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The film is broken into four separate features: "The Library", "The Drowned", "The Cold" and "Whispers". "The Library" segment is the frame story, which begins and ends the movie.
The Library
In the frame story of the film, H. P. Lovecraft learns of a monastery where a copy of the Necronomicon is held. Having been a regular there for his research, he sets up an appointment, his cab driver told to wait outside. Taking offense when the head monk calls his work "fiction", Lovecraft insists that all his writings are true. Requesting to read the Alchemical Encyclopedia Vol. III, Lovecraft steals a key from another monk and flees to the cellar, where the Necronomicon is being held. Unknown to him, a monk has seen him. Unlocking the vault where the book is held, the door closes behind Lovecraft unexpectedly, making him drop the key down a grating and into the water below. As that happens, one of the seals is opened.
Lovecraft sits to read and record what he is reading. It is not specified if he sees visions of the future through the book, or if the book contains future accounts. It is likely the stories will come to pass, and for the Necronomicon have already passed, alluding to the Necronomicon's timelessness, as all the stories take place well beyond the 1920s.
The Drowned
Edward De Lapoer is tracked down in Sweden after inheriting an old, abandoned family hotel. Left a sealed envelope from Jethro De Lapoer, he learns of his uncle's tragic death. Upon a boat trip return to New England, a crash on the shore killed Jethro's wife and son. Distraught, Jethro picked up a copy of the Holy Bible in front of several funeral mourners, tossed it into the fireplace and announced that any god who would take from him is not welcome in his home.
That night, an odd fishman arrives and tells him he is "not alone", then leaves behind an English translation of the Necronomicon. Using the book, Jethro brings his family back to life. However, they are revived as unholy monsters with green glowing eyes and tentacles in their mouths. Feeling guilty, he chooses to commit suicide by casting himself off an upper floor balcony.
Edward, distraught over a car accident years before which killed his wife, Clara, finds the Necronomicon and performs the ritual to revive her. That night, Clara arrives and asks to be invited in. Edward apologizes for the accident. Clara begins to regurgitate tentacles from her mouth, and in a panic, Edward pushes her away. Clara angrily attacks, but Edward, with a sword taken from a nearby wall, cuts her. She turns into a tentacle leading underneath the floor. Drawn underground from the injury, the creature below destroys the main floor and rises, a gigantic monster with tentacles, one eye and a large mouth. Edward cuts a rope holding the chandelier, jumps to it and climbs to the ceiling. "Clara" again tries to restrain him, but Edward destroys a stained glass window, the sunlight driving her away.
Edward pushes the chandelier rope free from the pulley, the pointed bottom piercing the monster in the eye, presumably killing it. Now on the roof, Edward has avoided the same fate that Jethro had years before, and decides to live.
The Cold
Reporter Dale Porkel is suspicious of a string of strange murders in Boston over the past several decades. Confronting a woman at a local apartment building, he is invited in, only to find the entire place is very cold. The woman he has confronted claims to suffer a rare skin condition which has left her sensitive to heat and light. Demanding the truth or his story runs as-is, Dale is told the story of Emily Osterman's arrival to Boston twenty years before.
Emily had supposedly taken residence in the apartment building, and was told by Lena, the owner, not to disturb the other tenant, Dr. Richard Madden, a scientist. Her first night, she is attacked by her sexually abusive stepfather, Sam, who has tracked her down. Running away, the two struggle on the steps leading to the apartment next door. Dr. Madden opens his door, grabs Sam's arm and stabs his hand with a scalpel. He falls down the stairs and dies. Emily is bandaged up and given medication. That night, Emily is awakened by the sound of drilling and she sees blood dripping from her ceiling. Heading upstairs, she finds Dr. Madden and Lena mutilating Sam's corpse. She passes out, awakening later in her bed with a clean ceiling. Dr. Madden assures her that it was all a bad dream.
The next day while job hunting, Emily sees two cops with flyers asking for information about the murder of Sam. She confronts Dr. Madden, and he comes clean: though Sam was already dead from the fall, Dr. Madden claims he would have killed Sam regardless for what he had done to Emily. Dr. Madden reveals his copy of the Necronomicon to Emily and explains to her how he learned of its information on sustaining life. In the greenhouse, Dr. Madden proves this by injecting a wilted rose with a compound to revive it, claiming that as long as it is kept out of the sun, it will never die. The two have sex, with a distraught and angry Lena spying on them.
That night, Lena threatens to kill Emily if Emily will not kill her, as Lena is in love with Dr. Madden, a feeling that has never been returned. Emily flees, only to return months later. Upon arrival, Emily finds her boss from the diner in Dr. Madden's apartment, struggling to avoid death. Lena stabs the man in the back, killing him. Lena insists on killing Emily, but Dr. Madden will not allow it. The two struggle, destroying lab equipment in the process. The resulting fire injures Dr. Madden severely, and without his fresh injection of pure spinal fluid, he feels no pain as his body disintegrates before he dies. Lena shoots Emily with a shotgun in revenge. Emily announces her pregnancy, and Lena, feeling a loyalty to Dr. Madden, saves her.
Dale suspects the woman he is talking to is not Emily's daughter, but Emily herself, having contracted a disease from Dr. Madden during intercourse. Emily reveals he is right, and that she is still pregnant, hoping one day that her baby may be born. She also reveals that she has continued murdering for spinal fluid, and chooses to keep a supply stockpiled. Dale realizes his coffee has been drugged as an aged Lena approaches him, brandishing a syringe.
Whispers
During a pursuit of a suspect known as "the Butcher", two Philadelphia police officers, Paul and Sarah, are arguing over their failed relationship and the coming baby. The argument leads to a crash, flipping the cruiser upside down. Paul, having unbuckled his seat belt in the argument, is knocked out and dragged off by an unseen person. Sarah unbuckles herself, breaks the window and exits the vehicle. Unable to call for backup, she follows a blood trail alone.
Inside the old warehouse, Sarah follows as Paul is taken down a service elevator. Sarah trips on a rope and falls through to the floor, saved from impact by the rope around her ankle. The rope breaks a second after, and as she gets up, she finds a man in glasses, Harold Benedict. Insisting he is merely the landlord of the warehouse and the Butcher is a tenant, he offers to lead her to him. Downstairs, the two are shot at by Mrs. Benedict, a blind old woman. Sarah, sick of getting a run-around, takes the shotgun and orders the two to lead her to the Butcher. Mrs. Benedict indulges in gossip first, insisting she is not really Benedict's wife. She also claims the Butcher is from another dimension. While searching for the Butcher, Sarah makes her way to a cavern filled with bat-like creatures and other monstrosities, but the Benedicts pull the ladder from the hole, leaving Sarah trapped. As Sarah ventures through the cavern, she starts to become scared, even promising to keep her unborn child. She later sees Paul, but he has already been eaten by the bat-like creatures that inhabit the cavern. His brains are needed by the bats to reproduce. The bats then begin to corner her. She later wakes up on a table, where Mr. and Mrs. Benedict are seemingly trying to feed Sarah to the monster bats.
Sarah suddenly wakes up in a hospital. Her mother and a doctor (who resemble the Benedicts) rush into her room. Sarah was forced to have an abortion as a result of the car accident earlier, but her mother insists that she will be forgiven if she forgives herself. Sarah wants to see Paul, but Paul is brain dead and turns out to be in the very same state that he was found back in the caverns. Sarah screams in terror in spite of her mother's pleas to not scare the baby. Sarah does not understand what her mother is talking about, as she thought the baby had to be aborted. Her mother opens her blouse and reveals that the baby is inside the womb of the monster-bat creatures. Sarah is even more scared, especially after removing her bed sheets and finding out she has lost half of one of her arms. Suddenly, the hospital setting changes back into the cavern. Sarah is still on the table, about to become a meal for the monster bats. Harold wants to leave, but Sarah still has the keys.
The Library
With the conclusion of the third tale, Lovecraft is confronted by the head monk, who assures him that all will be fine if he opens the door. Lovecraft admits he dropped the key. Furious, the monk warns Lovecraft to replace the book, but the author is attacked by a monster in the water beneath him, and the last of the seals opens up. The head monk reveals himself to not be human at all, as he begins stretching his body through the bars to enter the room, and Lovecraft uses a sword in his cane to defeat the monster in the water.
Gathering his things and grabbing the book, Lovecraft begins to depart, being caught by one of the monks who warns him of the foolishness of his actions, telling him he will pay for his misdeeds. Lovecraft then escapes to the taxi and orders it to leave, and it leaves unpursued.
Brian Yuzna was trying to get a new film project going using his business connections in Japan and decided a three-story anthology film with a creative team from America, Asia, and Europe respectively would give the film the commercial viability it needed to secure financing.[6] In developing a linking device for the film, Yuzna decided to base the film around the Necronomicon from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft while making the film more inspired by Lovecraft's stories rather than a direct adaptation of them.[6]
Release
Despite being completed in 1993, the film sat on a shelf until it was released direct-to-video on October 29, 1996.[7]
Critical response
Necronomicon was well received upon its initial VHS release in the US, but did substantially better in European and Asian markets.[citation needed] The film won the award for Best Special Effects at the 1994 Fantafestival.[citation needed]
Craig Butler of AllMovie later described the film as "a hit-and-miss affair", commending the writing of the first two segments, special make-up effects, and David Warner's performance, but criticizing the weak writing of the two remaining segments.[8]
With regard to the acting, Iain McLachlan of SFFWorld commented in 2004 that "Payne is especially effective because of his suppression of his tortured grief, adding considerable power to his scenes".[9]
In their 2006 book Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, Andrew Migliore and John Strysik opined that the film "does not deliver on what should have been a great idea. In fact the film loses focus, speed, and atmosphere after the first segment, 'The Drowned', almost as though the production had run out of money and time."[10]
Related Research Articles
The Necronomicon, also referred to as the Book of the Dead, or under a purported original Arabic title of Kitab al-Azif, is a fictional grimoire appearing in stories by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft's "The Nameless City". Among other things, the work contains an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning them.
Shub-Niggurath is a deity created by H. P. Lovecraft. She is often associated with the phrase "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young". The only other name by which Lovecraft referred to her was "Lord of the Wood" in his story The Whisperer in Darkness.
Nyarlathotep is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft. The character is a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared universe. First appearing in Lovecraft's 1920 prose poem "Nyarlathotep", he was later mentioned in other works by Lovecraft and by other writers. Later, writers describe him as one of the Outer Gods, an alien pantheon.
Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft and other authors. He is the ruler of the Lovecraftian Gods and may be seen as a symbol for primordial chaos, being among the most powerful entities in the Cthulhu Mythos.
At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931. Rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length, it was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
Re-Animator is a 1985 American comedy horror film loosely based on the 1922 H. P. Lovecraft serial novelette "Herbert West–Reanimator". Directed by Stuart Gordon and produced by Brian Yuzna, the film stars Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, a medical student who has invented a reagent which can re-animate deceased bodies. He and his classmate Dan Cain begin to test the serum on dead human bodies, and conflict with Dr. Carl Hill, who is infatuated with Cain's fiancée and wants to claim the invention as his own.
Beyond Re-Animator is a 2003 Spanish-American horror film directed by Brian Yuzna and starring Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu and Santiago Segura. It is the third and final installment in the Re-Animator film series.
The Dunwich Horror is a horror novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in 1928, it was first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales (pp. 481–508). It takes place in Dunwich, a fictional town in Massachusetts. It is considered one of the core stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Hyperborean cycle is a series of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith that take place in the fictional prehistoric setting of Hyperborea. Smith's cycle takes cues from his friends, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and their works.
Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
The Simon Necronomicon is a grimoire allegedly written by "Simon" a.k.a. Peter Levenda. Materials presented in the book are a blend of ancient Middle Eastern elements, with allusions to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley, woven together with a story about a man known as the "Mad Arab".
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.
"The Rats in the Walls" is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. Written in August–September 1923, it was first published in Weird Tales, March 1924.
From Beyond is a 1986 American science-fiction body horror film directed by Stuart Gordon, loosely based on the short story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written by Dennis Paoli, Gordon and Brian Yuzna, and stars Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree and Ted Sorel.
Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was an American one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, businesswoman and milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century. She is noted for her thirteen-year marriage to American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. She was a president of the United Amateur Press Association.
The Unnamable is a 1988 American horror film directed, written, and produced by Jean-Paul Ouellette. It is based on H. P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. The film is about a group of university students that made the poor decision to stay overnight in a 'haunted house'. Mark Kinsey Stephenson played the lead role, Randolph Carter, alongside Charles King.
The Mountains of Madness is an audiovisual musical adaptation of the works of H. P. Lovecraft by Tiger Lillies, Danielle de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke. It was conceived by Hacke in 2005. Tiger Lillies performs the music with narration by Hacke from selections of Lovecraft's stories.
↑ Migliore, Andrew; Strysik, John (February 1, 2006). Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft. Night Shade Books. ISBN978-1-892389-35-0.
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