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Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

With Disney’s new 3-D computer-animated A CHRISTMAS CAROL leading the weekend box office, and with the holiday season rapidly approaching, now seems like a good time to take a look back on the previous screen incarnations of Ebeneze Scrooge. Rubber-faced comic star Jimy Carrey is far from the first actor to embody the cold-hearted old sinner conceived and created by author Charles Dickens in his 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol (sometimes known by the longer title A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas). Dozens of actors (and at least a few actresses, including Susan Lucci in the 1995 TV movie EBBIE) have played variations of the role on stage, screen, and radio. Everybody from Alistair Sim to Albert Finney, from George C. Scott to Patrick Stewart, has taken a turn as old Ebenezer, and such is the strength of the source material that almost all of them are interesting in their own way.

But what of that original material? Thanks to Hollywood, novels, stories, and fiction in general have come to seem almost like nothing more than fodder for adaptations; in fact, a book almost isn’t a success in its own right — it’s merely a rough draft for the filmic treatment, and if Hollywood doesn’t think it’s worth filming, then — hey, it must not have been worth reading in the first place. And sometimes it’s not worth reading even if there is a film version. There have been more than a few cases where the film has almost completely supplanted the novel in the public consciousness, and this is certainly true in the realms of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. A brief list might include Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, Psycho, and even The Exorcist. Let’s face it: a big part of the reason that Stephen King is so well known (besides the fact that he’s a bestseller) is that so many movies have been made from his books that you don’t have to read at all to hear and know his name.

All of which returns us to our point about A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens original literary version of the story is a genuine classic in its own right that deserves to be read. In fact, instead of running out to see the new Jim Carrey film, it would probably be a better investment of your time and money if you were to pick up a copy of the novel at your local library or bookstore, then read it, at least to yourself and preferably aloud to those you love, be it family, friends, spouses, or lovers. The novelette runs only five chapters (or “staves,” as they are called), so it is hardly an overwhelming investment of time; the returns will be greater than you can imagine.

Of course, being so short, it’s not as if the Dickens tale is filled with plot details that had to be excised for the movie and television adaptations. You’re not going to find all sorts of sophisticated ideas that had to be toned down to make a mass-appeal movie. The truth, of course, is that Dickens was writing a popular tale, so it’s not as if the filmmakers had to move it any further in that direction.

No, what you will derive from reading this story is the richness of the language, the magic of a prose style perfectly calculated to tell the tale at hand. The brief excerpt at the top of this page should give you some clue as the amusement that awaits you: the overemphatic stress on a point that could have been made in a single sentence, the attempt to convince the reader as if overcoming some sort of resistance to the idea being stated — this points to a joy at the use of words as tools of entertainment. By the time Dickens moves into the second paragraph of the story, featuring his doubts regarding what is particularly dead about a doornail (as opposed to a coffin nail), you will know beyond any doubt on your part that you are indeed in for a fine evening’s entertainment. (Oh, did I say this story is best read around an open fire in the quiet hours of the evening? Well, there now.)

Your tongue will occasionally stumble across a Victorian colloquialism, but you should be able to figure out the gist from the context. (I myself am still not sure what “good upon ‘Change” means, except that it seems to imply Scrooge’s name was the equivalent of legal tender [i.e., money]; therefore, it had some intrinsic value or validity for whatever it was applied to.) Whatever the stumbling blocks, they won’t be enough to impede you from enjoying a rich piece of fiction that will delight you, no matter how many times you’ve seen the story acted out.

Depending on which adaptation is most familiar, you will encounter a few surprises. For example:

• In the various flashbacks depicting Scrooge’s younger self, Dickens does not chart his rise as a successful businessman – a fact given closer scrutiny in the 1951 film starring Alistair Sim.
• The Ghost of Christmas Past, often portrayed by a woman on film, is described as a “strange figure – like a child; yet not so like a child as like an old man viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the apperance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions.”
• Perhaps most interesting, despite the numerous dramatic depictions of Scrooge as a gray-haired old man, Dickens never specifies his age, beyond calling him a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” – which seems to be intended as more metaphorical than literal. From the details given in the story (Scrooge has a young nephew, married but without children), we would infer that Ebenezer is middle-aged.

It is also worth noting that, for an author not associated with the horror genre, Dickens well knew how to manipulate his literary elements to produce a shuddery effect. A Christmas Carol may be best remembered for its sweetness of spirit, embodied in The Ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present, but Marley’s apparation – bound in chains, jaw dropping open when he unties the handerchief holding it in place – is an effectively ghoulish one. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come - shrouded in a black robe, face unseen beneath a hood, voiceless - eerily evokes the figure of Death (imagery put to good grim use in film versions, even the comic spoofs). With these sublimely spooky moments – along with a ghostly carraige and the bizarre moment when Marley’s face replaces the knocker on Scrooge’s door – the novelette easily lives up to its subtitle A Ghost Story of Christmas

Dickens’ ultimate triumph is that he sells Scrooge’s transformation. As greedy and avaricious as the character is, somehow the seeds of redemption have been planted, so that we believe whole-heartedly his change of heart at the conclusion. Confronted by the ghostly visitations on Christmas Eve, anyone might proclaim themselves a changed man; Dickens convinces us that Scrooge will follow through in the days and years to come. And not merely out of self-interest (he wants to avoid the lonely death shown him by the Ghost of Christmas Future) but out of a new – or, more precisely, renewed – connection with humanity.

I won’t belabor my point any further, except to say that I try to revist this enchanting story every Christmas season. This is not meant to dissuade you from watching the many wonderful film and television adaptations; rather it is a suggestion that you visit the wonderful source material. Instead of watching a particular version of A Christmas Carol for the umpteenth time, why not take those two hours and read it? You will be glad you did.

And then, after emmersing yourself in Dickens’ fanciful world of Yuletide spirits and ghostly visitations, you may find yourself with a whole new appreciation of the adaptations that followed.

[NOTE: This article is the first in a series. Subsequent installments will examine some of the more notable film and television adaptations of Dickens' story.]

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2. A Christmas Carol (1938)
3. A Christmas Carol (2009)

Published in 1912, Doyle’s The Lost World arrived too late to accurately be labeled “Victorian,” but it has much in common with the Victorian-era science fiction literature of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, not to mention the adventure stories of H. Rider Hagard. As with Verne, the story is a sort of travelogue adventure to a mysterious land (in this case a plateau in South America, cut off from the forces of evolution that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs throughout the rest of the world). As with Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle uses the story to raise the issue of human evolution (at one point, the physical appearance of the books’ protagonist is pointedly compared to that of the leader of a tribe of ape-men, implying that the gulf separating modern man from his primitive ancestors is not so great after all). As for Haggard, he has pioneered the “lost civilization” adventure story with King Solomon’s Mines in 1885, but but Doyle went him one better by populating his lost world with dinosaurs. (To be fair, Verne had previously used the idea of prehistoric animals surviving into modern times in Journey to the Center of the Earth).

The great thing about The Lost Word - besides dinosaurs, of course – is that the adventure story is told with wit and humor. Arthur Conan Doyle improves over the work of both Verne and Wells, whose vivid imaginations concocted some amazing adventures but sometimes fell flat in terms of style and/or characterization. Doyle, on the other hand, was the creator of Sherlock Holmes: he knew the value of eccentric, acerbic characters; and in the person of the book’s protagonist, Professor Challenger, the author almost outdoes the intellectual arrogance of the more famous detective, creating a personality at once temperamental, admirable, and even humorous. Equally clever is the handling of the book’s narrator, Edward Malone, an Irish journalist who is understandably terrified of each new danger that presents itself – but who refuses to reveal his fear to his English compatriots, forcing himself to swallow his fear and face each new threat with a brave face that belies his inner turmoil.

In fact, the characterizations and dialogue of the first few chapters are so delightful that a reader is immediately hooked, long before the expedition has set sail for the Amazon – a rare example when the opening expository section of a story is as entertaining as the exciting adventure that follows. An early highlight is Malone’s attempt to finagle an interview with the reclusive, abusive Challenger, whose wife warns the reporter about the dire consequences of rousing her husband’s temper (”Get quickly out of the room if he seems inclined to be violent… If you find him dangerous – really dangerous – ring the bell and hold him off until I come”). The scene turns into a hilarious brawl with Challenger and Malone rolling out the door and into the street, where a policeman offers to arrest the professor until Malone admits he was at fault, his honesty having the side effect of earning Challenger’s respect

Once on route, the story of The Lost World does somewhat bog down in a familiar pattern of Jules Verne-like descriptions of every inch of territory charted on the way to finding the dinosaurs that are the book’s real selling point. There is also an inexplicable plot twist, with Challenger first sending the expedition off without him, then suddenly showing up to take over after Malone and company have reached South America. Why the subterfuge was necessary, is never explained.

Fortunately, once the plateau has been reached, the adventure is fast-paced and exciting, with plenty of action and adventure at every turn, involving both dinosaurs and a tribe of primitive men (who are condescendingly described as being relatively high up the evolutionary ladder – though obviously not nearly so high as the British explorers). The presentation of the prehistoric reptiles is certainly eccentric enough to be memorable: one two-legged predator is described as hopping like a kangaroo, which might not be scientifically accurate but which at least suggests a dynamic active form of life in keeping with our modern conception of dinosaurs (as opposed to the lethargic beasts often depicted in scientific theory of the past).

The Lost Worldis dated and flawed in some ways but remains entertaining as a sort of boy’s adventure story that can be enjoyed by adults, too. Malone’s motivation for joining the dangerous expedition is to impress a woman, but by the time he gets back she has left him for someone else. Instead of a heart-breaking moment, this is portrayed as a revelation of the fickle nature of women, prompting Malone to realize that the truly lasting and important bonds are between men who risk their lives side by side. It’s the perfect ending for a pre-adolescent boy too young to have developed an interest in girls yet.

A split screen effect combines live human actors with stop-motion dinosaurs in ths publicity still.

The first screen adaptation of Doyle’s novel is the 1925 silent film THE LOST WORLD, which is historically important as the first feature-length dinosaur movie. Although primitive by today’s standards, THE LOST WORLD is still entertaining as a showcase for Willis O’Brien’s old-fashioned stop-motion effects, and its story became the blue print for countless “lost world” films that would follow, including KING KONG (1933), which also featured O’Brien’s movie magic. The dinosaur action was greatly expanded for the film adaptation, with effects supervisor O’Brien filming scenes not in the novel or the screenplay. In effect the dinosaurs became the stars of the show, with the humans taking a back seat. This is especially true of the truncated version, the only one available for many decades, which deleted many of plot and character scenes that had originally been retained from the novel; restorations for laserdisc and DVD eventually revealed that the full-length film was reasonably faithful to its source, giving star Wallace Beery’s Professor Challenger at least a glimmer of the novel’s characterization.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s story had ended with Challenger bringing back a live specimen, a pterodactyl that escapes and flies home to its faraway land. One of the screenplay’s innovations was expanding this brief vignette into a third-act climax, replacing the relatively small flying reptile with an angry brontosaurs that breaks loose and runs amok in London. This sequence established what would become a cinematic tradition of unleashing  prehistoric monsters on modern cities; the plot device has been recycled in everything from the various versions of KING KONG to Steven Spielberg’s film THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK. The JURASSIC PARK sequel was based on Michael Crichton’s novel The Lost World, which borrows not only its title but also an early scene from Doyle, in which a scientific lecture is interrupted by a renegade scientist who believes that dinosaurs have survived into the present day. One element that Crichton’s novel lacked was a T-Rex brought back to civilization; the addition of this sequence for the film underlines the lasting influence of the 1925 silent film.

Irwin Allen's version of Doyle's novel used lizards as dinosaurs.

Besides the homages and spin-offs, there have been several subsequent official adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The First of these wasthe disappointing 1960 Irwin Allen production, which not only substituted Claude Rains for Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger but also, unfortunately, substituted made-up lizards for stop-motion dinosaurs. Michael Rennie (Klatuu in the 1951 DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL) is also on hand, and Jill St. John provides sex appeal, but not even the presence of Willis O’Brien on the effects team can compensate for the disappointment of the dinosaurs. (Ever the economical producer, producer Allen recycled this footage for the “Island of the Dinosaurs” episode of his television series, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.)

In 1992, disreputable producer Harry Allen Towers fashioned a surprisingly good version with John Rhys-Davies (LORD OF THE RINGS) as Professor Challenger. Despite phony-looking rubber-mechanical dinosaurs, the script and Rhys-Davies’ performance capture much of Challenger’s humor and temperament, which is often lost in other adaptations. David Warner (TIME AFTER TIME) is on hand in the thankless role of Challenger’s scientific colleague, but he brings his usual professionalism to the performance. The film and its follow up RETURN TO THE LOST WORLD received theatrical distribution in Europe but were sold as a two-part mini-series for American television and video. With a bigger budget for some really good special effects, this could have been a great movie.

After author Michael Crichton used the title The Lost World for his 1995 sequel to Jurassic Park, leading to the Steven Spielberg film two years later, it was perhaps inevitable that eager filmmakers would go back to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original book, which would allow them to fashion productions with the same title as a multi-million dollar summer blockbuster with no fear of legal action; after all, the novel they were adapting had prior claim to the title. Thus, we saw Patrick Bergin as a serious Professor Challenger in a competent but unremarkable version, directed by makeup effects man Bob Keen, which made its debut on U.S. television in 1998.

Cast of the LOST WORLD TV series, which ran for three years

Shortly thereafter came the 1999 TV pilot, with the once-promising Richard Franklin (PSYCHO II) directing a no-name cast in a version of the tale that followed much of Doyle’s plot, with one notable change: instead of returning the characters to London as in the novel, the pilot ends with the expedition forced to remain in the lost world for the remainder of the series.  As with the 1925 film, the television pilot upped the ante with the dinosaur footage; the script also added some romantic entanglements between the explorers and the natives (who are much more attractive than Doyle’s primitives), presumably so that the modern characters would not feel too badly about being trapped in the lost world for the three seasons that the series ran, until its demise in 2002. John Landis, one of the show’s executive producers, had previously hoped to mount a feature film version of THE LOST WORLD at Universal Pictures, with Richard Matheson scripting a faithful adaptation of Doyle’s novel, starring Sean Connery as Challenger, but Universal abandoned the project in favor of Spielberg’s JURASSIC PARK (1993).

Bob Hoskins stars as Professor Challenger in this BBC TV adaptation.

More recently, the BBC presented a fairly faithful adaptation of THE LOST WORLD in 2001, which reached U.S. shores courtesy of A&E cable. In this version, Bob Hoskins takes over as Challenger, and JURASSIC PARK-style computer effects supply the dinosaurs. The premise behind this production seems to have been to do justice to Doyle, but the screenplay still tweaks many of the details, apparently in an attempt to render the production as a serious piece of science fiction, not merely a rousing adventure story. Hoskins is good (playing the professor as driven man whose personal life has been eclipsed by his work), and the film is decently entertaining, but it does overlook one excellent opportunity: Doyle’s book is dated by its Victorian view of dinosaurs (recollect that allosaurus-type predator chasing human prey by hopping like a kangaroo).

Today’s scientific view of dinosaurs is completely different, so it would have been interesting to portray Challenger and his colleagues starting off their old-fashioned paleontological theories and then radically revising after observing the living animals first-hand. Unfortunately, the script’s one nod in this direction is backwards: dialogue has the Victorian scientists expecting to see an Iguanodon walk upright; when they encounter one, it is on all fours. The truth is the complete reverse: scientists from Challenger’s era would have expected to see an Iguanodon on all fours, but later research revised the image of the creature as bi-pedal.

Of course, Conan Doyle will always be remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes – a fact that would not have pleased him. If he is looking down on us from somewhere in literary heaven, he is probably grateful to see that at least one other of his literary efforts continues to inspire and influence filmmakers today. No doubt modern day dinosaur films will continue to flourish, thanks to the ever-improving innovations in the special effects field, but Doyle’s original novel really is a literary work worth reading for its own fine qualities, and as far as professor-scientist-explorer characters go, Professor Challenger stands head-and-shoulders above his competitors in the field.

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It is hard to say exactly what Stoker was thinking when he conceived the story, which is loaded with superfluous characters who disappear and reappear, and with mis-matched plot threads that never tie together. What comes through the text loud and clear, however, is a fear of female sexuality that borders on loathsome disgust and renders the material absolutely fascinating – the book seems tailor made for psycho-analysis, but you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to get a pretty healthy whiff of what lies beneath the surface.

The story follows the non-descript Adam Salton, an orphaned Englishman living in Australia, who is called back to the ancestral estate by his childless Uncle Richard. Salton’s return coincides with another expatriate Englishman returning home, the villainous Edgar Caswall, who does just about everything but twirl his mustache. In the first sign that Stoker has not thought through his plot very carefully, the reader distinctly suspects that Uncle Richard has called Adam home at least partly because he anticipates needing an ally against Caswall, but nothing every comes of this; the near simultaneous return of the two expatriates is just a coincidence.

Caswall is accompanied by a sinister servant, an African named Oolanga, and he is soon being courted by the widowed Lady Arabella Marsh, who hopes a rich husband will help her hold onto her late husband’s expensive property. Lady Arabella turns out to be something much worse than a mere gold-digger; she is actually an ancient, antediluvian monster, a sort of giant snake or worm (the etymology of the word “worm” has its roots in a term meaning “dragon”). In human form she is sinuous and seductive, her charms described in snake-like terms that induce more laughter than fear: her flexible hands wave gentle to and fro; the sibilation of her voice suggests a hissing serpent.

Since she is clearly the “White Worm” of the title, you would think Stoker would focus on her, but Stoker refuses to give up on Caswall as the lead villain. Whole chapters are devoted to Caswall’s attempts to open an old chest that his late ancestor brought from France, where it used to belong to Dr. Mesmer (he of mesmerism). Caswall seeks to use mesmeric influence upon Lilla, a young local lady. Why is never explained; we simply assume he is trying to seduce her – which makes it all the more strange when, after his first effort is thwarted by Lilla’s companion Mimi, Lady Arabella offers to help Caswall in his next endeavor (presumably to earn his good favor?). The book descends into complete incredulity when the two young ladies allow Caswall back into the house even though they more or less know what he is up to – a foolish move that results in the Lilla’s death, presumably from exhausting her willpower in the confrontation with Caswall and Arabella.

Fortunatly for the reader, Caswall’s failed effort drives him around the bend and he more or less retreats to the turret of his castle, from which he flies a huge kite, night and day, over the surrounding territory; shaped like a hawk, it scares the local fauna away. (One suspects some kind of metaphor is intended, but what?)

With Caswall out of the way, Lady Arabella moves more toward center stage. In the meantime, Adam’s uncle (who has no other plot function that to get Adam back to England) has moved off stage after introducing his nephew to Sir Nathaniel, the book’s equivalent of Van Helsing, who explains to the young man everything he needs to know to defeat the giant snake. You don’t have to be a trained story analyst to wonder why Stoker did not simply combine Richard and Nathaniel into a single character.

Somewhere along the way, Oolanga mistakenly believes he has information that will enable him to blackmail Lady Arabella into marrying him. Although Arabella is a villain, Oolanga’s proposal is not portrayed as two like-minded schemers joining forces; instead, it is viewed through the prism of class consciousness, in which the upstart negro (well, the book uses the word nigger), is roundly mocked for having aspirations above his station. Stoker even titles the chapter “Oolanga’s Hallucinations,” emphasizing how out of touch with reality his love for Arabella is, and he drives the point home in this passage:

Lady Arabella was not usually a humorous person, but no man or woman of the white race could have checked the laughter which rose spontaneously to her lips. The circumstances were too grotesque, the contrast too violent, for subdued mirth. The man a debased specimen of one of the most primitive races of the earth, and of an ugliness which was simply devilish; the woman of high degree, beautiful, accomplished.

Lady Arabella rebuffs Oolanga, and when he refuses to give up, she drags him to his death in a deep well, the open mouth of which is hidden in the basement of her property. Adam witnesses this event – in fact, he also sees her tear his pet mongoose in half (the second such creature she kills in the story) – and he is properly horrified, yet somehow he manages to maintain cordial public relations with Lady Arabella for the rest of the novel, a development that takes British stiff-upper-lip resolve to ridiculous extremes, with the two characters in some kind of complicit cone of silence regarding the matter. Needless to say, it never occurs to anyone to alert the authorities about Oolanga; after all, who cares about a missing…ahem, negro?

In another inexplicable turn of events, Lady Arabella decides to sell her property to Adam. We suspect she is setting him up for some trap, which never materializes. In an apparently unintended bit of sexual innuendo, she even asks Adam to plum the depths of her well-hole, and he seems happy to comply (an exchange of dialogue that Leonard Wolf found particularly ridiculous). The sale turns out to be merely a lazy plot device to give Adam access to the well so that he can load it with dynamite. (He and Sir Nathaniel have decided that the well is the path Lady Arabella uses to come and go when she is in her giant snake form.)

As if this were not enough, Lady Arabella gets fed up with Caswall’s kite-flying activities, which involve experiments in electricity inspired by Ben Franklyn, so she decides unravel the spool of wire leading to the kite and lay it out in a trail leading back to her old house. Her theory is that Caswall’s obsession with the kite will eventually lead him to follow the wire to her, but as luck would have it, the kite is conveniently struck by lightening, and the electricity follows the wire down to Lady Arabella’s hole, where it ignites the dynamite.

In a scene that predates the ridiculously overblown explosive climaxes of bad action movies by several decades, the ensuing destruction goes on for over two pages, loaded with emphatically gory details:

The whole place looked as if a sea of blood had been beating against it. Each of the explosions from below had thrown out from the well-hole, as if it had been the mouth of a cannon, a mass of fine sand mixed with blood, and a horrible repulsive slime in which were great red masses of rent and torn flesh and fat.

These and more unappetizing details suggest that this is the only passage in the entire text over which Stoker labored with any diligence. The rest of the prose reeks of haste, with description and dialogue that reads as if dictated on the fly – speed-writing, rather than speed-reading – with little concern for establishing atmosphere or developing characters. In fact, the writing is so unadorned that Lair almost reads like first draft that was meant to be further elaborated. The comic-book-like simplicity suggests one of those old “Big-Little Books,” written for kids, which contained an illustration on every page to provide vivid details missing from the text.

What gives the climax its kick is the underlying symbolism permeating the book. Lady Arabella’s well-hole, which emits a noxious stench, is the Sarlac Pit long before there was STAR WARS, EPISODE VI; RETURN OF THE JEDI – a blatantly obvious substitute for female genitalia. For Stoker, Lady Arabella’s “hole” reminds us that she is a nightmare embodiment of female sexuality – an aggressive seductress who appears beautiful but is revealed as an inhuman monster. In Dracula, Stoker had played a similar game with the vampire’s brides in an early chapter set in the Count’s castle, and he made a big deal out of portraying the transformation of an innocent English maiden into a lascivious vampire who is dispatched when her fiance drives a phallic stake through her body on what would have been their wedding night, but Lair of the White Worm takes things a giant step forward, turning the fatal woman into a Godzilla-sized entity whose loathsome nature easily outweighs any seductive appeal, and the final destruction of her lair reads like a grotesque orgasm.

Like H. Rider Haggard’s She, Stoker’s Lair provides a vivid insight into the Victorian male mind’s conception of powerful women. The difference is that Haggard’s adventure tale mixes fear and fascination in regard to Ayesha, “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.” Much more simplistic, Stoker simply piles on the disgusting details meant to convince us that Lady Arabella deserves to be blown into a million pieces of slimy worm-flesh.

Just in case you miss the symbolism, the ending reminds us that Adam has secretly married Mimi somewhere along the way, but his monster-fighting activities have prevented him from enjoying a honeymoon. Now that Lady Arabella has been reduced to harmless worm-mush, Adam’s uncle reappears and reminds the newlyweds that they are overdue. With the evil female defeated, her dark, dank hole plugged, nothing stands in the way of Alan’s consummating his relationship with his safe, “normal” bride.

THE MOVIE

When filmmaker Ken Russell saw his attempt to remake DRACULA come to nothing, he turned to Lair of the White Wormas an alternative but found the text markedly inferior. Rather wisely, Russell decided to present the film as a hoot; equally wisely, he removed Caswell and his kite, along with Oolanga, putting the focus on Lady Arabella (embodied by the wonderful Amanda Donohoe, whose forked-tongue-in-cheek performance rivals Vincent Price at his campiest).

Russell’s sly joke is that, although he set the story in contemporary times, he retained the essentially ridiculously Victorian attitudes, contrasting the innocent English maidens with the seductive Roman snake-goddess. Russell pushes a theme that Stoker suggested but never developed, that the lair of the white worm is nestled in territory once occupied by Roman invaders. Russell imagines Lady Arabella less as a prehistoric beast and more as a pagan priestess, offering sacrifices to her god. (Although in this case Lady Arabella and the giant worm are two separate entities, she retains her snake-like characteristics, including viper-like fangs and spitting poison). The location where the skull of an ancient worm is uncovered was once a Roman place of worship, but the territory has changed hands over the centuries, at one point being a monastary (providing a chance for Russell to depict Roman warriors raping nuns).

The Christian-versus-Pagan subtext sets up a nice vibe in the film, but Russell does not take it seriously, playing his symbolism for laughs. In a scene that seems deliberately lifted from CITY OF THE DEAD (a.k.a. HORROR HOTEL), Lady Arabella’s melodramatic invocation of the snake god, while she prepares to sacrifice a young virgin, is interrupted by the door bell, prompting her to exclaim, “Oh shit!” Later, a dream sequence shows one of the two male leads raising his pen into an erect position when Lady Arabella walks by – do I really need to explain that one?

Russell also undermines the genre conventions and plot expectations, to hilarious effect. When the “heroic” male lead (played by a very young Hugh Grant) confronts and kills a snake woman by slicing her in half with a sword, his momentum swings him around into a nearby drum set, where he goes crashing down amidst the clanging cymbals, looking like a complete idiot.

Lacking the budget to visualize Stoker’s multiple-explosion finale, Russell has to rely on a single blast, but he keeps the sexual symbolism forefront: the man who finishes off the worm reaches under his kilt to retrieve a grenade as if he were removing a giant testicle and dropping it down the feminine “hole,” where the resulting explosion (orgasm?) finishes off the icky female monster.

The film version of LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM has divided critical opinion (it ranks at 54% at Rotten Tomatoes). Those looking for a good horror film are inevitably disappointed – as indeed was I for the first half of my first screening. Once I realized I was watching a comedy, I laughed the rest of the way through and went back to see it again from the beginning so that I could enjoy the humor there, as well.

One can hardly blame audiences for missing the joke. It helps to be familiar with the original text – at least by reputation. Standing on its own, Russell’s LAIR is a typically delirious work from a director who specialized in excess. One might appreciate it as a generic genre paraody, but the full effect comes through when you see the 20th century filmmaker deliberately undermining the 19th century author. In the case of Stoker’s Dracula, we can lament that no film has ever truly been faithful to the novel; in the case of Lair of the White Worm, we should be thankful that Russell gave the tex the thorough de-construction job that it deserved.

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Hollywood’s continued preoccupation with Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earthis a bit of a puzzle. Yes, the book provides a certain potential for visual razzle-dazzle, and any excuse to travel to a lost world inhabited by dinosaurs is a good one, yet outside of the basic premise, the novel has little to offer in the way of plot or characterization. The story is almost as much a travelogue as an adventure, and a modern reader may frequently find himself wondering whether the many strange sights encountered on the journey are really enough to justify plowing through until the end. It is not a bad book exactly, but it lacks the charm and humor that make Conan Doyle’s The Lost World not only readable but fun all these decades later.

Having written his novels in the 19th century, Jules Verne is often called the “grandfather of science fiction” (or other similar terms), but some of his defenders prefer to call his work “scientific fiction” because of the author’s exhaustive research and dedication for writing books that stayed within the bounds of scientific probability. In his own time, Verne’s novels were called “Extraordinary Voyages” (a term coined by the author’s publisher), and he specialized in writing just what those two words seems to convey: descriptions of unusual and exotic journeys to distant lands, filled with descriptions of landscapes and wildlife, but not necessarily with much drama.

Part of the problem is no doubt due to poor English translation from the original French, and over the course of the past decade or so, there has been a movement to rehabilitate Verne’s reputation with English-speaking readers through new, more accurate and complete translations. Verne clearly represents the first full flowering of the “hard science” strain of science fiction, and he had an uncanny knack for imagining events that have since come to pass. Unfortuantely, his work, including Journey, can be slow going for today’s readers, who may be inclined to regard the inevitable changes made by Hollywood, when adapting his work, as improvements.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is indicative of many of Verne’s strengths and weakness. The author imagines a journey that truly is “extraordinary,” and he lays it out in vivid detail for the reader, replete with numerous memorable episodes featuring close calls, near escapes, brushes with death, not to mention encounters with various primeval and extinct animals that have managed to survive in subterranean caverns beneath the Earth’s surface. However, there is precious little story and almost no drama. The entire book simply follows Professor Lidenbrock as he and his nephew Alex and their local guide descend into the crater of an extinct volcano and follow various tunnels until they reach their destination. Character interaction is limited to the most basic sort. Alex, who narrates, is our eyes and ears, a sort of ordinary person who quite reasonably wants to turn back at the sight of each new threatening danger, while his uncle the scientist is eager to continue no matter what the peril, and the stalwart guide simply follows the orders of his “master” without question. Adding to the simplicity, Alex doesn’t speak the guide’s language, so the opportunities for dialogue exchanges and character interaction are mostly limited to him and his uncle. It is symptomatic of the lack of plot that many of the encounters with prehistoric monsters turn out to be dreams or hallucinations brought on by fatigue, and it doesn’t really matter much one way or the other; whether “real” or “imagined,” the incidents imply occur and then the story continues more or less as if nothing had happened.

Not surprisingly, when 20th Century Fox filmed the tale in 1959 with James Mason and Pat Boone, they added some antagonists and a love interest (in the novel, Alex often thinks back on the fiancé he left behind; in the movie, she actually goes on the trip). This helps give some small sense of excitement to the story (it’s a race to see who will reach the destination first), but to a large extent the film recreates the strengths and weaknesses of the source material. Its biggest advantage is the combination of color photography, underground location shooting, and special effects, which make the adventure quite a treat for the eye (and the ear, too, thanks to the stereo sound). It also helps to have Mason and Thayer David on board as Lidenbrock and his rival Count Saknussem, but the presence of Boone (yes, he sings) is rather distracting—not that he’s bad in the role of Alec, but it is hard to forget that this is, after all, the one-time pop singer who turned into a shill for the milk industry and a conservative anti-porn crusader.

Still, whatever the weaknesses of the 1959 version (which is considered a classic by many, despite its measured pace), it stands far and away above the 1989 remake, a film so bad that it went unreleased upon its completion in 1988. This version of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH was all about some kids on vacation in Hawaii who stumble into a volcanic cave that leads them toward the Earth’s core, but the behind the scenes story turned out to be far more interesting. When the film’s production company (the now-defunct Canon pictures) saw the results turned in by first-time director Rusty Lemorande, they called in another director, Albert Pyun, to save the project. In exchange for this service, Pyun talked the company into bankrolling his own underground adventure, Alien From L.A., starring swimsuit model Kathy Ireland. During the reshooting of Journey, Pyun added a cameo from Ireland, turning the film into a sequel to Alien From L.A. Both films wound up going almost entirely unseen, although Alien did find its way onto Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Since then there have been a few made-for-television adaptations, in 1993, 1996, and one in 1999 starring Treat Williams, but none of those  garnered much attention; there is also an obscure 1976 Philppino version. The latest adaptation, filmed in 3D, and with Brendan Fraser in the lead, alters the story so much that the screenplay was adapted into a merchandising tie-in novelization. This is an unfortunate tradition that extends at least back to the 1950 film adaptation of KING SOLOMON’S MINES, and includes BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992), both of which yielded novelizations that differed significantly from the source material. In the case of JOURNEY, however, one can hardly blame Hollywood for trying to goose the tale up a little bit.

Verne was a prolific writer, with dozens of titles to his credit. Those with the most interest for today’s science fiction fans are the ones that have served as source material for various movie adaptations that keep the titles in the public awareness. Besides Journey, there are 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and Mysterious Island (1874). Of lesser interest are From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon (which were adapted into a competent but mostly forgotten 1958 film under the title From the Earth to the Moon) and Robur the Conqueror (1886) and its 1904 follow-up Master of the World (which were jointly adapted, under the later title, into a fairly well written but not very well produced Vincent Price movie in 1961).

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Gordon told Fangoria that he hopes to begin filming in the fall. “It follows the short story pretty closely, and what’s great about it is that, as far as I know, it’s the only Lovecraft tale that has a strong female character. Normally we have to invent one, but for the first time, we didn’t have to do that. We’re also working with Amicus again, because we had so much fun the first time around.”

Lovecraft’s story (which, running 27 pages and divided into seven chapters, might best be termed a novelette) takes the form of a first-person confession by a narrator named Dan Upton, who has just killed his best friend Edward Pickman Derby by putting six bullets in his brain. Dan’s justification is that he did not kill Edward but an evil intelligence that had possessed Edward’s body. Edward had been married to Asenath, who apparently had the power to transfer her consciousness from one body to another (the twist is that Asenath is not really Asenath; her body has previously been snatched by her evil father Ephraim, the story’s true culprit).

First published in 1937, “The Thing on the Doorstep” is one of Lovecraft’s stronger tales, written while at the height of his creative powers, during his mature period when he was crafting what came to be known, after his death, as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” The story is set in Arkham, a fictional town created by Lovecraft, inspired by Salem, which appears in many of his other stories. The character names are also familiar, implying that Upton and Derby belong to families with long histories in the town. (For instance, the decadent painter in “Pickman’s Model” is named Richard Upton Pickman.)

The narrative conforms to Lovecraft’s usual structure, depicting a character who has seen a glimpse of dark and dangerous things that lurk just beyond normal human awareness, hiding in shadows or other worldly dimensions and eager to intrude upon our space and time. Typically, it is told in the first-person, so that, technically, one could read it simply as the ravings of a deranged mind and conclude that nothing supernatural had occurred at all. The first-person narrative also allows a certain leeway for Lovecraft to indulge his penchant for over-written prose – which can be charitably read not as stylistic excess on the author’s part but as evidence of the narrator’s disturbed state of mind. To be fair, Lovecraft is relatively restrained this time out. He doesn’t play at stringing together as many multi-syllabic adjectives as his thesaurus will reveal; instead, his references to “unknown and malign cosmic forces” are used as a dramatic flourish to top off paragraphs.

Of course, these flourishes are what make Lovecraft Lovecraft. They are the literally equivalent of Bela Lugosi’s melodramatic line readings – which is to say, they are hammy and over-done, but also extremely entertaining. Also, they help set Lovecraft apart from other horror fiction. A life-long fan of the genre (and of Poe in particular), Lovecraft spent much of his career arranging his own version of familiar tropes. This took the form of recasting traditional horror themes in the guise of science fiction. “Thing on the Doorstep,” like many Lovecraft stories, is filled with references to Sabbat, black magic, and evil cults, but underneath it all is the suggestion that what we experiencing is not supernatural at all but some “elusive cosmic horror.”

Writing at a time when Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had recently changed our conception of the cosmos, Lovecraft sought to portray an indifferent universe filled with forces beyond human understanding, forces that could warp the space-time continuum with results that appeared like magic to hapless humans – a point developed more fully in “Dreams in the Witch-House.” In “Thing on the Doorstep,” this element is limited to a few hints, mostly vague references to previous Lovecraft tales featuring Elder Gods that are ultimately revealed to be aliens and/or inter-dimensional beings.

“Thing on the Doorstep” is mostly a good horror yarn – well-structured and atmospheric, with a good and gruesome pay-off at the end. Although characterization was not Lovecraft’s strong suit (he considered human personality to be trivial when viewed on a cosmic scale), he does a serviceable job with both Derby and Upton (you feel sorry for their predicament), and even Asenath (mostly off-screen) manages to convey a suitably weird sense of menace.

Also, “Thing on the Doorstep” is one of the few Lovecraft stories that might be described as “character-driven.” Like a tragic character, Derby falls prey to Asenath because of his own weakness, which he is unable to overcome. Most Lovecraft stories tend to feature characters who stumble upon evil forces by chance or out of intellectual curiosity; Derby is one who more or less brings it upon himself.

The story’s science fiction element is minimal – more something interpreted in light of his other stories than existing within this specific text – but the sense that the tale is part of a mythology is what sets is apart from fiction by other writers. It is this distinction that makes Lovecraft’s work uniquely memorable – and unfortunately, it is this distinction that is too often mitigated in translation to film. Remove it, and you tend to be left with a fairly conventional horror tale (a weak-willed person possessed by an evil spirit). Hopefully, Stuart Gordon’s adaptation, which will be co-scripted by long-time collaborator Dennis Paoli, will find a way to translate the ineffable Lovecraft magic to the screen.

My high opinion of “Thing on the Doorstep” (based partly on nostaglic fondness for having read it at a young age) is not universally shared. Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon states, “Most critics agree that ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’” ranks among”the poorest of Lovecraft’s later tales. Author Lin Carter called the story a “Sordid little domestic tragedy…wholly lacking in the sort of cosmic vision that makes Lovecraft’s best stories so memorable.”

Nevertheless, Lovecraft fan Auguest Derleth, who founded Arkham House publishing in order to anthologize Lovecraft’s tales in book form, included “The Thing on the Doorstep” in The Dunwich Horor and Others, a collection of what he deemed to be 16 of Lovecraft’s strongest tales. Also worth noting, Anne Rice references the story favorably in her novel The Tale of the Body Thief, in which a character who wants to switch bodies with Lestat first catches the vampire’s interest by slipping him a copy of “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Lestat recognizes the tale and the author, and he says he likes it, although he obviously does not take it very seriously.

Regardless of the tale’s literary merits, S.T. Joshi (the ultimate expert on all things Lovecraft) believes that, perhaps more than any other Lovecraft story, “The Thing on the Doorstep” has good potential for cinematic treatment:

I believe a highly effective film could be made of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” given that it is chiefly a human story involving the interaction of a few characters, something the film medium can handle a lot better than the kind of “cosmic horror” that Lovecraft is known for.

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