ESSAY: Lurking Fear - The Story, the Movie, the Difference

Note: spoilers for both the short story "The Lurking Fear" and the film of the same name.

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Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" has some fun, gruesome details that should make for an energetic adaptation.  The short story, written as a serial in 1922, focuses on an artist curious about a spate of deaths in the Catskill Mountains.  His growing obsession culminates with his horrible discovery that the beast responsible for the deaths is only one of many hundreds, and all of the monsters are part of a centuries-old incestuous family named the Martenses.  In terms of genetic deterioration, the creatures are somewhere between the villains of "Home" from The X-Files and the bat-like monstrosities from Neil Marshall's The Descent.

Each sub-chapter ends with a horrifying "revelation" that feels predictable, especially if the reader's already worked through similar regressed-human-creature tales like "The Outsider" and "The Horror at Red Hook," but the serialized structure keeps the short story punchy and entertaining.  Lovecraft hounds will enjoy his digressions into florid considerations of cosmic possibility...

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.

...but even casual readers should get a few shivers from the atmosphere of dread and potential violence.  Not bad for a hundred-year-old chiller.

Floodlit lighting does this creature no favors.  Where the hell are the shadows?!

If IMDB is to be believed, producer Charles Band originally wanted Stuart Gordon to direct The Lurking Fear.  Makes sense, considering that Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond were impressive adaptations that transmuted Lovecraft's short works into movies that were somehow both exploitative and dignified.  Sadly, Gordon didn't get involved, but Band tried to follow his pattern with From Beyond.  Namely, use the ending of the short story as the jumping-off point for the movie.  Lovecraft's tale ends with a force of men blowing up the monsters' underground caves, and this film focuses on that idea.  There's a lot of dynamite and a lot of explosions.

Also, the film's just called Lurking Fear.  Charles Band and director C. Courtney Joyner must've talked to Sean Parker.  "Drop the 'the.'  Just Lurking Fear.  It's cleaner."

Filmed in Romania on a shoe-string, with act breaks and video quality that suggest it was intended for television, Lurking Fear completely reworks the story as a contemporary story of criminals and innocents that must hole up in one location and band together to face a threat.  If this sounds familiar, it's most likely because you've seen Assault on Precinct 13.  Or Demon Knight.  Or From Dusk Till Dawn.  Or Ghosts of Mars.  Or Splinter.  Or a thousand other movies.  The formula's easy, and, here, it's trite.  The heroes lack common sense, the villains fail to threaten.  The dialogue consists of individual sentences with little connection to the action.  At one point, villainous Miss Marlowe (Alison Mackie) kicks hero John (Blake Adams) square in the face and purrs, "Ooh, we really are good together."  Come again?

Blake Adams is Casper Van Dien as Josh Holloway.

Lurking Fear wants to be a modern action-horror picture, similar, but the film carries too many details from the story, and those details don't work.  The context of the film, both its situation and its time period, conflicts with the traits of the story.  For example:

Why don't these people talk to police?  In the story, police investigated but couldn't turn up any clues, and the isolated terrain made such inquiries difficult.  Here, we never learn that.  People seems to get to Leffert's Corners off a highway or something.

Why don't the heroes dynamite the creatures' lairs during the day?  In the story, nobody knows that the creatures have lairs, which explains why they can't take the fight to the creatures.  Here, the heroes just wait around, I guess because they haven't reached feature length yet.

If the creatures are this intelligent, and this bountiful, why don't they have a better fighting strategy?  In the short story, they're gibbering, chaotic beasts, cannibalizing each other whenever possible.  Here, they're a functional family unit lucid enough to capture and taunt, but they don't have any plan beyond thrusting their arms through boards and windows.

"Hey, bad guy, looks like this cocktail is on you."

"Oh my God, what an enormous explosion!"

"Man, you guys see that huge explosion?  No way that explosion didn't happen."

Some references from the story survive.  The town of Leffert's Corners is the same as the story.  The Martense family is still named as such.  A couple of set decorations make mention of Arkham and Miskatonic, which is cute, I suppose.  It's nice to see genre actors like Jeffrey Combs and Ashley Laurence, especially with Laurence wearing an Ellen Ripley swagger (and a low-cut shirt), and their relationship is believable, with his schoolyard crush and her purposeful distance, but Blake Adams pratfalls his way through the middle of the film, and his convenient loss-of-shirt during the climax is groan-inducing.  The revelation about his character at the end is anything but, since his connection to the monsters is right there in his name.

Oh yeah.  Remember what I said about explosions?  There's about two minutes worth of explosions at the end of the movie.  No doubt stuck there to guarantee investors that the crew got their money's worth.  After ten seconds, explosions are boring.  So, I, uh...

I improved it.