Re-Animator by Eddie Falvey;

Author:Eddie Falvey; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA

Lovecraftian Adaptation in the Films of Stuart Gordon

Returning to a case I made in chapter one, it is fair to argue that Re-Animator is about as strong a film as Charles Band’s Empire International Pictures ever did make. It is also reasonable, I would suggest, to propose that Stuart Gordon was the best technical filmmaker working within the studio at any time during its run. Indeed, Linda Badley has argued for Gordon’s status as a “horror auteur”, by which she is referring to “the large number of notable recent directors whose films are recognized as employing, throughout a body of work, horror film syntax and themes to express, often self-reflexively and ‘subversively,’ their ‘visions’” (2004: 224-5). Listing Gordon beside other notable horror auteurs including Dario Argento, Clive Barker, Mario Bava, Tim Burton, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Larry Cohen, Brian De Palma, Abel Ferrara, Lucio Fulci, Tobe Hooper, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Sam Raimi, Jean Rollin, George Romero and Ken Russell, Badley makes a case for, firstly, unstitching any existing critical distinctions between “high” and “low” forms of horror (ie. Polanski’s highbrow literariness beside Rollin’s sex-fuelled exploitation films), as well as a case for marking Gordon out as a filmmaker with an overriding “vision” to speak of.

This vision is well worth scrutinising in the context of Gordon’s ongoing interest in the works of Lovecraft, represented by adaptations over a twenty-year period: From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dagon and Dreams in the Witch House, a TV movie that featured as part of Mick Garris’s Masters of Horror series (2005-7), a series that was for some critics important for determining auteur status among contemporary horror filmmakers.45 Joe Hickinbottom, in a chapter on Takashi Miike’s horror reputation, makes use of Garris’s Masters of Horror as a prism through which to observe the discursive and economic functions of the horror auteur, and how such statuses are conferred and capitalised upon. Hickinbottom writes that “Masters of Horror was accordingly billed as an opportunity for audiences to indulge in the nightmarish work of some of horror cinema’s greatest directors” (2020: 95). While Gordon’s status as a horror master is less contentious than, say, Miike’s,46 it nevertheless invigorates a way of looking at the director’s work that invites one to situate it within the principle tenets of auteurism.

Joe Tompkins has identified how important the idea of the auteur is to the marketing of horror. In his assessment of horror auteurism and the splat pack — referring to a group of popular “torture porn” filmmakers such as Eli Roth, James Wan and Rob Zombie who all emerged in the early twenty-first century — Tompkins claims the following:

[A]uteurism remains central to the marketing of some horror films. The invocation of horror auteurs has tended to permit critics, fans, and filmmakers to accumulate subcultural capital by expressing their appreciation of, and affiliation with, ultraviolent horror. What is more, this practice has become part of industry practice, with production and distribution personnel seeking to invest themselves and their output with the subcultural authenticity that is associated with a cohort of 1970s horror directors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.