Dark & Twisty

Before reading “The Thing on the Doorstep”, I figured I could write this blog with ease.  A man is frightened to madness by what he sees on his door step.  Said madman will then relay his story to us with brooding language and minimal characterization.

Smack butt and call me biscuit if I wasn’t a bit wrong. Oh, there are characters torment to madness by fear and the horrible creatures that lay in the unknown, but it was the narrator.  He instead got to relay the changes he sees in his friend Ed as he is driven to madness. 

Lovecraft seems to have thrown a spanner in the works with this story.  He gives us an almost enjoyable story.  Typically, I cannot enjoy Lovecraft because of the trappings of Lovecraft.  I can see him in the story instead of the narrator or characters, but this was a bit better.  This round the madman is possessed.  But it isn’t that simple, he’s possessed by his wife who is possessed by her father.  That’s some kinky Freudian stuff right there. It takes a far more actual psychological turn than Lovecraft’s usual buffoonish attempts at psychopathology. At least Ed has a true reason to rant; he’s being possessed and controlled.  He is losing control of himself by magical means.

The other spanner is that the monster is killed, or so we think.  Oftentimes Lovecraft leaves the reader with the cliff hanger that the elder god or creature from the unknown is still lurking and that it may get us and make us mad or play mad songs or paint mad pictures.  In this case, Ed is shot and killed, but his story is different.  When the Thing visits the narrator, we discover it is Ed.  At the end of the story, we discover Ed’s psyche or personality if you will has been transferred to his wife’s dead, Innsmouth body. She was dead before she took control of Ed the final time.  This means that Ed isn’t dead, and that his wife’s evil psyche lives on as well, waiting to possess the next person, maybe even you.

I’ve read a variety of Lovecraft’s stories.  I won’t say all of them, but a lot.  This isn’t the scariest of his stories, but it has become one of my favorites.  The reason is that he broke from his tired, moss-covered, great cosmic horror and elder god mold, and it made the difference. 

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So “The Music of Erich Zann” inspired me to make a Lovecraft soundtrack.  Here are songs on The Lovecraft soundtrack as preformed by Erich Zann.

1.      Cthulhu Came Down to Georgia

2.      Cthulhu’s Call (a church hymn)

3.      Mountains of Madness Rain

4.      Mountains of Madness Breakdown

5.      Ballad of Herbert West

6.      These Dreams (in the Witch House) featuring Heart

7.      Flabby Claws Is Coming to Town (a holiday song)

8.      D-A-G-O-N

9.      Don’t Fear the Lurking Fear (featuring more cow bell)

10.  Crooked Little Shack

11.  (hidden track) Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks (I think that H.P. would like them.)

12.  (hidden track) Rock Lobster by the B-52s (A Innsmouth favorite.)

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Here we go again.  Can I say that about Lovecraft?  Yeah, I can.  The Music of Erich Zann again brings us the first person narrator haunted by some horror beyond measure.  Something that lives the color out of space and the twisted weird angles of Lovecraft’s world drives another man to near madness.

It’s easy to pick on H.P.  There is a lot of time between now and then and when he wrote his works, he was really creating the new thing, but I have to wonder did people start to think that this is the same song and dance (no pun intended).  I think that today Lovecraft would have a serious issue getting published because of his almost lack of skill to come up with a story that doesn’t sound the same.

The Music of Erich Zann does take an original turn on the same of Lovecraft softshoe.  This story doesn’t involve seeing creatures so hideous it drives the narrator to madness.   This deals with sound.  Lovecraft did have a great talent of using visual stimuli to make his stories creepy.  In this particular tale, the way the houses are built on the street shows his talent for this.  Unfortunately, even his great talent for the foreboding and terrifying landscape is trite today.  This story uses music and sound to give the reader the creeps. 

The music of Zann is not really described very well, but the madness of his song comes through.  In real life, there is not much more unnerving (or annoying) than music that is arrhythmic or out of sorts. Dissonance is always bothersome.  The music in this story doesn’t seem to fall into this category.  Lovecraft, again never gives a good description of the music, but get that it is music.

Zann’s crazy melodies are just him running a bow randomly on the frets of his viola. He wasn’t beating on the back of the instrument like he was in a Philip Glass symphony.  The music followed its own scale.  It had its own rules that didn’t match the rules of music of our own world. That is creepy.

When it comes to favorite Lovecraft stories, this isn't one.  I can see his trying something different.  It worked.  He chose to use sound and music to haunt us with the uneasiness of his world.  Lovecraft definitely had his own world and it was filled with crooked little houses and crooked little men.  Fish people lived by the coast waiting for Elder Gods to ascend from the depth, and long dead Philistine gods still had worshipers, but with Erich Zann, he added a sound track.

Lastly, the story reminds me of an Elton John song.  It’s called “I’ve Seen That Movie Too.”  In this song, there is a guitar solo.  Nothing unusual about guitar solos in rock music; even though Elton is a piano player.  The unusual thing about this solo is that the guitar was recorded forward but is played backwards on the song. It sounds like music but follows its own rules like the music Zann played.

(For those who know me well, yes, I did work an Elton John song into this blog.)

By the way “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” is available on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

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I have to say that silent movies can be a drag.  I’ve seen quite a few, and being the noisy person I am, give me a talky any day. 

I cannot say that for two great silent classics: The Phantom of the Opera and Nosferatu.  The two classics of horror cinema should always be considered the granddaddies of the creature features.

The original Phantom of the Opera uses one of the most talented character actors to ever grace Hollywood, Lon Chaney, Sr.  Even though he made few talking pictures, he was very versatile.  I would interesting to see in today’s culture how he would do.  With the make-up effects of his day, which were primitive at best, he was able to make himself into one of the most icon images of horror.  Even to today, when the Opera Ghost is mention Lon Chaney’s image comes to mind. 

The beauty of that picture was the scope of the images.  In silent movies, so much relied on the setting and costumes.  Sure, they were over acted, but they had to be.  Without the body language of involved in vocal cues, the actors had to over dramatize their movements.  In many ways this made this film version even scarier.  It was over acted with the grace of William Shatner, but what an effect.

If you’ve never seen this version of the movie (or Claude Raine’s version which is a good one too.  Claude Raines is a superior actor.  Also reference: Casablanca, Spellbound, The Wolfman [original] ).  You can’t beat this movie version.  Try it out if you can find it. 

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The Phantom of the Opera may be the most disappointing “horror” novel I have ever read.  I say disappointing because I had high hopes for this book based on so much of the other media versions of it. There are few silent movies if not early horror movies in general than The Phantom of the Opera.  Then there is the 1940’s version with Claude Raines.  These two movies give something to the phantom isn’t given in the book. 

In the 1920’s silent movie, Lon Chaney gives the Phantom a pathos and a sympathy he doesn’t quite get in the book.  In Universal Claude Raines version, the Phantom has a reason for his scarring and his strange madness.

In 1910, Gaston Leroux published the novel in its French version.  A year later, the English edition came out.  Leroux himself was a journalist that had adventure stories that would be unbelievable. 

The major problem I have with his story is that the story is rather melodramatic.  Since the story took place in a theatre, melodrama may have been the order of the day so to speak.  However, the story borders on soap opera. 

I found the characters to be rather stiff and cardboard.  They, however, fit in with characterization of the Victorian period, which the story would be written just at the end of.  With the characterization, the Phantom isn’t well rounded a villain for my taste.  He is mad, but we really never find out why he is mad.  The Persian says he’s always been like that, but he doesn’t elaborate as to why.

Speaking of the Persian, this character seems a little to convenient.  He seems to be just as knowledgeable about the L’Opera as the Opera Ghost.

The one thing that Leroux has going for him in this tale, is that he has a wonderful creepy setting.  There are few places in Paris more spectacular or mysterious as the L’Opera.  The building was construct around the time of the Franco-Prussian War.  During the siege and invasion of Paris during this war, the building was used as a store house of munitions and food products.  The below stage area of the L’Opera was cavernous and had many rooms.  Leroux took this into his story.  The Phantom is very creepy in that he can be just about anywhere in the building by using these various rooms. The greatest thing about the L’Opera is that is does have a subterranean  lake underneath it.  Leroux uses this as the location for the Phantom’s house, which is perfect.

Leroux had a great opportunity to make a wonderfully scare book with his Phantom of the Opera.  Unfortunately he was not a good enough writer to pull it off.  His journalistic style of writing wasn’t able to maintain the horror element needed for the story to be truly scary. 

The story relies on the madness of the Opera Ghost, but his madness seems random at best.  Some one say like in the musical version and the Claude Raines movie version that it is love, but the Phantom doesn’t really love Christine.  He loves having a plaything to mold to his own image.  It is a perverse love at best, which can be seen when he enslaves her.  The Phantom is scary only by the way that his cultural and personal beliefs so differ from our own, but even those elements are stereotypical to the belief about Persians and Near-Easterns during this time frame.

In more capable hands, this story would terrify.  Even though he was a horrible writer of character, it would interesting to see what Lovecraft would have done with such a horribly creepy location as the L’Opera.  What would Stoker have done with it?  Would the Phantom have been an elder god or some kind or fish person. Would Dracula have used the varied chambers to do his evil? Alas we will never know the true possibility.

Okay, I know that I’m going to get blasted for this random rambling about the story.  So do you worst.  I’ll be hiding in my lake house underneath the main building of Seton Hill awaiting your next arrival.  I’ll have my skull mask ready and my fingers cracked so I can play my pipe organ.

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