Reviews of “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) and related work
- Adaptation: Dreams in the Witch House (2022)
“The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933
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H. P. Lovecraft (writer).
I think of this as a relapse into Lovecraft’s earlier and collaborative poorly planned macabre stories, as indicated by the silly editorial cartoon rat and the Christian framework of “Two Black Bottles” (1927). The hoofed “black man” avatar of Nyarly here is the Christian figure seen in “Thrawn Janet” (1881). It was a crusty notion even back then, yet “The Dreams in the Witch House” imitates the previous generation’s occult horror stories, like “Playing with Fire” (1900). It is certainly similarly frivolous in its worldbuilding.
References here: Detwiller’s mathematical Mythos, “Dreams in the Witch-House” (2005).
‣ Dreams in the Witch House (2022
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Seen in 2023.
Like Pickman’s Model (2022), this short film is an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022). The only good thing about it is that it includes a false positive: A historically correct medium who uses historically correct gauze for her fake ectoplasm, despite the addition of an afterlife in limbo. The rest of the time, the adaptation mixes the worst of Lovecraft’s original with the repetitive tropes of its own time. The editorial cartoon rat is predictably bad in CGI.