consider the temporal implications that occur in the film as it progresses. No, Ward is actually the hydrologist sent by the authorities to the land of the Gardners to survey it so they can build a bridge there. He is there in a great deal of the plot and he directly interacts with the Gardners without a middle man, so to speak.

The small details, the introductory visuals, are what grab me. As Ward enters the heavily forested land of the Gardners we see Barbie Doll limbs arranged on the branches in strange shapes not unlike Swastikas, which in turn have been depicted as Elder Signs of the Lovecraft variety or, in this case, they could have been in a flower petal arrangement. The best thing about symbolism is that one object can mean multiple things, or dimensions, at once as opposed to simply a one and/or the other allegory arrangement.

This is where we meet our first member of the Gardner family. You see, unlike the short story where they all seem to have archaic or Biblical-sounding names such as Nahum, Thaddeus, Merwin, and Zenas — and an unnamed Mrs. Gardner, the patriarch of the family is Nathan, his wife is Theresa, and their sons are Benny and Jack. In fact, the only one with a standout first name is the daughter of the family: Lavinia. She is the first person that Ward meets.

Now here is where the Cthulhu Mythos lore does unfold a bit. It’s a great example of Mythos retelling, or reinterpretation of Mythos parts. Lavinia’s name comes from poor Lavinia Whateley in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”: the daughter of a warlock forced to bear the children — Wilbur Whateley and his invisible, monstrous sibling — from the extra-dimensional being Yog-Sothoth. That Lavinia is driven mad by the experience, and killed by her own unseen child, the aforementioned Dunwich Horror, later on in the story.

The Lavinia in Color Out of Space, however, is a young woman with occult background: or at least has ties to New Age magical practices and mysticism. Of course, if anything she seems more like an eclectic solo practitioner of witchcraft because Ward himself asks if she is in the Wiccan or Alexandrian traditions, and doesn’t seem to know the difference: even when Ward “guesses wrong.” I mean, the man did study at Miskatonic U and what is the paraphrase? Never go against a Miskatonic University graduate when the occult is on the line? Here is an interesting part of that discussion: Ward actually thinks she is an Alexandrian Wiccan: and while the Alexandrian tradition had been created by Alex and Maxine Sanders in 1960s Great Britain, it was Gerald Gardner in 1954 who first gathered and established the principles that would lead to Wicca. So of the two choices, Ward would have been wrong in considering Lavinia an Alexandrian.

But that clever tongue and cheek reference by Stanley aside, it’s through Lavinia, this young woman forced to live on this old farm that belonged to her late grandfather, now raising fruits and vegetables, and alpacas for their milk, that are introduced to the rest of her family, and their situation. Nathan Gardner has moved his family to his father’s old farm because his wife Theresa is recovering from breast cancer. The city of Arkham, of which this land is a part, wants to buy the property to create a reservoir. Theresa herself is attempting to heal, and also recover her property business while losing clients because of terrible Internet connection and communication.

The interplay between the family members, all of whom aren’t particularly pleased to be living in this area, feels real. It isn’t set in the 1800s, as their counterparts had been in the short story, and it feels like they are in twenty-first century. You can see Nathan, played by Nicolas Cage, attempting to maintain order and cohesion in the family, and even though he is a bit overbearing, you can tell it is because he is worried about his wife, and the future of his family.

And there are so many Lovecraftian themes and resonances in the film already. Nathan, and to some extent Theresa, are afraid of becoming like their parents — with Nathan fighting against some of the legacy his father left behind through disapproval and the latter’s own death by cancer — so you have that hereditary curse or doom trope tweaked ever so lightly. You have Benny Gardner and his fascination with satellites and space as well as the resident old man hermit’s Ezra’s eccentric electronic and monitoring equipment: both of which are very reminiscent of Crawford Tillinghast’s experiments in Lovecraft’s story “From Beyond.” Ezra himself seems like a throwback to Ammi Pierce who is apparently mentally unsound as he tells the narrator his story in Lovecraft’s short story, though like him he knows a lot more about what is going on than he would seem. And in addition to Lavinia’s literary resonance, among her magical tools she has a copy of what seems to be the Simon Necronomicon: a book released by Schlangekraft, Inc. in 1977 and republished in paperback form by Avon Books. This is an attempt to combine Aleister Crowley, and Sumerian mythology into the Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in the form of a grimoire. And no, it is not the Sumerian version of the Book of the Dead, definitely not the Naturom Demonto or the Necronomicon Libre Ex-Mortis, and probably one of the reasons I believe Lavinia is an eclectic practitioner. Trust me.

But even Lavinia’s mystical leanings are a call back to the Mythos, even if they are treated as something of a red herring, or a fond Lovecraftian in-joke. When the meteor does come down, everyone thinks it’s something like a mystical summoning, or an alien plague. All the Lovecraft trope references get honourable mentions in this film.

I am a Lovecraft fanatic, and while all the easter-eggs — especially locations mentioned in passing such as Arkham, Aylesbury, Dunwich, and Kingsport — are fantastic little winks, I think the strength of Color Out of Space comes with its effects, and the interpersonal horror — family horror — that we get to see unfold.

One of the major issues in adapting “The Colour Out of Space” into a visual medium is the fact that the “Colour” is by its very nature something that can’t be described. The phenomenon or entity is beyond the third dimension, and its hues are supposed to defy anything that the human eye can perceive. The contrasts of colour are used well too, especially in the ending where there is only white, and then no colour at all.

So how do you create a visual effect of that? How do you creatively interpret it? There is of course CGI, and it does get used in the film, but it is done sparingly and I appreciate the decision to make the Colour itself something of a rainbow spectrum. Sometimes it is almost a recognizable colour, before it shifts into another, and many besides. It is deceptively beautiful and it fits well with the initial effect that it has on the land around it. It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz taken to an alien and horrific place where it’s reversed and the twisted fantasy background becomes painfully vibrant, and the resulting reality and aftermath is a dull, dead black and white world. The flying mantises in the interim also seem to match this idea, and so do the flowers.

The flowers are an excellent touch. I’m not sure if they exist in the short story, but they are small, beautiful, pink-red petals that grow like cherry-blossoms until, eventually, they dominate everything. There is a point towards the end of the film where you see the farm property resemble a depiction of an alien atmosphere like Yuggoth. That is another excellent idea that they added as well from the Mythos. Stanley illustrates the meteor and its impact has caused some space-time issues, especially with regards to how the spectrums of light affect human perceptions and senses of reality. A nice little wink towards Lovecraft, again, is when Nathan keeps smelling something strange that no one else can perceive, much like how Lovecraft in his own works would have his characters know something eldritch was afoot when they began to smell a “strange foetor” from an object or subject.

So you can imagine that once the meteor lands, and it disintegrates after attracting lightning from the atmosphere (most likely turning into invasive dust particles into the surrounding environment) that the mutations begin. The prostheses and the fusion nightmares they depict are excellent and something of a rainbow-coated Re-Animator level form of art. There is definitely a ton of body horror after a while, which combined with some minor but striking psychedelic effects on space-time makes the themes of this film pretty clear.

Even the cat isn’t immune. Sorry H.P., though I have to say that the name “G-Spot” is a far better name for a feline than what you, or your mother, have called your cats in your time.

But talking about the flowers is an excellent metaphor for what happens in this film. It has a slow pacing. It sets a story of a troubled family that nevertheless still loves each other and attempts to make things work, even repair things between them, and adds that eldritch horror from the stars — the uncaring, inhuman element from cosmicism that shows how small and arbitrary human comfort is — and begins to erode everything they are away. It’s like the cancer that Theresa Gardner has tried to beat, or that her family has attempted to help guide her through by sacrificing their old normal to make a new normal that will never, ever be normal again.

And the cracks, that were already there before but could have been dealt with, show with extreme prejudice after a while. I don’t want to go into too many spoilers, as I think you should definitely watch this one on your own, but I will say that there is a perversity in the fact that the film begins with Lavinia attempting a magical ritual to “make things better” for her mother and family, and that Nathan is attempting to make a living — and failing to do so — from milking alpacas (even calling the organs that he is milking “breasts”) when his wife has had a mastectomy: a detail I’d missed the first time I saw this film. You see all of the dysfunction and miscommunication, the resentment, and even the love hit critical mass along with the mutated growth from the Colour. I think it’s effective because you really empathize with this family and you want the Gardners to succeed, or to survive: and you know that based on this being a Lovecraftian story — a Mythos reinterpretation — that this just won’t happen.

It’s a far cry from an unnamed mad wife being locked in an attic, along with one of her sons. And it’s actually kind of heartbreaking that this all happens right when some reconciliation and healing seems to occur, pretending desperately at normalcy during a time of sickness — an illness that can neither be understood nor cured — while falling towards the inevitable.

I think the weakest part of the film is Phillip Ward being integrated into the plot towards the end, but I see why he is there to be able to tell the story, as much of it as he knows anyway. He does bring a human face to the story as well. The thing is, what really affected me from Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” is the fact that after the farm becomes unnaturally fertile, it turns into a wasteland that seems to grow over time even under a new reservoir that will consume the world: after the light or the Colour leaves it. In Stanley’s cinematic version, it is the mutation itself and watching it happen, observing how it destroys human lives — but also brings them together and changes them — with an outside like Ward attempting to understand the whole thing after the fact that really hits home.

I think that what is so effective is that while the story and the film are different, the latter pays homage to the former and has its spirit. I think it translates it well. A funny thing, too: “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” — with part of Phillip Ward’s namesake — was the story Lovecraft wrote right before “The Colour Out of Space,” while “The Dunwich Horror” — which Stanley wants to adapt after this film — features Lavinia’s literary namesake. And as he wrote “The Colour Out of Space” Lovecraft penned an essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: taking his own steps to attempting to further define the genre from his lens or perspective. It is much like how Stanley, through the love he and his late mother who died of cancer had for Lovecraft’s stories, attempted to always go back to “the well” — the mutated, poisoned well featured in the film to capture the soul of the Mythos while also making his own story, and having his crew carrying it on through their captivating performances.

Color Out of Space Well — From Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space.

Was Color Out of Space perfect? No, but it’s a case of having the letter of the law be skewed a bit, but the spirit of it coming through like the unbearable, poignant light of an alien flower blooming, unfurling, and leaving a stark greyness that you will remember forever.