Adapting Locativity: Or, Why the German Baltic Isn't Weird

Tim Lanzendörfer

When I was a kid, one of the things we’d do as a family of a Sunday afternoon was watch Godzilla movies on TV, joking about the badness of plot, costume, and so on—when appropriate, of course! B movies stayed with me, and by the time I was a teenager, we’d graduated to the kind of direct to video creature feature film that my younger self would no doubt have been scared by, but we, at sixteen or so, didn’t think scary at all anymore. More expensive versions of this would sometimes crop up on TV, too: films such as Lake Placid, for instance, and we’d watch them all. One of the things that worked, in those films, was that for whatever reason, while we’d be definitely keyed into the thinness of their plots, their atrocious acting, and the fundamental logic issues that they could show, two things never gave us pause: the evil corporations or sinister government agencies that often were behind the mutated monster fish, reptiles, birds, and so on. And the simple point that of course, a rural U.S. lake, or an island off the coast of Oregon, or a river somewhere in the boonies, these might all contain monsters.

This was first made present to me when we watched, in 1999, a German TV production (for the broadcaster RTL, I want to say, but may be wrong): Das Biest im Bodensee. In that film, Lake Constance stands in for Lake Placid’s Black Lake—the monster is an amphibious creature of some kind created by a lab leak from a Basel, Switzerland-based evil corporation—and the final shot (almost) is the typical one of a government goon having secured, despite promises, a test tube full of monster, promising the eternal return of the creature. Only the government goon works for the German ministry of research, the Bundesforschungsministerium.

Will I say: none of this worked? It’s not so much that the film is bad, technically, acting-wise, plot wise, although it is. For me, the thing was that what was imaginable on Black Lake in upstate Maine was simply ridiculous on Lake Constance; what I’d easily let slide for a U.S. black ops research bureau, working for the FBI or the CIA, I’d find ludicrous to imagine the grey bureaucrats in the Forschungsministerium to manage. There was a disconnect in this translation of one agency to another, one location to another.

Tim, you say, what’s that got to do with Lovecraft? Fair point. One of the most notable things about Lovecraft, of course, is his New England-ness, the way the weird is built against the backdrop of “ancient” America: against the comparatively old stones of Providence’s stand-in Arkham, but also the backwoods of the coastal towns, the dark places in the old forests and distant mountains, as in “The Colour Out of Space.” There is something persuasively strange about these locations, in a way that plays into adapting these stories elsewhere. And it is not just that it’s impossible to set anything Lovecraftian anywhere but in New England, of course. Not only did Lovecraft manage to do it—speaking of “The Colour Out of Space,” one of the best versions of that is the German Die Farbe, by German-Vietnamese director Huan Vu.  And that’s set in Germany, in the Swabian-Frankian Forest in the north of Baden-Württemberg. Black and white filmmaking does some of the heavy lifting here, but even so: you buy the weirdness of the people, the strangeness of the forest. Location is always a character in Lovecraft, and in good adaptation, it is, too. And this locationality of the weird is not entirely interchangeable, without losing whatever Lovecraftian element the localities themselves evince.

Which does bring me to my object today, a chance find in a comic book store the other day: Vol. 2 of what I assume are two volumes of a series, “Auf den Spuren H.P. Lovecrafts,” published by a now-defunct private publisher, Verlag Torsten Low. This German publication appears to be conceived as a series of stories written in the vein of Lovecraft. Its conceit, as suggested by the inner cover, is that it is an annual opportunity to enter “Hapeh”’s (the German phonemes of “H.P.”) library, where we (the readers) might discover “stories about blasphemous, sleeping Gods and disgusting servant creatures.” Lovecraft, here, takes on the role of the mediator of stories – like the crypt keeper of EC comics – to allow other work to shine through his librarianship. If he doesn’t author, at least he authorizes: that this sits somewhat weirdly besides the idea that these stories are also explicitly Lovecraftian is probably beside the point. (Why does “Hapeh” collect stories that are written in his style?)

The volume I have contains two stories: “Im Knusperhäuschen,” by the writer Matthias Töpfer and the artist Stefanie Hammes, a story playing on the Hansel and Gretel folktale, mixed with Lovecraftian worship of tentacled monsters. It works fairly well, though compared to much of Lovecraft, keeps perhaps too much unsaid and unshown. But I’m more interested in “Die perfekte Musik,” a riff (ha) on “The Music of Erich Zann” by the writer Sabine Völkel and artist Angelika Barth. In that story, an aspiring journalist tries to trace the composer of mysterious, popular tunes that turn out to be a larger plot to wake the Great Old Ones from their slumber. This is all pretty good standard fare for Lovecraft, and I might have been inclined to rate it more highly but for the fact that it insists on locating the place where the weird music gets produced as “Winding an der Ostsee” (Winding by the Baltic). The place does not exist – but unlike Innsmouth, unlike the “hills west of Arkham” of “The Colour Out of Space,” unlike the “wild domed hills of Vermont” of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” what “Winding an der Ostsee” evokes isn’t a strange out-of-timeness, foreboding isolation, and ancient mystery. Rather, very much like the Bodensee, it’s a mundane summer holiday-ness. In “Das Biest vom Bodensee,” this is, perhaps, partially the desired effect: its thrill would have been, had it been any thrilling at all, the usual horror of creature-horror, the irruption of the deadly into the mundane, the sudden threat of a monster against kids on the beach, and so on. That it still fails is due to the bad writing, bad acting, general overall badness—but also, I think, because it’s difficult to associate the German mundaneness of the Bodensee and the Ministry for Research with weird monsters. It’s perhaps significant in this light that the evil guys in this film appear in light gray, badly tailored suits, and drive silver Mercedes cars; rather than in dark suits, driving black cars. The evil Germany affords is…bland, boring, bureaucratic.

The weirdness which Winding and der Ostsee affords, similarly, is…none? I recognize that this is an assertion based solely on my reaction to the comic. But I’d venture to say that, like “Im Knusperhäuschen,” much would have been gained by not naming the location of the weird, because a random Baltic coast town cannot sustain the same feelings of dread that a remote New England town; largely uninhabited hills of old growth forest; or, for that matter, Lousiana swamps can.

Is there a point to this rambling? If I simply said: adaptation, even adaptation of the kind that a writing-after is, highlights again the centrality of the locations of Lovecraft’s fiction, and the care in establishing them as weird, as potentially harboring the horrible, in the first place—then perhaps you’d say, and perhaps rightly, that that’s a fairly obvious point. Let me still make it? Lack of care with regard to the question of its place leaves this comic without the ability to move (me); and it’s notable, in this regard, that of course it didn’t have to do any kind of locating, any kind of naming. The little volume I have suggests this answer to the problem of how to adapt the specific locativity of Lovecraft to other places: just remain vague. But it’s also not the only possibility here, of course. As Vu’s Die Farbe suggests, if you pay attention to building place, it is definitely also possible to assert specific, even German locativity, without losing the possibility of the weird.