Just about anyone who follows horror has bemoaned the sorry state of the genre these days. Nearly everything is a remake, either of some 1970s or 1980s classic or of some recent Asian hit. The rare films that aren't remakes are simply lazy copies of whatever worked a year earlier, the current "torture porn" subgenre, for example. And hardly anything screens for the press, which means that even the studios now understand how low things have sunk.

The new film The Ruins likewise isn't screening for the press, but it is based -- of all things -- on an actual book! With pages! It's by Scott B. Smith, who many years ago wrote both the book and screenplay for the excellent A Simple Plan. The new movie inspired me to look up other literary-based horror movies (whether inspired by novels or short stories). Sadly, aside from Stephen King and the upcoming Midnight Meat Train (based on Clive Barker's short story), I couldn't find much good recent work, but there is plenty to choose from ...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1947) was an early twentieth century horror writer with a dark and unique vision. In his stories humanity was usually treated at best like a pawn in the cosmic game and a dust speck at worst, with a race of elder gods called The Old Ones threatening to return and possess the earth once again. Try to imagine repo men who are several stories tall with lots of tentacles and working on a cosmic scale. Much of his work was published in Weird Tales and other fiction magazines of the period, but his readership was limited during his relatively short lifetime. Posthumous reprints of Lovecraft's fiction eventually garnered him a larger audience, but his work has been notoriously difficult to capture on film. That hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying, though.

Re-Animator (1985)
When Fangoria magazine first printed a feature article about Re-animator prior to the film's release, they described it as a "moist zombie film." With all the blood and internal organs flying around, to say nothing of that pan full of blood in which Herbert West was keeping Dr. Hill's severed head alive, I find it hard to argue with the accuracy of the statement. This was the first of several Lovecraft adaptations from director Stuart Gordon, and probably his best. Everybody's got a roommate from hell story, but you'd be hard pressed to top Dan Cain's (Bruce Abbott) after he lets Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) move in with him. Both are med students at Miskatonic University, an institution that pops up many times in Lovecraft's work. West has just returned from Austria where he was working on a process of reanimating the dead. West and Miskatonic's Dr. Hill (David Gale) take an immediate dislike to one another, resulting in the good Doctor quite literally losing his head. The scenes of a reanimated Hill toting around his own severed noggin are not always convincing, but they're hard to forget. The film strays pretty far from the source material in both the details and the use of humor (if Lovecraft himself had a sense of humor, I don't recall ever seeing it on display in his fiction), but this remains one of the greatest horror films of all time.

Last December, Matt Bradshaw brought us the tasty sci-fi news that Guillermo del Toro was working on bringing classic writer H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness to the big screen. A month later, I followed suit with a link to Latino Review, who had a script review up for the project. After that, many months passed with no further word. Now, however, an anonymous source told the site that del Toro will jump into the project after Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. The director has been itching to do it for years, but didn't have a studio, and according to their source, he's found it with Universal in a deal made two weeks ago. If this source is correct, that means that del Toro is bouncing 3993, which was slated to be his next project.

For those not up in the world of Lovecraft, Madness is a novella about an Antarctic expedition made by scholars from Miskatonic University. They discover strange, ancient life forms that are unknown to their science. They are further puzzled by how highly evolved the forms are, although they seem to pre-date humanity. Named "Elder Things," they're actually aliens and you know, alien stories rarely, if ever, go well. This could potentially get made before the strike date, since the script is already written, but I imagine this will be a project that gears up once the strike dust has settled.

Getting an entire feature-length film out of a short story always seemed odd to me. Adapting a piece of fiction by H.P. Lovecraft is even more of a trick since much of his work doesn't translate to film (see my review of The Call of Cthulhu for a notable exception). Director Ulli Lommel sidesteps both issues by completely ignoring the Lovecraft story on which The Tomb (released on DVD this past week by Lionsgate) is allegedly based. Names of some of Lovecraft's characters from other stories like Charles Dexter Ward and David Pickman are kicked around, and there's mention of a "witch house" which also refers to Lovecraft's work, but it feels like an afterthought. Lovecraft's "The Tomb" concerned a man's morbid fascination with a crypt he finds as he wanders through the woods, while Lommel goes in another direction entirely, delivering a pretty blatant knock off of the Saw movies, right down to the creepy doll puppet.

Tara Griffin (Victoria Ullman) and Billy Trafford (Christian Behm) both awaken in what appears to be a warehouse basement. They don't know one another, but they've both been beaten bloody and each has a tag tied to their toe with a date written on it. A sinister and electronically filtered voice announces over a P.A. system that one of them will survive if they follow the rules of the game set out for them, or at least that's what I think he says. Poor audio is one of this film's many negative features, and the mysterious villain's distorted voice is hard to understand, as are other characters in the many scenes where Lommel is so enthralled with the musical score that he lets it play louder than the dialogue. One thing the mystery villain does say repeatedly is "eight nails, who fails," which refers to the nails driven into the many coffin lids we see in the movie and that only one person will get out alive. Someone obviously thought this line was a lot more clever than it actually is as it is repeated ad nauseum.