A little while back I uploaded a reading/recording of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House", one of his most famous stories. As was the case with "Pickman's Model", the story was adapted (and I use that term very loosely) for Netflix's "Cabinet of Curiosities" limited series produced by Guillermo del Toro. If you haven't read the source material, or listened to my recording and review of the first story (episode 5 of the series on Netflix) I'll wait while you do that to get caught up to speed.
Good to go? Excellent!
So, you'll recall that the adaptation of "Pickman's Model" left something to be desired. There were elements of the original story that were preserved, but it was the padding and additions to the story that really ruined the episode for me and many others. "The Dreams in the Witch House" (episode 6 of "Cabinet of Curiosities") has the opposite problem. It isn't the few elements that are preserved that are the problem, such as character names mostly and the ending, it's that the aforementioned list is pretty much the only thing consistent with the source material.
I'm not exaggerating.
Aside from the names of the main characters, there is essentially nothing of the original in this story. Gone are the fantastical worlds encountered during the second phase of Gilman's dreams. Gone are the tenants of the witch house and the sense of dread surrounding Walpurgis Night and the midnight revelries of the witch cults in Arkham. Instead, the main character (who I refuse to acknowledge as being anything like the Gilman of the original story) is a depressed, melancholy, sad-sack of a man who has no motivation in life beyond once again seeing his dead twin sister who died when they were kids. Given the character's graying hair, either he has been stressed out his entire life or it's been several decades since the event. The point is, this is far from the studious mathematics graduate student who postulated theories of traveling between dimensions who is, unfortunately, haunted by the soul of a sadistic witch and her familiar. This is not the one who was dragged into unknown abysses and interacted, unwittingly, with the dark messenger Nyarlathotep. This is a pathetic loser who never amounted to anything and spent his whole life pining after his dead sister instead of getting counseling.
The new characters are even more useless. The nun and her sister are equally pointless. The nun serves to be a caricature of everything bad about organized religion as seen from the perspective of someone who was abused in the church. The nun is a cold-hearted, judgmental, unsympathetic turd and her sister, who is clearly involved with studying the witch-house (possibly involved in witchcraft herself) is the voice of reason who convinces her sister to aid them by asking "aren't all souls worthy of salvation"? With that her sister realizes that she needs to help. It apparently takes a pagan to show a nun that they aren't living up to Christ's example. Then again, I've come to expect this sort of trope from media. Christians are judgmental hypocrites, and it is up to the non-Christians to hold them to their own standard. Unfortunately, there have been enough within Christendom who have validated this trope.
In any case, the ending fits the book pretty closely as far as Gilman's death is concerned and the contents of the alcove in the house containing Keziah's and her familiar's remains, even if those remains aren't found after the house collapses (which doesn't happen in this, unsurprisingly). The rest of the ending is pretty stupid though.
All in all, I still don't understand why they bothered adapting either of these and then veering so far off the source material. I'm not saying that everything has to be 1:1 the same, but this time they didn't even try.
No comments:
Post a Comment