Noted racist Howard Phillips Lovecraft (a New Englander with Little Englander prejudices) may these days be widely known for his bad and wrong views, but he could bash out a tale of the wyrd in his sleep. Quite literally, with a lot of his Lord Dunsany-inspired stories of the Dreamlands, such as 'The White Ship', 'The Cats of Ulthar' et cetera conjured during his twilight hours of R.E.M. - but with more slimy eldritch people than shiny happy ones. Some quite interesting instances of his incubus-inflicted iterations of oneiric odyssey are to be found not in his professionally published works but in the marginalia.
1933 was a big year for the H.P sauce to be hag-ridden by the night mare and bestowed with eerie visions from beyond, with him not only finally putting pen to paper to transcribe a phantasm that had invaded his dreamscapes five years earlier in the form of 'The Thing on the Doorstep' but also scrawling a missive that included one of his latest phantasmagorias. Lovecraft was a serial and dedicated corresponder, and many of his letters to friends, co-writers and fans have survived down the decades. This particular letter - to acquaintance Bernard Austin Dwyer - related a brief outline of a dream in which the unidentified narrator of the piece is shown into an attic room in an 'Old World' town, not London but some coastal town that they forgot to close down (possibly Mummerset judging by the briefly-transcribed dialogue "Ahrrh! It be 'ee, zur?"), wherein they perceive a vision or phantasm of a clergyman. This spectre in Anglican garb burns his mystic tomes in the fireplace before meaning to hang himself from the rafters, but upon noticing the narrator begins to glide towards them menacingly before being repulsed by the protagonist's handy-dandy purple laser beam (dreams are the realm of the wyrd and inexplicable after all) The short dream tale ends with the narrator sighting themself in a mirror and realising that a profound change has somehow overcome them - they are now the evil clergyman.
The story would see publication two years after Lovecraft's death, in the April 1939 edition of Weird Tales.
Charles Band's Empire Pictures originally shot the story as part of an anthology film called Pulse Pounders alongside a follow-up to Band's 1984 fantasy compendium The Dungeonmaster (a.k.a. RageWar, a film probably more famous these days for spawning the iconic catchphrase "I reject your reality and substitute my own" as perpetuated by Adam Savage on Mythbusters and a phrase that's probably problematic in these days of people decrying anything they dislike as 'fake news' and burying their heads in alternative facts) titled Dungeonmaster II: A Sorceror's Nightmare which was never completed. Another segment was a sequel to the 1984 classic Trancers titled City of Lost Angels which reunited Tim Thomerson and Helen Hunt as Jack Deth and the lovely Leena, respectively (not that one alas).
Adapted by Dennis Paoli, the short is something of a reunion of the alumni of 1985's
Re-Animator and 1986's
From Beyond, with not only Paoli backstage scripting but in front of the camera's proscenium arch Jeffrey Combs, the lovely Barbara Crampton (sadly
sans the fetish wear from the latter film which may well have triggered my puberty) and David Gale present and correct with David Warner joining in a half decade before he got another Lovecraftian turn in 'The Cold' segment of
Necronomicon.
Beginning with a haunting piano theme from Richard Band over a semi-animated title sequence which unforgivably misspells Ms Crampton's name as "Barbra", we have the lady in question as the oddly-monikered Said Brady returning to a former residence to collect some belongings. The truculent landlady (Una Brandon-Jones, the "miserable pensioner" Mrs Parkin of Withnail & I who doesn't care where you come from) has issues with the rats in the walls - a nice reference there - as well as Miss Brady's loud sexual activities when she lived there with "him"; we learn that "he" ended his own life there by hanging himself.
Asking to be left alone in the upstairs room, Brady is soon accompanied by the disembodied voice of Jonathan ("him", Combs) who paws all over her with spectral hands as we'd all like to, before manifesting in the hungry flesh and removing his dog collar and clerical garb and giving the young lady a damn good ravishing ("Your body is my religion" is such a good line) on the bed, all the while they're being watched by a human-faced rat creature (Gale).
She awakens in the night to find the rat-thing crawling on the bed - Gale perhaps eager for another cunning linguistics lesson like in Re-Animator - and a tall stranger also in religious dress (Warner) who tells her that not only is the rodentine abomination Jonathan's familiar, but that he seduced her in order to take her soul. Identifying himself as a bishop sent from Canterbury to excommunicate her lover from the church, the man reveals that he was murdered - his head smashed in with a holy chalice - and floats toward her spouting dire warnings. Assailed by visions of the phantom clerics, including Jonathan's living corpse hanging from the rafters instructing her to "Kiss me like you used to" (hanging from a rope whilst being blown by Barbara Crampton is how I want to go: I now have an auto-erotic asphyxiation oral fixation), she reaches her wits' end and puts her own head in the noose only for her demon lover to take possession of her lovely form.
And so, in a neat inversion of the original tale's ending, the baleful curate leaves the house bound for pastures new in a new bewitching and beguiling body whilst the rat creature lies thrashing its stop motion claymation tail in one of the landlady's rat traps.
Thought for decades to be lost media, a videotape copy of the workprint was found in 2011 and subsequently restored and released for our edification. And well worth a tickle from an eldritch tentacle it is indeed. I R'lyeh mean that most sincerely.
No comments:
Post a Comment