One of the many things that makes Lovecraft interesting, at least for me, is the discussion of why his writing work, if it does work for you (and despite my jokes about gambrel rooftops and fishmen, it does work for me most of the time). Everyone has their own reasons. Some can be agreed upon by the larger body of Lovecraft fans. Others are acutely personal. My example has always been my tendency to go backpacking in the wilds of New England, seeing firsthand how, even in our modern, developed world, civilization can vanish abruptly, leaving you surrounded by nothing but the night and woods. Even in those small states, the amount of land that gives way to untamed solitude is vast, and when you walk into the middle of it with nothing but boil-in-bag stroganoff and a headlamp to fend off the grip of the wilderness, it becomes a lot easier to believe Lovecraft’s tales of ancient things lurking in the mountains and foothills. You look up and realize how tiny you are. You look around an realize how vulnerable you are. Wolves, bears, and rutting moose are bad enough. I guess if I had to also deal with chattering crab monsters from space, I’d find them a lot scarier than I might have while sitting at home with a dram of Glenmorangie, reading The Whisperer in the Darkness. Because as has been pointed out to me in discussion, it’s not so much the monster as it is the isolation.
And perhaps nowhere is the isolation of a Lovecraftian protagonist more apparent than when someone steps up and says, “You know what? I liked Curse of the Crimson Altar.”
Kicking off a whole month of Lovecraft adaptations is the film that reunites the producer, director, and screenwriter of Re-Animator. Much of Dagon’s running time is comprised of Paul’s desperate flight through the seemingly inescapable labyrinth of the crumbling village, mobs of bug-eyed, tentacled creatures always close behind. Most of this sticks pretty close to The Shadow Over Innsmouth. While it changes the motivation for arriving in the decrepit old village (a ship wreck instead of general curiosity) and the location of the village (somewhere along the coast of Spain instead of somewhere along the coast of New England), and adds a girlfriend into the mix, once arrived in town the action is more or less the same. Particularly well executed is Paul’s ordeal in his own room at the inn, where first he is mere disgusted by the squalid nature of the abode then becomes terrified once he realizes the hall is crowded with things that want his blood. Although the comedy in Dagon is not as pronounced as it was in Re-Animator, it’s still present and evident in scenes like this. Paul, realizing that there is no lock on his room door, desperately scrambles to remove a tiny deadbolt from the bathroom door and screw it into the main door. That the lock is so tiny it could hardly stop a child from knocking in the door never seems to cross his mind. He also spends most of the movie doing his best to look threatening to his pursuers while brandishing a small pocketknife the likes of which are often given away as novelty items at conventions.