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Jun 20, 2023

Stuart Gordon's Adaptation of "Dreams in the Witch House" for Masters of Horror Confirmed His Status as Our Greatest Adapter of the Works of H.P. Lovecraft — Nathan Rabin's Happy Place

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It's the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin's Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.

It's both intimidating and encouraging that there's so much good television out there that it's damn near impossible to experience it all, particularly if you’re like me and you aren't particularly interested in quality TV.

I’ve never seen an episode of Justified, Succession, Yellowjackets, Fleabag or Deadwood but I have mindlessly consumed countless hours of various iterations of 90 Day Fiance.

I love horror anthologies even when they’re terrible yet it took this project for me to finally get around to exploring the aughts horror anthologies Masters of Horror and Fear Itself.

Horror maven and Halloween III: Season of the Witch co-screenwriter Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror afforded Stuart Gordon final opportunities to adapt his beloved H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe for the small screen.

In 2005 Gordon co-wrote and directed an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story Dreams in the Witch House, which was the basis for an entry in Guillermo Del Toro's terrific horror anthology Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities directed by Catherine Hardwicke.

Hardwicke and Gordon perhaps unsurprisingly had markedly different takes on the same morbid material. Hardwicke's adaptation focused on its protagonist's desperate attempts to bring his dead sister back from the great beyond.

Gordon's "Dream in the Witch House", in sharp contrast focusses on a physics graduate student who is fundamentally alone in the universe even before he ends up in one of the Re-Animator's realms of pure evil.

I’ve noticed over the course of this series that when it comes to casting lead actors, he either goes for the great Jeffrey Combs or a lesser-known, lesser actor with serious Jeffrey Combs energy.

We’ve all got a little of that Jeffrey Combs feeling, but since Jeffrey Combs IS Jeffrey Combs he has it in spades. Thankfully Ezra Godden, who stars as intense student Walter Gilman, has a whole lot of Combs in his. DNA.

Godden is not Combs. No one else is. But he's close enough. Dreams in the Witch House opens with its cursed protagonist renting a room from Mr. Dombrowski (Jay Braze, who I know best from his role as the devil in Slam Dunk Ernest), a misanthrope who makes a seemingly counter-intuitive point of telling his new tenant that he does not like students or young people.

He doesn't seem to like anyone but in Lovecraft's cruel world the universe itself is hostile to your existence. It's certainly contemptuous of poor Walter Gilman, who seals his own doom by renting a humble little room that's a portal to a realm of supernatural evil.

Mr. Dombrowski is openly contemptuous of Frances Elwood (Chelah Horsdal), a single mother he derides as a parasite and a welfare cheat. Walter develops a crush on his attractive neighbor, who is even more desperate than he is.

She's on the verge of homelessness and is forced to rely upon Walter, someone she has known for a matter of hours, as a babysitter for her traumatized tot.

Before things take a turn Gordon first grounds the spooky happenings in the free-floating desperation of Walter and Frances in a house that sends out bad vibes only. What Mr. Bombrowski neglected to mention on the "Room for Rent" sign in his front yard is that the house is actually hundreds of years old and a powerful vortex of evil.

Oh, and this cursed abode has a unique and uniquely unfortunate rodent infestation problem. It's home to the usual vermin but also Brown Jenkin, a rat-like creature with the proportions of a regular rodent but a human face and voice.

Brown Jenkin is the familiar of Keziah Mason, a seventeenth century witch who was arrested during the Salem Witch and is seeking a body for an unholy sacrifice. I’ve done a lot of wiki-surfing on H.P. Lovecraft. The process started well before I got the enviable assignment to write up the complete filmography of our foremost interpreter of Lovecraft's terror tales and fright fables.

I vividly remember reading about the rat with the human face and thinking, "Howie my spooky dude, you are one crazy motherfucker! I don't know what you’re smoking to make you think up this freaky shit but you need to hook a brother up with your dealer's number!"

Brown Jenkin is every bit as viscerally disturbing as I had both hoped and feared. There's something about the ungodly combination of rodent and human that's unnerving in a way that's hard to put into words but then that's always been Lovecraft's deal; horror beyond our imagination, beyond our frame of reference and beyond the ability of language to adequately describe.

Walter's fragile grasp on reality is tested when he begins having horrifying visions of the aforementioned seedy rat-man and then a witch who is at first seductive, attractive and extremely naked before becoming geriatric, evil and monstrous.

This haunted house's other unfortunate tenants include Masurewicz (Campbell Lane), a traumatized old man who has seen things no man should ever have to witness, and has just barely survived.

Masurewicz knows all about the rodent with the human face and the sacrifice-seeking witch. He knows that he and Howard are cursed and controlled by sinister forces they do not understand but he cannot save himself any more than he can his new acquaintance.

Ezra Godden, who also did a more than acceptable job in the off-brand Jeffrey Combs role in Dagon does a good job of conveying his character's fundamental helplessness as he comes to understand just how powerful the house is.

Howard can't keep horrible things from happening or protect the innocent. Even more terrifyingly, he can't keep himself from doing horrible things to the innocent. As the film progresses, this lost soul becomes a threat to the baby in the house rather than its guardian or protector.

The medium might have changed but this stellar adaptation only confirmed Gordon's status as our culture's preeminent expert when it comes to realizing H.P. Lovecraft's waking nightmares on the big and small screen.

That's why I’m psyched that my journey through Gordon's career is not quite over, as I have two more feature films I remember quite liking in Edmond and Stuck as well as two more segments for horror anthologies: The Black Cat for Masters of Horror and Eater for Fear Itself.

Will they be good? I can't say for sure but considering that I’ve liked everything Gordon has done with the exception of Dolls I'm going to go ahead and say yes.

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