Retrospective: H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon (1992)
By Robert B. Marks
I am pleased to declare that I discovered H.P. Lovecraft a short while ago when, out of curiosity, I picked up a copy of his Dream Cycle. After finding it to be excellent fiction, I was hooked: I am now a Lovecraft fan.
So, when I noticed H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon: The Book of the Dead on a rental outlet shelf, I just had to have a look. I was expecting to see some well done Lovecraftian horrors from the dawn of time, and perhaps even a bit of Cthulhu. I was both pleased and disappointed.
The movie opens with H.P. Lovecraft entering a monastery with the intention of looking at the Necronomicon, which is under guard. As he does so, the odd things which happen around him serve as a frame for three stories.
The first story is about a man who returns to his ancestral home in America and finds a will from one of his ancestors. The will talks about how the Necronomicon helped him to resurrect his dead wife, and the man decides to do the same, only to end up awakening Cthulhu instead.
The second story is about a reporter who discovers that inside a house is a woman who has lived for sixty years without aging. The key to this secret of immortality, which is (of course) found in the Necronomicon, turns out to have a very heavy price for the reporter.
The third story is a particularly gruesome tale where a pregnant cop finds herself in an abandoned building searching for her partner, who has been carried off by "the butcher". When she follows the trail, she finds herself being fed to a monster from the dawn of time.
Sadly, the movie very liberally adapts the stories written by H.P. Lovecraft, and a great deal of style is lost. However, the first two are done quite well. As a Lovecraft affectionado, I was picking out bits and pieces of what I had read earlier. I was particularly impressed with the first story, which could have been taken word for word from a Lovecraft tale.
The linkage story, with H.P. Lovecraft reading the Necronomicon, was a joy. Not only did it fit nicely into the Cthulhu mythos, but there were unseen monsters, tentacled horrors (aside: for some reason Lovecraft had an obsession with two things: tentacles and cats; cats I can understand, but tentacles have always puzzled me), and Lovecraft makes a close escape with the Necronomicon and the knowledge that there are horrible things around us that we could never imagine.
It is the third story that rains on the parade. While Lovecraft wrote of million-year old horrors, and the monster in this story is as old as the dinosaurs, graphic dismemberment of central characters was not something Lovecraft ever practiced. The story starts well and is very suspenseful, but once the main character is betrayed, the story simply becomes a mindless gorefest with little to do with anything Lovecraft ever wrote.
The movie also has another failing: it explains very little. When I saw it, I saw it with some friends who had never been exposed to any of Lovecraft's writings. So, while I was enjoying the tidbits of Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors, they were watching the screen in mystification. This is a film that actually should have a reading list attached: reading The Call of Cthulhu before seeing the film helps it make sense, but without some prior knowledge of Lovecraft, the viewer is lost.
So, the rating: Necronomicon is not bad at all, with some strong performances and horrific creatures from the dawn of time (but, sadly, no cats). However, the gruesome ending to the third story and the lack of explanation pull the movie down considerably, and might even turn people off of a brilliant writer. So, the final score is 3/5, with one warning: read The Call of Cthulhu before you see it.
Robert Marks
--
The future has not been written, / The past is set in stone,
And I am but a lonely wanderer, / With time as my only home.
-- from _Demon's Vengeance_
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