The Most Merciful Thing in the World
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Last night, I hosted a screening of Dan O’Bannon’s underseen 1991 classic The Resurrected at the Stray Cat Film Center, which put me in the position of having to justify why I regarded it as the best H. P. Lovecraft adaptation to date.
For starters, I said that it wasn’t my favorite adaptation. This is true. My favorite is Die, Monster, Die! from 1965, which certainly isn’t the best. But then I had to further backtrack and say that I don’t necessarily believe that this is the best movie, full stop, ever adapted from a Lovecraft story, either.
Instead, The Resurrected sits at a relatively (and unfortunately) unique intersection of being both a good movie and a good adaptation – keeping, for the most part, to the spirit of the work it’s adapting, even when it deviates from the letter, while also bringing enough of its own vitality and personality to the proceedings to make it worthwhile on its own.
That, by itself, might be enough to justify my placing it as the best Lovecraft adaptation to date. While the Old Gent’s work has been brought to the screen dozens upon dozens of times, most interpretations fail to satisfy one or the other of those relatively modest criteria.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so. In their landmark guide to Lovecraftian cinema Lurker in the Lobby, Andrew Migliore and John Strysik quote artist Allen Koszowski as he hopes for the day when “some gifted filmmaker will adapt Lovecraft’s stories in a manner that does both credit,” before suggesting that O’Bannon’s Resurrected “did just that.”
However, while casting around on the podcast following the show, I hit upon something that I think might be an integral part of the real explanation of why I hold The Resurrected in such high regard.
Lovecraft’s stories are often told in indirect ways. The quote that I used at the top of this post is the famous opening paragraph of his 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and it could in some ways be seen as a statement of intent for how several of the Old Gent’s stories are constructed.
Rather than a straightforward narrative from point A to point B and C and so on, Lovecraft’s tales are often about the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge,” which gradually reveals a sinister and often epic dimension to otherwise seemingly unrelated events – a dimension of which only the story’s protagonist (and now the reader) is usually fully aware.
It is this gradual accrual of details that many cinematic adaptations often elect to jettison, but which The Resurrected leaves intact. For those of us who are familiar with Lovecraft’s posthumously published novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where everything is heading is already a foregone conclusion, but watching all the pieces tumble into place, revealing, bit by bit, an ever more gruesome and grotesque whole is still deeply satisfying.
Of course, this approach isn’t for everyone, which might help to explain why The Resurrected isn’t better known among Lovecraft adaptations, even while those who do know of it tend to hold it in high esteem.
Nor is it limited to Lovecraft (who is not even its best practitioner). Indeed, while the approach is particularly well-suited to cosmic horror, the idea of the story that grows from the gradual accumulation of relatively innocuous, seemingly unrelated incidents is one that has been used in all sorts of genres, and is especially popular in stories of crime and detection.
To see what is, without a doubt, my favorite cinematic example of it, one need look no further than Koji Shiraishi’s 2005 found footage film Noroi: The Curse, in which a documentarian gradually pieces together an almost apocalyptic plot involving a rural sect. But it’s also used in any number of other horror films, to greater and lesser degrees.
When it’s done well, this slow-building patchwork of seemingly dissociated knowledge is one of my favorite approaches to telling a scary story, and I think the extent to which The Resurrected engages in it helps to cement my agreement with Migliore and Strysik that it is “the best serious Lovecraftian screen adaptation to date.”
