There’s an ongoing dispute among horror fans about the “filmability” of H.P. Lovecraft. An entire camp of fans steadfastly defend their position that Lovecraft’s shorts are so abstract and strange that there just isn’t any way to accurately adapt them to the screen. Those people have never really read a Lovecraft story. Of course Loveecraft is shootable, it’s just that no one ever seems to have the drive to faitfully adapt the guy’s work with the exception of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. However, I don’t want shit on these loose interpretations, either, because some of them are really good and chief among them are my personal favorites, Re-Animator and From Beyond.
Indie production house, Shoreline Entertainment, seems to have an, I don’t know, remake (maybe?) of From Beyond listed in preproduction with the following synopsis:
Detective Davis Tillinghast is a modern day Sherlock Holmes, using his keen intellect and powers of deduction to solve the cases no one else can … until now. A series of bizarre and seemingly impossible mutilations have him stumped, the only tenuous clue leading back to the laboratory of his estanged brother Crawford, a crazed genius obsessed with inter-dimensional physics. Crawford has invented an instrument that hyper-stimulates the pineal gland of the brain, making visible the many thousands of parallel universes that occupy our space/time continuum. But unbeknownst to him this machine is also empowering creatures from other realities, giving them the ability to “drift” – travel between dimensions. Davis discovers that a “drifter” has been causing the random mutilations and sets out to destroy his brother’s machine. In the process, Davis is exposed to a vast amount of the machine’s energy, turning him too into a drifter.
It’s certainly not a faithful adaptation but neither is the Stuart Gordon movie. They both utilize the standard plot element of the machine that stimulates the pineal gland but both have similarities that end there. Not too bad, though.
