The Arcanum (2005) by Thomas Wheeler: If there were an award for worst fictional depiction of H.P. Lovecraft, this novel would certainly finish in the Top 5.
At least.
Screenwriter Thomas Wheeler tries for a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, only with real people and not fictional characters. This team is The Arcanum of the title and in this novel consists of H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisiana Voudon 'Queen' Marie Laveau.
Set in 1920's New York, The Arcanum pits our rag-tag group of ghost-busters against a sinister plot that's actually a large-scale version of a standalone, supernatural-themed episode of The X-Files. Many references appear to earlier adventures of The Arcanum, now deprived of its creator as his murder by telepathy starts the events of the novel in motion.
Wheeler depicts Lovecraft as a slightly less cowardly, more magicky version of Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Houdini is a bland cipher. It's hard to make Houdini boring, but Wheeler does it. Conan Doyle gets the most prominent role as the de facto leader of The Arcanum. He may be in his early 60's, but Doyle is totally buckling those swashes against the forces of Evil.
It really doesn't help matters that Wheeler wedges Lovecraft's Great Old Ones into a fairly standard Christian narrative in which the Devil, angels, and Nephilim all appear. Aleister Crowley shows up as a lazily written Crowley, twirling his mustache and leering. OK, he doesn't have a mustache. But he is a one-dimensional jerk.
Perhaps the most unintentionally funny moment comes when Lovecraft wields one of the Eltdown Shards. The shards were created by Richard Searight and used by HPL in his portion of the group-story "The Challenge from Beyond." However, Wheeler, who does not seem to do research all that much, re-imagines the Shards as the fossilized arm of some creature, enhanced by what is basically an Iron Man glove to tap their power. And here I thought they were tablets!
There are probably thousands of better stories featuring HPL, Houdini, and Doyle as characters. Hell, you can just read the story HPL ghost-wrote for Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," aka "Under the Pyramids." You can read about a fictional team-up of Houdini and Conan Doyle in William Hjortsberg's excellent 1996 novel Nevermore. Or you can read The Arcanum and laugh and laugh... Not recommended.
Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg:
Handling the Undead is John Ajvide Lindqvist's second novel after the great, and marvelously adapted for Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2004). The first time around, Lindqvist looked at vampires with a fresh perspective. This time around it's zombies to not quite the same level of excellence as Let the Right One In. There's no shame in failing to match the earlier novel -- Let the Right One In is a truly great horror novel.
Handling the Undead presents zombies in a new light. All the recently dead in a specific part of Stockholm at a specific time one day come back to life. This is not a zombie apocalypse. There are perhaps 1500 of them, and they don't try to eat the living. They just try to get home if they can. Those that are buried have a hard time of this until the authorities figure out the parameters of the Resurrection and dig up those graves that should have the living dead in them.
The novel does concern itself with Why and How this event has happened. But it's more focused on three families handling their undead.
Father David and son Magnus must deal with the return of the horribly disfigured Eva. She's David's wife and Magnus' mother, and she died in a car crash that occured almost simultaneously with the Resurrection. Of all the undead, Eva is the most intelligent and able to answer question, albeit vaguely.
Grandmother Elvy and granddaughter Flora have to deal with Elvy's undead husband who died a few days before the Resurrection after a decade of Alzheimer's. Oh, and Elvy and Flora are telepathic. And Elvy believes a mysterious spirit has told her that the Biblical Apocalypse is about to happen.
Reporter and grieving grandfather Mahler and his daughter Anna have to deal with the return of Anna's two-months-dead son Elias, who died soon after his sixth birthday from a fall from a window.
Meanwhile, lots of stuff happens in Sweden. Or at least Stockholm. The authorities round the dead up. Weird psychic phenomena start to happen. The undead that are extremely decayed cease to function. Is the Apocalypse at hand? And are these zombies ever going to eat someone?
Well, read it and see, I guess. Handling the Undead is a much shorter, less detailed, quieter novel than Let the Right One In. Too quiet, really, and the explanation for what has happened, when it comes, is just a little too goofy to be satisfying.
As with the fantastic revelations at the end of Lindqvist's later Harbour, those in Handling the Undead don't so much satisfy as they undermine all the suspense and world-building that has come before. Despite all the uses of a very Stephen King-like "This isn't what was really there but only what the human mind can translate," the end sputters out in a most unsatisfying way. What has come before was pretty solid, but perhaps not enough to lift Handling the Undead above a Lightly Recommended.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose: written by Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Laura Linney (Erin Bruner), Tom Wilkinson (Father Moore), Cambell Scott (Ethan Thomas), Jennifer Carpenter (Emily Rose), Colm Feore (Karl Gunderson), and Henry Czerny (Dr. Briggs) (2005): Handsomely mounted and morally bankrupt piece of irresponsible garbage. And I wouldn't call it irresponsible if it didn't trumpet its based-on-a-true-story merits right through to the 'Where are they now?' end titles. But the facts of the case have been changed so much that the end titles are as much fiction as the narrative that precedes them.
The movie was filmed in British Columbia, Canada and takes place in America in what looks to be the early oughts. The real story took place in Germany in the 1970's. About the only thing that stays the same is that the young woman being exorcised ended up dead. Her real name wasn't Emily Rose. The priest conducting the exorcism was tried for negligent homicide, so that's sort of right. Why not go with a complete fiction? Because 'Based on a true story' is part of the selling point for a movie like this.
So a devout young woman from a rural area goes to a big city college and gets possessed by a Devil. Or maybe The Devil. No, maybe it's six devils piled into her like she's a clown car. And they're all really important devils, name-checking their importance. Or maybe they're lying. Mean old medical science decides Emily Rose is epileptic, prescribes drugs.
Oh ho, we're told by an anthropologist called in for the homicide trial, those epilepsy drugs made Emily Rose MORE SUSCEPTIBLE to demonic possession! Because God didn't account for the invention of pharmaceuticals or something. Also, the expert witness anthropologist quotes Carlos Castenada on the stand. I kid you not. She also appears to be Hindu. Theologically speaking, I have no idea what that means.
Laura Linney plays the agnostic defence attorney who learns to believe in something after being stalked by a demonic presence throughout the trial because Dark Forces want a certain trial outcome! The demons like to wake people up at 3 a.m., I'd assume because they're doing a riff on The Amityville Horror. The devil, or a devil, occasionally shows up as a silhouette of what appears to be Emperor Palpatine.
One thing that gets me with works like this is that they make no sense from the standpoint of the very religion they purport to champion. Father Moore (a beleaguered Tom Wilkinson, earning that paycheck) theorizes that God wants him to stand trial so that people will hear Emily Rose's story and thus find proof of God. But proof negates faith. If God had ever wanted proof to be a component of Christianity, then He's been going about it the wrong way for more than 2000 years. This is an advertisement for Roman Catholicism from people who don't seem to have the faintest idea what Roman Catholicism stands for.
Anyway, the movie makes it clear that there's a possession going on, and that Emily Rose died not as a result of the exorcism but as a result of the demons getting stuck inside her because of her anti-epileptic medication. And it's all true, even though it isn't. How many people die in exorcisms every year? What a self-righteous, morally reprehensible turd of a movie. Everyone involved should be ashamed. Not recommended.
