Better than the Book: Re-Animator

I'm a relative newcomer to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I read At the Mountains of Madness long ago, but then kind of forgot about it. With all the attention Alan Moore has given to Lovecraft lately, I decided it was time to dig into it. I started with "The Dunwich Horror" and moved through his best, "The Shadow over Innsmouth," to some others. The worst of what he's written is, I think, "Herbert West, Reanimator." It's just not a very good story.

As a developmental editor, I spend a lot of time suggesting ways for writers to improve their stories. One suggestion I often make is for writers to show instead of tell. Yeah, it's the basic thing you learn in high school, that dramatizing the interactions of human beings is probably going to be more interesting than a summary of that interaction. Usually, it means going into detail: giving us the dialogue, being descriptive when chronicling action, stuff like that. Showing through words.

Lovecraft's story is virtually all telling. It covers years and years of West's activities through, through the filter of his friend/roommate/collaborator. And it's got a bit more of a mythology of the reanimation, for lack of a better word, that ties together the separate sections, and gives more personality to most of the reanimated corpses. But it doesn't really work. As I read, I felt like I was looking through a fogged up window at the events going on. I never got a good sense of any of it.

The movie version is, however, rather intense. Of course, as film, it becomes much easier to show events. But Stuart Gordon's film, though it does have a lot of dialogue, almost doesn't need it. The visuals alone would be all you'd need for the most part, and even the scenes in which there's a lot of talking (I'm thinking of our introduction to West as he criticizes the doctors at the university), could be glossed over with a title card or two. It could be a silent movie.

The movie is tense where the prose is lethargic.  This is one example of the filmmakers seeing something worthwhile in the source and jettisoning everything else. It works.