The House Next Door

By Simon Abrams

I'm not entirely sure that it's possible to make a successful film adaptation of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. His florid writing style does everything it can to prevent the reader from being able to visualize what's going on, which is a good part of the fun that any adaptation, film or otherwise, usually willfully ignores. I mean, let's face it, his most memorable creation is a space-alien-God thing with an unpronounceable name—Lovecraft's narrator makes a point that he can only approximate the name because it stems from a far coarser and more guttural language—and an unimaginably hideous chimera-like body. His monsters are intentionally unfathomable so it stands to reason that reproducing their images and the context within which they were created is a hard sell.

Necronomicon, an omnibus film of Lovecraft adaptations, is a valiant effort and serves up some intriguing mixed results. Its first segment, "The Drowned," directed by Christophe Gans, is the weakest of the four stories though it's also the only one to faithfully reproduce the atmosphere of Lovecraft's story. In it, a man comes home to his long-abandoned inheritance—a moldering mansion with shelves full of cob-web covered books and a waterlogged, sunken cellar. Gans' Byronic anti-hero lusts after a particular tome in the house that hearken back to the original owner's supernatural activities. That kind of gothic, single-minded quest for Faustian knowledge is key to Lovecraft's stories but Gans doesn't really make much of that solid foundation of atmosphere.