![]() ![]() Two years later, AIP made the first movie that openly admitted to being a Lovecraft film, Die, Monster, Die ! Based on The Colour Out of Space-a rather slight story about a meteor that crashes to earth on a distant farm-it is far more SF than its predecessor. ![]() Unfortunately, when we finally glimpse the creature, instead of an unspeakable alien monstrosity it looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon with an extra pair of arms (one suspects a Paul Blaisdell creation leftover from one of Corman’s SF films). It is a decidedly Lovecraftian elder god, and there are the expected references to the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Curwen’s spirit takes over Ward’s body, and takes up where he left off with his experiments with the monstrous creature in a pit under the house. They insisted that he borrow the title of a minor poem, The Haunted Palace, and bill it as yet another Poe film (Vincent Price reads a snatch of it at the end, which is Poe’s only contribution).Ĭharles Dexter Ward returns to his ancestral home, Arkham, and finds the town haunted by the monstrous mutations caused by a curse left on it by his ancestor, Joseph Curwen (also Price). AIP disagreed: they’d turned their Poe films into a recognizable brand and didn‘t want to risk making a film by another, lesser-known author. The final products, thanks to Corman’s gift for working within a tight budget, look very much like the Hammer films he is ripping off.Īfter making the first five, though, he wanted a break. In 1963, Roger Corman made the first attempt with a version of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.Ĭorman convinced AIP to fund a series of color Edgar Allan Poe movies with higher budgets than they’d given him before (which admittedly wasn’t much). While he arrived far too late to qualify as Gothic, his stories are filled with enough ancient secrets, crumbling manors and irrational terrors for five Gothic authors. It was probably inevitable that someone would try to film Lovecraft in an age of Gothic horror films. Which doesn’t change the fact that the mere notion of Gothic SF suggests the mad jumble of clichés in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Lovecraft’s stories offer a more satisfying mix, with ancient aliens, brains in tanks and even fish-men. A few versions put the SF into clearer focus-as in James Whale’s bravura 1931 creation scene (suspiciously similar to the demonstrations of real-life “mad scientist” Nicola Tesla) but even his sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, mixes in the supernatural.Įdward Bulwer-Lytton wrote about underground races living in the hollow earth Jules Verne’s one Gothic story throws in a device that records and plays back images and H.P. Some call Frankenstein science fiction, although a lot of people disagree: the novel spends little time on the creation of the monster, focusing instead on its consequences. It isn’t as if SF hadn’t appeared in Gothic fiction before. Which makes it even stranger that a few filmmakers tried to combine the two. It is also clear that these two competing cinematic visions were very different: one bright, clean and evenly-lit the other shadowy and expressionistic with garish splashes of color: one looking towards the future the other haunted by the past: one rational even in the face of the unknown the other feverish and demon-haunted, with madness lurking in the dark. Many of those who had churned out low budget SF in the Fifties turned to Gothic horror in the Sixties. The fifties SF boom had already peaked-its audience had grown far more discerning, demanding better effects and writing. What is certain is that when Hammer films released The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, it proved so successful that other studios rushed to get their own Gothics into the theaters. Nor is it ever easy to explain why it changed. And then the audience bought their popcorn and watched Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, forgetting the aliens, spaceships and distant worlds they’d flocked to see only a few years earlier. Graves burst open, releasing madness, plague and all the monsters of the dead past. ![]() Terrible things stirred in the depths of the earth. Evil creatures of the night fell upon us. Yet we knew the universe would open all its secrets to us.īut then the darkness came. We faced unknown hazards, unexpected consequences of our own actions, beings vastly more powerful than us, and even the darkest corners of our own psyche. We boldly set out into the stars, confident we could conquer every peril. ![]()
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