JD,it says somewhere (amateur review)that Reanimator "exceeded the boundaries of good taste"
Surely Lovecraft is ABOUT good taste?
HPL is NOT about gore,unless i'm very much mistaken
Um, have you read the "Herbert West -- Reanimator" set? Gore galore; over-the-top by the bushel. It begins as a rather stiff, somewhat hackneyed bit (one of the very few HPL actually did for money), but he quickly began to parody himself with that one, and its increasingly excessive aspects (which themselves could be said to "exceed the boundaries of good taste" make that pretty obvious. The film caught hold of these aspects, and ran with them. At the same time, if you actually watch the thing without preconceptions, it is very carefully crafted and has a lot of layers. My first impression, back when it came out, was that it was a romp, but went a bit too far perhaps even so. Over time, I've come to see it rather differently. It's odd, but (with the exception of
Dreams in the Witch-House), I've not tended to care for Gordon's Lovecraftian films that much the first time around; distinctly
disliked Dagon, for instance. But as time goes on, I find myself drawn back to them, and on re-watching them I pick up so much that I didn't the first time around... and end up viewing them in a different light. They have subtleties, nuances, and a great deal of (admittedly unconventional) intelligence in the handling of their source material. They also do not lack pathos -- though, again, it is generally of an unconventional kind. And Paoli and Gordon often pick up on very elusive aspects of the stories and play on them in ways which brings them out more clearly. They are certainly not for everyone but, in their own way, they may be among the most faithful adaptations of Lovecraft around, at least when it comes to the spirit of the things.
As for Lovecraft being about good taste... I don't think I'd agree with that, at least not in the usual sense of that term. His stories contain incest and inbreeding in general ("The Lurking Fear", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", at least implied in "The Dunwich Horror", among others); necrophilia or at least thanatophilia of one kind or another (the C. M. Eddy collaboration, "The Loved Dead", "The Tomb", "The Hound"); cannibalism ("The Rats in the Walls"); what amounts to bestiality ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", "Pickman's Model").... And that's just a start. Nor does he always handle such things with restraint; if such is fitting for the story, then certainly he does; if a more boisterous, flamboyant approach is more in line with a particular tale, he can pull out all the stops. Certainly, critics such as Edmund Wilson or even the generally favorable Peter Penzoldt, have taken him to task for excess. As Penzoldt put it:
Even if there is a true symbolism in Lovecraft's tales it is his realistic descriptions of pure shameless horror that strike one as the dominant feature. If any writer was able to cram his tales with more loathsome physical abominations than Crawford and Machen it is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He delights in detailed descriptions of rotting corpses in every imaginable state of decay, from initial corruption to what he has charmingly called a "liquescent horror." He has a particular predilection for fat, carnivorous, and, if possible, anthropophagus rats. His descriptions of hideous stenches and his onomatopoeic reproductions of a madman's yowlings are something with which even "Monk Lewis" did not disgrace fiction. I could well understand Mr. Blackwood, when he once told me that to him "spiritual terror" seemed entirely absent from Lovecraft's tales; for if there is any, it is hidden under so much repulsive detail that the English master may well be excused for not noticing it.
I don't entirely agree with Penzoldt's (or, for that matter, Blackwood's) assessment -- I would say "spiritual terror" is a prime component of Lovecraft's tales, especially his better ones -- but I can well understand the latter point that the more obvious physical repulsiveness of much of Lovecraft's fiction might obscure this aspect to many. HPL played a difficult and dangerous role of fusing the physical repulsion of horror with the more ethereal, elusive impressions of "spiritual" terror... very much in line with the Goths who influenced him so much via their impact on such writers as Poe. The symbolism often lies in those very descriptions of physical abomination and decay (as in "The Outsider", where they bring home the tragic point of that tale on both a purely physical and a deep emotional, even pathetic, level at the same moment -- I believe that Don Burleson's reading of that tale, and its importance to the majority of Lovecraft's corpus, is spot on*), as these are powerful ways to address Lovecraft's theme of our own alienation, degradation, and lack of importance in the cosmos. In essence, Gordon and Paoli have picked up on that and used much the same approach, at least in From Beyond and Dagon (Re-animator is, as stated, more on a physical, human-centered plane), and done so with considerable skill and subtlety... ironically falling into the same category as HPL did with the earlier critics, who also missed the import of
his use of such things.
*I've quoted Burleson's essay at length elsewhere; but I'll repeat some of that here, as it seems germane to the discussion:
[That] central apocalyptic moment at the mirror, the moment of terrible revelation when the Outsider, trying at first to believe the carrion horror in the frame to be a separate entity, reaches out and touches the polished glass and knows the abominable form to be his own. In a sense, the fateful mirror is also a lens, in that the moment at the glass brings to focus what is going to be the broad thematic concern of Lovecraft's entire oeuvre: the nature of self-knowledge, the effects of learning one's own nature and one's place in the scheme of things. The rotting finger that touches the glass sets ringing a vibration that will endure, will continue to resonate in varying pitches and intensities, throughout the whole experience of Lovecraft's fiction.[...]
[In At the Mountains of Madness the] humans who happen upon the ancient stone city learn not only of the previously unsuspected existence of the elder race (a race hinted at only in folklore); reading that race's historical murals, they learn the most devastating fact of all -- that the ancient race, experimenting with life forms, created people as a sort of jest. Here humankind has looked into the most cruelly candid mirror, has touched the glass and come away forever scarred.[...]
[...] Time after time, in various ways, the Outsider reaches forth to touch the glass, and suffers the agony of self-discovery. To be human is to be the Outsider, a meaningless speck adrift in the sea of stars. [Burleson terms this "ironic impressionism", and goes on to say:] The old saying is that "it shouldn't happen to a dog," and indeed it could not; dogs are unreflective on their lowly status in the universal scheme, while Homo sapiens -- ironically, the knowing animal -- can know its debasement, a debasement not even so elevated as true tragedy, since humankind has no genuinely tragic dignity, no dignity of great beings brought low, to fling back at the mocking stars.[...]
In literary theorist M. H. Abrams's well-known The Mirror and the Lamp, the mirror is a metaphor for mind, mind viewed (in pre-Romantic or Neoclassicist terms) as a mimetic reflector of externality, in contrast with the "lamp" metaphor of mind as a radiant contributor to what it perceives. For Lovecraft (in such a scheme decidedly the pre-Romantic) the mind is more mirror than lamp. But for Lovecraft the mirror is also a metaphor for the cosmos itself that reflects back humankind's true face, the face of a lost and nameless soul. Self-referentially, Lovecraft's career-long text itself is a sprawling hall of mirrors, mirrors mirroring mirrors, a labyrinth of iterated thematic reflections through which wanders the Outsider who forever reaches forth, in hope against hope, to touch the glass.
Lovecraft's use of such physically loathsome things as the rotting corpses and the shoggoths symbolize this debasement... a part of why, for instance, Dyer and Danforth are so appalled at the things -- given what they know from the historical murals of the Old Ones, they recognize that they are closer to the shoggoths in nature, that in fact this is a close, if not direct, relative; the theme of biological degeneration and evolutionary reversion frequent to Lovecraft. At the same time, the ultimate climax of that novel (one generally missed by readers) is not this revelation of the shoggoths, horrific as it is, but rather the implications of what Danforth sees as they fly back over the Mountains of Madness and he glances back just as the "merciful" mist lifts to reveal what lies beyond those
other mountains. It is this which finally shatters him completely, and it is entirely a "spiritual" terror left only lightly hinted rather than described.
