There were so many unusual or artistic films
adapted from books that I could have included, like Kwaidan (so beautiful),
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (again, beautiful), Call of Cthulhu (love to
see modern silent films) and Viy (Gogol!). In the end, however, I can only
choose five, so I picked the absolute strangest, and my absolute favourite, films
adapted from literature.
The Fall of the House of Usher
(1928, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber)
At least two film versions of Edgar Allen Poe's short story
were released in 1928; Jean Epstein's beautiful, dreamy version co-adapted with
Luis Buñuel (who quit due to creative differences) and this short version by
French Impressionists Watson and Webber.
Another, more modern, adaptation worth a watch is The Bloodhound, which is very understated while also addressing the character’s subliminal fears.
Zoo
(2005, various)
Otsuichi
(pen name of Hirotaka Adachi) adapted the script, made of five segments, from
his own short stories. Each is an unpredictable curio, with even the trope of
girls locked into rooms by a murderer taking an unusual angle. One of my
favourite segments is a boy struggling to cope with his seemingly dead parents,
both insisting they lived while the other died in a car crash, both apparently
unable to see the other. Are they both ghosts? Is one still alive? Is a
dimension shift happening? It’s a bit of a shame (in my opinion) that it
explains too much at the end, but the explanation itself is slightly barmy
which saves it.
Wisconsin
Death Trip (1999, James Marsh)
One
of the most hauntingly odd films I’ve seen adapted from an equally strange book
released in the seventies. The book contains photographs and newspaper articles
of sad and strange happenings in Wisconsin during the 1800s, when the endless
snowy months drove its inhabitants to madness and despair.
Hansel
and Gretel (2007, Pil-sung Yim)
In
this version of the classic fairy tale, with strong elements of It’s a Good
Life by Jerome Bixby, the children are the creepy ones. Eun-soo just wants to
visit his sick mother and get home to his pregnant girlfriend but crashes his
car by a forest, where a girl leads him to a magical looking house populated by
three children and their parents – or at least that’s how it seems.
It’s visually wonderful, filled with rainbow cakes, pagan symbols, bright colours and old toys evoking those unsettling Edwardian Christmas cards. The mystery deepens as each of Eun-soo’s escape attempts fail while the children become increasingly threatening and, I said it, annoying. However, in the end, you can’t help but feel sorry for (almost) everyone involved.
Spark
of Being (2010, Bill Morrison)
Bill
Morrison’s films give me the uneasy feeling that I’m watching the videotape in
Ringu, particularly Decasia. This one strings the archival footage that Bill is
known for together to loosely recreate the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The different story segments are announced by chapter headings and we’re often
placed in the “monster’s” POV as he watches the family go about their business
on the farm or endures suspicious stares from city dwellers.
As with the House of Usher it helps if you know the story because it’s completely without dialogue and intertitles. However, it's such a loosey goosey adaptation, that the main intrigue comes from the historical value of the archival footage and the trippy scenes you can zone out to. I think my favourite bit is the petri dishes and bacteria of Frankenstein’s laboratory (patched rhythmically together from educational films) while Dave Douglas’ jazz score goes absolutely nuts, very cool.
Madeleine Swann's collection, The Sharp End of the Rainbow, was published by Heads Dance Press and her novella, The Vine That Ate The Starlet, was released by Filthy Loot.
Her collection, Fortune Box (Eraserhead Press), was nominated for a Wonderland Award. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and podcasts including Splatterpunk Award nominated The New Flesh: A David Cronenberg Tribute.
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