Stuart Gordon's late-career resurrection continues apace with the disquieting Dreams in the Witch-House. Gordon made his bones as the go-to (maybe the only) guy for watchable adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and he lives up to that identity with this, an episode of the uneven Showtime series Masters of Horror. This is not his best Lovecraft adaptation (Re-Animator will forever hold that title), but it's the closest to the tone of the stories.

Witch-House sees grad student Walter Gilman (Ezra Godden) renting a room in a shabby part of town. The place is small and crummy — the clothes chest lacks bottoms in its drawers — but it's cheap and there's a cute single mother named Frances (Chelah Horsdal) living in the next room. Walter begins to suspect that things are not as they seem, however, when his work with string theory shows the shape of his room to possess the perfect diagram for an interdimensional portal.

And then the rat with the human face shows up. There are some sinister goings-on in this house dating back some 300 years, and it's up to Walter to try and put a stop to it before history claims more victims. But how do you stop an ancient evil when your waking life is a nightmare?

Right from the title, it's pretty clear that this is going to be a rubber-reality movie. Gordon's introduction of this, with the reveal of Brown Jenkin (the man-faced rat), is well played - the revelation comes after a scene in which Walter fights off a rat in Frances's room. We're primed to expect more rats, but not rats with supernatural powers. From there, he blurs the lines between the dream world and the real world until they're indistinguishable. (Interdimensional portals will do that.)

What separates Witch-House from the normal variety of rubber-reality film is the use of the dream state to represent Walter's loss of control in the situation. He starts as the confident hero figure; however, as the witch's powers and intentions become defined, his resolve breaks down (for reasons, which the narrative makes clear). By the point of the climax, he's a blubbering mess driven to insanity by forces beyond his comprehension or control. This is classic Lovecraft in its design - the Everyman who finds something that man was not meant to find. Gordon's worked with Lovecraft's material for so long that these ideas seem as much a part of his ethos as they do Lovecraft's. (Even his non-Lovecraft projects have an air of these forbidden-knowledge thematics, i.e. King of the Ants.)

Article Author: Steve Carlson

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

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