31 Nightmares: From Beyond · 4:59am Oct 27th, 2014
There are many parts of Lovecraft’s work that I dislike (his almost comically fearful racism, his general misanthropy,) and disagree with. For instance: The concept of Things Man was Not Meant To Know.
Lovecraft watched the dawn of modern science with absolute terror; certain it would reveal nightmares that obliterate the collective sanity of all humanity. He wrote with absolute conviction that it would plunge us all into nihilistic truth that would devour the very soul of our species.
This is of course complete bullshit. We know infinitely more about the universe and our place in it than we did in HPL’s day, and to my knowledge it has yet to drive anyone completely insane. The universe is a vast, incomprehensible place that couldn’t give a toss if all eight billion of us and our tiny little speck of planet were to be completely erased from existence tomorrow. If humans never existed at all it wouldn’t affect anything on any sort of cosmic scale, and you know what? It is my belief that none of us live our lives as if the opposite were true.
So when I say that From Beyond manages to perfectly evoke the feeling of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and remains an effective horror movie for me you can imagine that it must do a lot of things right.
For starters it is motherfucking weird as fuck. The plot involves a machine that stimulates the pineal gland in order to peer into another dimension and interact with the weird ass critters living there, some bizarre psycho-sexual fuckery, and a dudes pineal gland burst out the front of his skull like a third eyeball after which he runs around killing people.
Second it make excellent use of practical effects mixed with some good camera and editing tricks to give the other world creatures a properly strange vibe.
This is another movie that I feel could stand to be remade. If ever there was a call for a horror film to make some really clever use of CGI this is it.
Tomorrow we venture out to a little cabin in the woods to do some light reading… hope you’ve packed properly. Change of clothes, toiletries, maybe a chainsaw…
Later on Lovecraft actually respected foreigners if they assimilated well into Anglo-European culture, even marrying a Jewish woman who was "well assimilated" in his words. Yeah, his racism was a bit much even for his day....
2557801 Its some how worse than Robert E. Howard's (author of the Conan the Barbarian stories and a pen pal of Lovecraft's.) Howard characterized all non-whites as barbaric and savage but somehow seemed to respect that.
Lovecraft was just plain scared of black people.
You're gonna do the original Dead Rising?
Fuck yeah!!!!!