End of October reading and viewing

I've finished my annual October re-reading of Lovecraft. This year, I read most of The Dunwich Horror and Others, a hardcover collection from Arkham House which includes some of his best stories, including Cthulhu Mythos tales (the original "Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth) and non-Mythos stories like "The Music of Erich Zann," "Pickman's Model," and the frequently anthologized "Cool Air" which was adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery (as was "Pickman's Model," though I never saw that one). The Mythos stories are long and, if you're not in the right mood, rather draggy. The plots are all fairly similar in construction: a first-person narrator tells of his involvement in an incident in which someone has meddled in the rites of the Old Ones, usually having used the Necronomicon, an ancient book of spells and rituals by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, to allow the horrifying beings to return to earth. The meddler (or some innocent bystander) always meets a bad end, and often the narrator himself is scarred for life in some way by his own involvement.

The Old Ones, horrible gods from our distant past who seem to be exiled out in infinite space, are rarely actually seen, though we do have a sense that they are large humanoid creatures with tentacles. We see some gross flying beasts in "Whisperer" and a freakish race of half-human/half-fish people in "Innsmouth" (the basis for the fairly decent Lovecraft movie Dagon, technically also based on an early Lovecraft story called "Dagon"). The non-Mythos stories are shorter and often more immediately creepy, "Erich Zann" being one of his very best--the narrator befriends a lonely old man who plays unearthly music and can apparently see beasts from another dimension out of his attic window. Oddly, I actually like the 70's movie of The Dunwich Horror more than the story (like most Lovecraft adaptations, the movie is only "inspired" by the story, rather than being a close adaptation), but "The Colour Out of Space" is a way better story than its film version, Die Monster Die.

I got an idea for a Lovecraft drinking game: every time he uses the word "blasphemous," have a drink. Of course, you'd never get to the end of a story, because that is his favorite adjective, whether it's appropriate to the noun or not--what the hell are "blasphemous angles"? Still, I quite enjoyed immersing myself in Lovecraft's baroque fiction again.


On my classic movie blog, I've reviewed a number of horror and sf films I watched in October, but one that didn't fit the blog was House, a mediocre 80's haunted house movie. A writer, troubled by the disappearance of his young son and the subsequent breakup of his marriage, moves into a haunted house, has ghostly visions, gets his neighbor and his ex-wife involved, and may get a shot at redemption by saving his son after all. The low-budget FX are OK and the supporting cast is so-so. The star is William Katt, the prom boy in Carrie and the star of the TV show "Greatest American Hero." He's handsome and he fits the Stephen King-ish lead character pretty well, but as usual with this kind of film, it all falls apart in the final third, and the internal logic that has been set up fails, too. My favorite horror film of this October was Hangover Square, part of a new boxed DVD set from Fox. I haven't decided what's up for Halloween night--probably a Universal classic, like the original Dracula, or Bride of Frankenstein. After all these years, the first 20 minutes of the Lugosi Dracula still gives me chills.