Cody Hamman looks at the second entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series, Stuart Gordon's Dreams in the Witch-House.
Lovecraft’s story was about Walter Gilman, who studies calculus and quantum physics at Miskatonic University and specifically rents a room in a boardinghouse because he knows it was inhabited by a witch named Keziah Mason back in 1692. She had spoken about “lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond”, an idea that goes hand-in-hand with Walter’s own mathematical theories. Unfortunately, the lines and curves in the witch’s old room do open a doorway into another dimension, with nightmarish results for Walter.
In Gordon and Paoli’s version of Witch-House, Walter Gilman (played by Dagon’s Ezra Godden) is a Miskatonic grad student who is working on his string theory thesis when he rents a room in a rundown old boardinghouse. It’s not a nice place, it seems to be infested with rats, the manager Dombrowski (Jay Brazeau) is a jerk, and the downstairs resident Masurewicz (Campbell Lane) is a strange fellow who beats his head against wooden furniture while praying and warns about a witch. A witch with a familiar called Brown Jenkin, a rat with a human face. But it’s cheap, and Walter finds a potential love interest in his neighbor Frances (Chelah Horsdal), a young single mother who asks him to watch her infant son when she has to go out.
As the title implies, Walter is plagued with nightmares while staying in this old house. Nightmares that start with a visitation from Brown Jenkin, who tells him “She’s coming.” And she is coming. The witch, Keziah Mason (Susanna Uchatius). The longer he stays in the house, the more intense his nightmares about Mason and her human-faced rat pal get... and the more clear it becomes that Frances’s child is in danger from these characters. Characters who have the ability to cross dimensions, because Walter’s thesis is correct: at certain angles, dimensions can intersect and allow someone to travel between them. And the construction of his room has just the right angles.
Dreams in the Witch-House is a strong example of why Gordon and Paoli were the perfect team to bring Lovecraft stories to the screen. While they capture the creepiness of the original story, they also give it a stronger emotional core with the addition of the Frances character, which gives Walter a personal connection to the child that ends up being targeted by the witch. This makes the horrific sequences even more intense, because Walter is desperately trying to save someone he has come to care about.
I’m not generally a fan of movies that use nightmare sequences as their primary way of delivering scares (unless Freddy Krueger happens to be slicing people up in those nightmares), but this is one of the rare cases where it works for me because of the building feeling of dread – and the fact that we know that these nightmares are going to become reality soon, unless Walter finds a way to thwart his supernatural adversaries.
The presence of a human-faced rat in Lovecraft’s story gave Gordon a challenging character to bring to the screen, but he did it well, and without an abundance of CGI. Gordon just filmed a rat scampering around the set, and to show the face he punches in for close-ups of actor Yevgen Voronin, who was made up to look like a human / rat hybrid. The fact that Brown Jenkin happens to be the only credit Yevgen Voronin has ever received is amusingly perfect. It’s like he got into the entertainment industry solely to play Brown Jenkin.
Sadly, Dreams in the Witch-House was the last Lovecraft adaptation we ever got from Gordon, but at least he got one more shot at it before he passed away in 2020 and gave us another fun movie to watch. A marathon of Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dagon, and Dreams in the Witch-House would be a great way to spend a day, especially during the Halloween season.
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