The writings of H.P. Lovecraft have had
a notoriously rough history when it comes to film adaptations. Very
few films which claim to be based on his writings even attempt to do
serious justice to the source material, and of those that have tried
only a small handful have succeeded. Though there are at least a few
Lovecraft stories or novellas that obviously cry out to be made into
a great movie, this troubled track record has lead to a feeling that
his fiction is somehow unfilmable, and most big studios have been
scared away from any attempt to prove otherwise. Never has this been
more obvious than in Guillermo Del Toro's frustrating and (so far)
fruitless years-long attempt to get a big-budget adaptation of At
The Mountains of Madness off the
ground. But while Hollywood has continued to be scared off by the
pioneering horror auteur, Lovecraft has had a bit more recent success
overseas. It was in Spain in 2010 that we finally got a big-screen,
(reasonably) big-budget Lovecraft film; in fact, we got two of them.
A highly ambitious two-film story arc, The Valdemar Legacy
and The Valdemar
Legacy II: The Forbidden Shadow
aren't based on any single Lovecraft story, but are a loving homage
to the master's work, drawing heavily from his rich and iconic
Cthulhu Mythos. With great atmosphere and a compelling original story
that is nonetheless clearly based on his writings, the Valdemar
saga was exactly the sort of
theatrical Lovecraft film we had been hoping to see for years. But in
a great irony, the films were never released – either theatrically
or on DVD/blu-ray – here in the author's home country. At last the
first film has been made available on streaming platforms in
America... but since, as with Kill Bill or
the final installments of many a young adult franchise, the films are
basically two halves of one double-length movie, that doesn't do
American viewers much good. However, those with the ability to import
European discs are encouraged to seek out both parts as a
double-feature. While it may not actually be an adaptation, this is
the closest we've seen yet to how H.P. Lovecraft can and should be
handled in mainstream cinema.
An appraiser for a
real estate firm is sent to value a long-abandoned mansion with a
dark and tragic history, which once belonged to the mysterious
Valdemar family. Once inside, she finds herself caught in a grim
mystery – and trapped within the mansion – when she discovers
that it is not unoccupied after all, and its current inhabitant may
be a killer... or worse. Meanwhile, in flashback, we see the history
of the Valdemar family: the story of an early-20th-century
illusionist who gets mixed up with some very real – and very dark –
magic, involving the notorious (real-life) occultist Aleister
Crowley, and Lovecraft's equally notorious grimoire, the
Necronomicon. The past and present storylines are told in parallel
across both films, gradually converging and adding up into a larger
portrait of otherworldly horror. Both halves are compelling, although
the early-1900s storyline about Valdemar and his descent into the
occult is the stronger of the two – in part because the time period
(the time when Lovecraft was actually writing) fits so well with the
source mythology, and offers opportunities for some beautifully eerie
atmosphere and art design. Spanning a century, the plot is far too
big to fit into just one film, so spreading it across two movies was
a bold choice, and certainly a good one. By cross-cutting between the
past and present stories rather than giving them each one
self-contained film, The Valdemar Legacy often feels less like
two movies and more like a miniseries; an approach which is common
with adaptations of bestselling book series like Harry Potter and
The Hunger Games, but is a pretty gutsy move when adapting the
mythology of a somewhat niche cult author from the better part of a
century ago. It's a good thing that a European studio was willing to
make this gamble, because I highly doubt it's anything that an
American company would have attempted.
What is most
interesting about the parallel-time-periods approach is that the two
halves of the film make use of somewhat different narrative and
visual styles, appropriate to the era of their plots. The 2010 half
of the film has a very modern horror feel, not unlike the work of
James Wan and his Blumhouse contemporaries, with grimy, gritty
settings and moments of post-Saw serial killer tension. The
early-1900s half has a vintage gothic horror feel: beautiful
Victorian environments haunted with deep, foreboding shadows,
flickering candelight, and howling wind. It's the sort of artistic
and narrative style that Guillermo Del Toro loves, and that he gave
us on a far grander scale in last year's Crimson Peak. It's
perfect for an Old Dark House horror story, and it feels like the
natural habitat of Lovecraft's ghouls and Old Ones. The Valdemar
Legacy films had a pretty large budget for a horror title –
about 15 million for both put together (for comparison, Insidious
was made for just 1.5 million, while the much more expensive
Crimson Peak cost 55 million) – and it is clear that the
construction of the film's very impressive sets is where much of
that money went. The Valdemar masion is rendered both in Victorian
opulence and long-abandoned decay for the respective plot threads,
and in both cases the sets drip with fantastic atmosphere.
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| "I feed on the souls of good H.P. Lovecraft movies. I usually go hungry." |
The films –
especially the period storyline – also interact in a very
interesting way with the frequent misconception that Lovecraft's
creations are real. Both the Necronomicon and Cthulhu have become so
ingrained in popular culture that many people don't know he created
them, and think of them as elements of a real mythology. The
Valdemar Legacy plays with that by mixing his mythology with real
occultists and historical figures of the same time period. The
inclusion of Aleister Crowley – notorious occultist,
philosopher, and generally pretty creepy guy – as a main character
goes a long way to further ground the Cthulhu Mythos material in
reality, and blur the line between fact and fiction. Crowley brings
with him a few other real-life individuals: figures from literary,
occult, or true-crime history. I cannot spoil who any of them are, as
there are some cool surprises among their ranks, but it is a very
effective conceit.
Most of the actors
who play these characters – real and fictional – will not be
known to most American viewers, with the exception of one. The
Valdemar Legacy is the final film (or rather, films) of iconic
Eurocult actor Paul Naschy, who passed away at the age of 75 before
the film was released. While he was best known for a career of
exploitation films that usually fell somewhere between campy and
trashy, he gives a pretty good final performance here, as Valdemar's
butler who gets pulled into the occult nightmare with him. These
films are very different from those which defined his career, but
fans of his should be sure to see them, as they give him a chance to
sign off with a pretty dignified dramatic role.
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| "I'm drawing a line in the sand- do not read the Latin." |
The films are not
without their flaws, however. As mentioned earlier, the early-1900s
story works quite a bit better than the present-day one, which has a
few leaps of logic and moments of unevenness. The elements that
appear influenced by modern serial killer movies like Saw
sometimes feel out of place, and a couple of the modern-day villains
are more cliché and less effective than the menacing and mysterious
fictionalized Aleister Crowley. Also, while the budget was large
enough to give the sets and art design a wonderfully rich look, the
money clearly started to run thin in post-production, resulting in
some unfortunate compromises in the special effects department. The
practical effects in the film look quite good, but a few sequences
make use of some CGI which is decidedly rough around the edges.
Nowhere is this more evident than the climax of the second film,
which features some artistically well-designed Lovecraftian imagery
rendered in unfortunately uneven CGI which harms its believability
and impact. It's a shame, because strictly from an art design
perspective, the visuals on display here are an excellent realization
of Lovecraft's work; they just needed a bit more money or attention
to make sure that the computer graphics used did them justice. There
is definitely worse CGI out there – this is by no means SyFy
Channel bad or anything like that – it just stands out as being
noticeably weak since the film looks so good otherwise.
Even if it is
ultimately flawed, though, so much of The Valdemar Legacy 1 &
2 is so good that it is very easy to recommend, both to H.P.
Lovecraft fans and fans of this style of horror in general. It is a
wonderfully ambitious attempt to bring the author's mythology to the
big screen, taking bits and pieces of many of his stories and putting
them together into a grand-scale original tale which nonetheless
captures that elusive narrative style that we call Lovecraftian. In
that regard its closest American analog, from a decade and a half
prior, is John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness: neither
film is based on any single Lovecraft story, but both are
adaptations of his body of work and their overarching mythos. No, we
still haven't gotten the big-budget Hollywood Lovecraft movie that we
have long hoped for – Del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness
is still in production limbo, though he claims it isn't yet dead –
but The Valdemar Legacy is definitely the closest thing. And
honestly, with its ambitious two-film arc, it is likely a bolder and
more adventurous attempt at bringing the author to the screen than we
are likely to see from an American studio any time soon. Hopefully
part II, The Forbidden Shadow, will eventually follow the
first film onto American streaming platforms, and hopefully both
films will eventually find their way to North American blu-ray. But
in the mean time, those who can import region B/2 discs will find The
Valdemar Legacy films fairly easy to find, and are encouraged to
do so.
Be a good sharer!
Score:
- Christopher S.
Jordan