Despite the fact that HP Lovecraft remains the 20th century's most celebrated writer of supernatural horror, most attempts to bring his work to the screen have been doomed to ignominious failure from the get-go.
Remember The Shuttered Room, in which Oliver Reed and Flora Robson try to convince us we're in Lovecraft's demon-haunted New England rather than the distinctly less spooky Home Counties of the Olde one? Or Necronomicon, the ambitious, multi-directorial Lovecraftian compendium that ended up being a tottering three-layered shit sandwich?
And, if we're really scraping the barrel,
how about La Mansión De Los Cthulhu, a misbegotten Spanish attempt to cash in on Lovecraft's most famous creation which features Frank Finlay as a black magician and has bugger all to do with Cthulhu or anything else really.
Some readers, at this point, may be holding up their little webbed hands and crying "Dagon!" or "Re-Animator!" While they have their good points, Stuart Gordon's numerous riffs on
the Master's stories mostly just reduce them
to juvenile splatter-fests and have failed as miserably as other contenders in conjuring any of the eldritch atmosphere of cosmic horror that oozed from the pages of Lovecraft's original tales.
Which brings us to The Unnamable - director Jean-Paul Ouellette's 1988 screen adaptation of one of HPL's early yarns - and
the crux of the whole problem.
Lovecraft's very short story records a discussion between two friends - Randolph Carter and Joel Manton - about whether something can be truly 'unnamable', so far beyond everyday human experience it can't
be quantified, dissected or described. While Manton maintains there is nothing that can't be depicted by "the solid definitions of fact", Carter asks why we shouldn't imagine "psychically living dead things in shapes - or absences of shapes - which must for human be utterly and appallingly 'unnamable'". It's a good question, and one horror directors should perhaps ask themselves more often.
So, while Lovecraft's Unnamable gives us Puritan legends of a thing that leaves the tracks of "split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws", and ends with a vision
of "the pit, the maelstrom, the ultimate abomination" that pushes the powers of description beyond their limit, Ouellette's film just trots out a screeching, bat-eared harridan in shaggy leggings: yes, just as in every other half-arsed fright flick you've ever seen, the
pay-off is, in fact, a let-down, a literal-minded, lame-brained attempt to bottle that unnameable essence of horror which only exists in the fleeting glimpses and flickering shadows of the unknown.
On the plus side, Unnamable does make maximum use of its source material, although this is exhausted in the first 20 minutes, leaving Ouellette nowhere to go except down the well-trodden road of kids-get-offed-in a-spooky -house. Five years later, after a surprisingly successful video-rental half-life, the film got a belated sequel. Considerably better than the first outing, The Unnamable Returns boasts real actors, a plethora of Lovecraftian references, and softcore legend Julie Strain (pre-mega-boob-job by the looks of things) as the creature. Best of all, this may be the only film in which the cosmic powers of the Great Old Ones are defeated by the hero's deft use of a humble library chair!
Out now from Anchor Bay, £16.99
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