The Grim Cellar

1993, USA, Directed by Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans, Shusuke Kaneko

Colour, Running Time: 93 minutes

VHS, PAL, ITC, Video: 1.33:1, Audio: Stereo

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, writer of strange tales about ancient creatures and alternate dimensions, visits an old library to research the phenomenon of death (and evasion of it) through an rare tome called Necronomicon. There he uncovers several stories that will prove to inspire him in his macabre iterations… In the first tale a man inherits a mansion that brings with it a grim past - decades before, the occupier, distraught at the deaths of his child and wife, is inexplicably visited in the night by a horrific creature who bestows him with a book - the Necronomicon - that will allow him to grant life again to his dead loved ones. He’s soon engaging in a bloody ritual to bring back the dead and return they do, only not quite in the shape that he remembered them. This has resonance with the new owner whose own wife was previously killed in a car accident. The second story introduces us to a reporter who’s looking into the case of a recent spate of rather odd murders, whereby the victims appear to have been drained of spinal fluid. He comes across a house that’s supposedly home to someone who should have died a long time before, but there’s no official record of the man’s death. There he’s greeted by a young woman afflicted by a rare illness whereby she claims to be allergic to heat and light. She recounts how she came to be ill, and reveals the truth about the man who never died and how he has influenced her own destiny. Through this the writer learns, to his misfortune, what’s been happening to the recently deceased. Lovecraft’s final reading opens with a car chase that results in the pregnant female cop and her boyfriend crashing the police car in a deserted area. Her boyfriend goes missing and in searching for him (and the crook they were chasing) she comes across a strange underground complex resided over by a couple who appear to be quite insane, muttering as they do about a ‘mad butcher’ and aliens. But as she discovers more of the subterranean world she realises that there is a hell down there that threatens more than just her life…

The fiction of H.P Lovecraft has been noticeably absent from the big screen and it’s generally acknowledged that his work is difficult to do justice in cinema. In the past this may have been because special effects simply weren’t up to the job of efficiently recreating some of the author’s abhorrent visions, being as they were of unspeakably monstrous creatures that had often lay dormant for centuries. The other explanation for the difficulty of adapting, and something that could still be considered relevant, is that Lovecraft’s creations were indescribably morbid, often inducing madness in those unfortunate enough to witness their arrival: how can you visually represent something that imagination itself can conjure up in a far more horrifying state? By obscuring the exact nature of an entity it can become somewhat more frightening, an evolutionary remnant of our innate uncertainty of darkness, and fiction by default obscures these visual details permitting our imagination to clumsily (but effectively) fill in the gaps. By delineating everything visually cinema can often work against the very thing that it’s trying to achieve. Sometimes it works, but not as often as we’d probably like (assuming, that is, that we like being spooked!). Stuart Gordon took one of Lovecraft’s easier ideas to adapt and managed to create a cult hit with Re-animator, and later made a nice little return to Lovecraftian notion with Dagon. There have been a couple of other attempts along the way, one of them being something that seems to be unfairly unforgotten: Necronomicon. An unusual modern-day example of the anthology film, this film actually manages to approach the terror of Lovecraft’s work and reasonably apes it. Despite being made just before the CGI boom (something that was still the domain of huge budget films at the time) the generally gruesome special effects here, being mostly prosthetic, are prime examples of their kind - the creatures are gorgeously designed while gore is plentiful but not overly gratuitous. On a technical level the only thing that can be considered a drawback is the sometimes incompetent and excessively used music. The narrative takes the novel slant of suggesting that Lovecraft was not a writer of fiction, rather a man documenting ghastly tales of monsters that mankind was hitherto largely oblivious to. In a neat in-joke, Lovecraft is played by Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West in the aforementioned Re-animator) who is present in the wraparound story that sandwiches the other three tales. The first two stories, The Drowned and The Cold can be a little hard to follow as essentially they’re flashbacks within flashbacks and the viewer is having to keep track of what quite a few different characters in different times are up to. Once you get your head around that they’re pretty macabre and satisfying snippets of imagination, the nocturnal visitation in part one being a particular favourite of mine. David Warner makes a welcome entry in The Cold as a doctor obsessed with preserving life (similarities to the Herbert West character here), and the conclusive revelation is sufficiently dark. The final part, Whispers, is the best as it drags its heroine, almost literally, to hell but doesn’t necessarily bring her back. Just as you think there’s a cop-out happy ending you realise things are only getting worse. Whispers, is the one that really reflects the fear of insanity that made its mark in many of the author’s stories and its effective understanding of that gives it the edge over the other two sections in my opinion. Evident in the last two stories is an undercurrent of fears associated with birth and pregnancy, something which resonates on a particular level of the mind that some people may overlook but for me it adds an extra dimension of unease that helps to connect me with the material.

This promotional ITC video cassette is time-coded and fullscreen with a stereo soundtrack. Details obviously get lost in the many darker scenes and this is something that would be welcome on DVD. Indeed, aside from a French release, a disc release of Necronomicon is an unfortunate absence in the world of digital film media these days and hopefully someone will bring it to the attention of those who’ve managed to miss this on VHS in the UK and US. Not an overwhelming classic but a small lost jewel that’s worth having a dig around for.