hp lovecraft

Tres cines de la CDMX

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I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime for my fellow travelers to recover with a traditional siesta. While everyone else smartly took the opportunity to nap between major-event excursions to the lucha libre show or to Diego Rivera’s studio, I instead ventured out of our apartment on solo adventures to survey the local cinema scene. In total, I visited three of CDMX’s local theaters that week for three unique moviegoing experiences. The films I saw were English-language productions subtitled in Spanish, so the only language barrier was figuring out how to order tickets without totally embarrassing myself; I like to think I failed admirably. Here’s a quick recap of the titles & venues I was able to squeeze into the trip.

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2025) @ Cine Tonalá

The one hip English-language film that screened at every indie CDMX cinema the week I happened to visit was the portrait-of-an-artist documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Like most audiences, I was previously only aware of its titular one-hit-wonder through her association with Jonathan Demme soundtracks. It turns out that was for a very obvious reason: racism. After running through about a dozen or so Q Lazzarus in the usual style of more famous artists’ docs, a title card in this new career recap reveals that she’s never had an official record release besides her contributions to movie soundtracks, because contemporary producers decided she was too “difficult to market.” It dropped my jaw. As a rise-to-near-fame story, Goodbye Horses gets intensely friendly & intimate with Q herself as she gets to know documentarian Eva Aridjis on a personal level. The most incredible part of her story, really, is the happenstance of meeting the two directors who’ve popularized her music through cinema—Aridjis & Demme—by picking them up as a cabbie working the streets of NYC, decades apart. For his part, Demme made an all-time classic out of “Goodbye Horses” by placing it in two separate films (Married to the Mob and, more infamously, Silence of the Lambs). Aridjis’s contribution is no less significant, though, since her new documentary includes a 21-track collection of Q Lazzarus songs that have been previously left unpublished.

Just as I knew little of Q Lazzarus’s personal or professional life before watching this new documentary, I also had no idea the documentary itself existed until I traveled to Mexico City, where it was playing relatively wide (partially because it’s director Eva Aridjis’s home town). That widespread distribution gave me plenty of options for cinemas to visit, and I settled on Cine Tonalá in the La Roma neighborhood. The single-screen theater is attached to a proudly laidback cocktail bar & performance venue, functioning as a multi-purpose arts space rather than a popcorn-shoveling corporate multiplex. Its closest local equivalent in New Orleans would be The Broad Theater, except with steeper incline seating and more lounging-around space in the lobby. It’s the kind of cozy spot with thoughtful programming that I would visit every week if I lived in the neighborhood (speaking from experience with The Broad).

The Haunted Palace (1963) @ Cineteca Nacional

The Cineteca Nacional museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood is anything but laidback. Built in the 1970s as a temple to celebrate & preserve the artform, it’s an impressively large & lively venue that was swarmed with visitors on the Saturday evening when I dropped by to see 1963’s The Haunted Palace. The 12-screen cinema was showing an eclectic mix of both repertory titles (including selections from Hayao Miyazaki & Agnieszka Holland) and new releases (including Goodbye Horses), but its public cinema is only one facet of the sprawling facility. The massive complex had a college campus feel, complete with museum exhibitions, appointment-only archives, multiple cafés & vendors, an outdoor market, and a quad area where young cineastes were chilling & chatting. I arrived at least a half-hour early, which allowed me enough time to go DVD shopping, picking up a copy of the Mexican horror staple El Vampiro. If I ever return, I’ll make sure to arrive a half-day early instead, since there was plenty more to explore elsewhere on-site.

Among the few repertory titles being offered that week, I of course went for the one directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, since that’s squarely in my comfort zone. The Haunted Palace is an odd outlier in the Corman-Poe cycle that actor-director duo is best known for, since it only recites a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe poem and mostly pulls its inspiration from Lovecraft instead. It’s also out of step with the typical payoffs of a classic Roger Corman creature feature, since its central monster doesn’t move an inch and Lon Chaney Jr. gets all of the best jump scares in a supporting role just by . . . hanging around. It’s only a pleasure for audiences who enjoy lounging in spooky castles and fog-machined graveyards while flipping through pages of the Necronomicon (or listening to its Vincent Price audiobook version), not in a rush to get anywhere. That is to say that I very much enjoyed seeing it screened big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd, even if there are far better titles in the Corman-Poe cycle that would’ve been a better use of the time & space (primarily, The Masque of the Red Death). In local terms, the experience was comparable to The Prytania’s recent afternoon screening of The Fall of the House of Usher, except the venue was a half-century newer and the audience was much fuller.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) @ Cinemex

If Cine Tonalá is the Mexico City equivalent of The Broad and Cineteca Nacional is the Mexico City equivalent of The Prytania, then Cinemex is the local equivalent of an AMC palace. I must’ve passed by a half-dozen locations of the corporate franchise while exploring different parts of the city, so it was hilarious that the one located closest to our apartment was called Casa de Arte, as if it were an independent arthouse. It’s the same way that AMC arbitrarily labels some of its offerings as “Artisan Films” even though they’re wide-release, major-studio productions with massive budgets (no offense meant to the artistry behind AMC Artisan titles like Sinners & The Phoenician Scheme). Cinemex does not offer a one-of-a-kind arthouse experience. It offers the same-as-it-is-everywhere multiplex experience, which is a different flavor that sometimes tastes just as good. It’s about as artisan as a cup of Coca-Cola.

It was in that downtown multiplex that I caught the latest (and possibly last) installment in the Misión: Imposible franchise, The Final Reckoning. Perhaps due to the lack of enthusiasm with the previous entry in that franchise, Dead Reckoning, the three-hour epic does a lot of sweaty scrambling to connect its story to the larger, decades-spanning Mission: Impossible narrative arc before then settling into the tension of two lengthy Tom Cruise stunts: one in which he raids a sinking submarine and one in which he pilots an upside-down airplane with his foot. The resulting picture is one hour of aggressively incomprehensible crosscutting & flashbacks followed by two hours of old-school movie magic. I would say that it’s the kind of classic movie magic that you can only find in Hollywood, except the movie was mostly shot in England and I personally watched in it Mexico. There really isn’t anything especially recommendable about it beyond the excuse it offers to escape the summer sun for a few hours with a lapful of overpriced junk food, which is the only reason anyone would visit an AMC or a Cinemex anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Suitable Flesh (2023)

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Before his death in 2020, director Stuart Gordon was planning a comeback, alongside his screenwriting collaborator Dennis Paoli, with whom he had worked on films like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castle Freak. That intended return was to be Suitable Flesh, another Lovecraft adaptation, and although Gordon didn’t live to see it completed, his friend and longtime collaborator Barbara Crampton was determined to usher it to completion, which she achieved this year with Joe Lynch in the director’s chair. I’ve never seen any of Lynch’s feature work, but I was very impressed with his short film Truth in Journalism that was a bit of an internet phenom a few years ago (although the fact that everything that references the film online now gives away the twist, sometimes in the title). And while there’s nothing that’s technically wrong with this one, I have to admit that I just didn’t enjoy it. 

Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is a psychiatrist living an idyllic life of career success, loving marriage with handsome if temporarily unemployed husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), and a fulfilling best friendship with colleague Daniella Upton (Crampton). After a session with a man who is trying to give up smoking, a young man from the nearby Miskatonic University bursts into her office and introduces himself as Asa Waite (Judah Lewis, of The Babysitter). He tells her that his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), wants his son’s body, in a scene that would have been more effective if it had been played with more ambiguous dialogue that implied (for instance, abuse at the hands of his father), but instead just sounds like ranting and raving. When she gets a phone call from Asa later, she fears that he’s in danger and goes to his house, only to become embroiled in an apparent domestic disturbance situation that belies dark magic. Eventually, Derby finds herself swapping back and forth between her body and that of Asa, but the entity with which she is exchanging corporeal forms with is not Asa, but something much older and more powerful, and if they switch a third time, it will be permanent. 

Narratively, this one is a bit sloppy, and it’s also not really a surprise that the Lovecraft story from which is takes its concept, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, is often considered one of the talented racist’s lesser works. Lewis is doing fine work as the menacing thing that first possesses Asa’s father before taking him over, and although I love seeing Graham in just about anything, there’s a bit of a disconnect between Lewis’s version of (what we’ll call) the spirit and hers, and I wish Graham’s version was as menacing as Lewis’s. There’s also something very fun about the idea of a possessing spirit that has bodysurfed through time in male bodies because of its misogynistic ideals, only to end up in a woman’s body and learn how much it enjoys riding dick. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this movie, nor is its gruesome final act, which is what I think will end up being what Suitable Flesh is most remembered for. A shambling, battered corpse that begs for death isn’t the freshest idea (An American Werewolf in London and Return of the Living Dead immediately spring to mind), but it’s realized here in a truly horrifying fashion. 

Still, for me, the film’s highlight was Crampton (as she often is). She looks amazing here, and her turn as the confused Dr. Upton who has to come to terms with the fact that her best friend is not losing her mind but is in fact experiencing a truly supernatural event is a sight to behold. In many ways, she’s the true protagonist, the one with the most character development and the person with whom we sympathize the most. It makes the first half of the narrative seem like filler until we get to the good parts, and I have to be honest, I think the late Gordon would have gotten us there faster and better. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Beach House (2020)

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One of the pitfalls of regularly watching genre movies is that they start to blend together if you don’t diversify your diet. The way genre films can repeat and reshape the same story templates into thousands of uniquely meaningful variations is a beautiful thing. However, if you watch, say, five varying riffs on The Thing or Groundhog Day in a month the barriers that distinguish each individual film start to break down. All of that is to say that the modestly budgeted Lovecraftian horror The Beach House was very poorly timed, to no particular fault of the film itself. In a year where The Beach House has to compete for attention with fellow new releases Color Out of Space, Sea Fever, and The Rental—all of which cover nearly identical genre territory with much larger budgets & creative resources—it has almost no chance of standing out as its own distinct vision. Still, the benefit of working within the realm of genre is that these familiar templates have their own guaranteed entertainment payoffs baked into their recipes. It took me a while to warm up to The Beach House as a worthwhile, distinct product, but it does eventually get pretty gnarly while staging its climactic mayhem, conjuring a few memorably horrid images that will continue to haunt me despite the rest of the film’s overbearing familiarity.

(Like in Sea Fever), The Beach House features an aspiring scientist, who (like in The Rental) finds herself in a tense social situation while intoxicated with her boyfriend and a strange couple at vacation home, until (like in Color Out of Space) an extraterrestrial infection mutates the people & landscape around her into a grotesque Lovecraftian hellscape. It’s not just the familiarity with these archetypes & settings that makes the film difficult to sink into. The melodramatic CW Network-flavored acting style and the influence of drugs & alcohol also confuse what’s intentionally off in the protagonist’s surroundings and what’s just mistakenly inauthentic & cheesy. It’s impossible to fully get your footing in the film’s early goings, where it’s unclear whether there’s already something sinister in the air or if the dialogue is just being unevenly performed by the subprofessionals the modest budget could afford. Things quickly pick up once the parameters of the beachside Lovecraft horror become explicitly clear, though, and the hideous chaos of the back half more or less erases the tedium of its build-up. I’m not sure the film has anything more to say than “Don’t take edibles with strangers in an unfamiliar location” or “Never trust a fuckboy named Randall” but its pseudoscientific descent into primordial horror is well staged once it gets past those first-act speed bumps.

There are a few isolated, truly grotesque images in The Beach House that should perk up any horror nerds who make it past the doldrums of the film’s early stirrings. Whether seeking out those scattered nightmare visions for their own sake is enough to justify watching an entire movie is dependent on your own appetite for this kind of material. That’s especially true in a year where it’s bested in nearly every way by Color Out of Space in particular, which goes so much further in both its supernatural mayhem and its off-putting performances that The Beach House almost feels wholly redundant, if not just poorly timed. It might have fared better in a different year, but I can’t pretend that it registers as anything particularly memorable in our current context.

-Brandon Ledet

Color Out of Space (2020)

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Richard Stanley is back, baby. After decades of Film Industry exile (documented in the bizarre saga Lost Soul), the witchcraft-obsessed genre freak has re-emerged fully charged and ready to explode. It would be inaccurate to claim that Stanley’s comeback feature hadn’t missed a beat since his early-90s nightmares Hardware & Dust Devil. The director seemingly also hasn’t been keeping up with modern filmmaking trends & aesthetics either, though. If anything, Color Out of Space finds Stanley regressing back to the grotesque 1980s sci-fi creep-outs of horror legends like David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, and Stuart Gordon. His comeback’s practical gore effects, neon lighting, and ominous synth score all harken back to an era before Stanley’s own heyday. He even mines Stuart Gordon’s pet favorite source material to achieve the effect: public domain short stories penned by H.P. Lovecraft. The only blatant difference between Color Out of Space and its 1980s predecessors (beyond its casting of a post-memeified Nicolas Cage) is that Stanley appears to be a true believer in the spooky, occultist forces that his imagery conjures – opening the movie up to some genuinely heartfelt moments of supernatural familial trauma.

To oversimplify Lovecraft’s fifty-page short story, Color Out of Space is about a horrific, unearthly color that crashes to Earth via a meteor and puts all of humanity in potential peril. In classic Lovecraftian fashion, this unfathomable hue (represented onscreen as a searing neon purple) drives anyone who gazes upon it absolutely mad, representing a kind of forbidden, otherworldly knowledge the puny human mind cannot handle. This global-scale phenomenon is presented in Stanley’s adaptation as an intimate drama among a nuclear family unit, with an increasingly unhinged Nicolas Cage centered as its figurehead. Cage’s family lives on an isolated alpaca farm (a Mad Libs-style variation on the source material’s story template), driving each other into a sweaty, self-cannibalizing mania as the titular cosmic hue spreads from its meteoric landing pad to the plants, animals, and other wildlife who share the farm with them. The prologue before the meteor crash is a little creaky & awkward, recalling the tone of a VHS-era fantasy movie that never quite earned the forgiving lens of cult classic status. Once the horror of the Evil Color fully heats up, however, the movie is genuinely just as disturbing as anything Stanley accomplished in Hardware – if not more so.

Most audiences are going to treat Color Out of Space as an excuse for yet another memeable Nic Cage highlight reel to pass around via YouTube clips. The movie’s exponential mania setup provides more than enough fodder for that kind of ironic mockery, eagerly leaning into the humor of Cage’s patented freak-outs. If all you want from the film is some classic Nic Cage stunts, you’ll get what you paid for: Nic Cage milking alpacas, Nic Cage ferociously gnawing on vegetables, Nic Cage foaming at the mouth while repeatedly firing a shotgun. He even revives his classic Vampire’s Kiss accent fluctuations to update them with erratic backslides into Donald Trump parody. When his petrified children ask each other, “Dad’s acting weird, right?,” it’s a hilariously cautious understatement. This movie totally delivers on the Nic Cagian absurdity that ironic goofs recently searched for in the much more somber Mandy, only to find it in isolated scraps. I just think framing Stanley’s film as a pure indulgence in over-the-top buffoonery is selling its merits short. As consistently fun as the Nic Cage Freak-out is as a novelty from scene to scene, the movie at large registers as a genuine, heartfelt nightmare. The thing about Stanley’s 90s films is that they were always a little cheesy & over-the-top, but they were also legitimately scary. So is his decades-delayed comeback.

The Lovecraftian theme of forbidden, maddening knowledge can be (and has been) applied to a wide range of metaphors, from the philosophical to the psychosexual to the purely surreal. As I took it, Color Out of Space finds deeply personal resonance in the source material specifically as an illustrative metaphor for the spread of cancer. Mirroring Stanley’s mother’s death by lymphoma in real life (as well as bit player Tommy Chong’s real-life struggle with prostate cancer), the nuclear family unit at the film’s center immediately starts the story off in a grim mood, suffering the aftershocks of their mother figure’s battle with breast cancer. The supernatural, maddening growths that later mutate from the purple meteor crash site aren’t entirely contained to the plants & animals in the area. They also scramble the cells of the family’s cancer-survivor mother figure so that she’s an unrecognizable, difficult-to-stomach burden on her family. Meanwhile, her loved ones devolve into increasingly hostile maniacs, unable to maintain their cool as the mutinous growths resulting from the meteor tear their bonds to shreds. On the surface, Color Out of Space is a genre film throwback to Lovecraftian horrors of the 1980s like Society, Possession, and From Beyond. What really enables it to terrorize its audience, however, is that it’s also a fucked-up family drama about cancer wreaking havoc on a household. It’s just as heartbreakingly grim as it is colorful, Nic Cagian fun.

I was genuinely horrified by this film’s total nightmare of a third act; it’s the same lingering chill I picked up from Hardware, Stanley’s powerful debut. He may not know how to construct a recognizably human prologue before his supernatural plots take off. Nor does he know how to conduct a Normal conversation, if his recent interviews and past clashes with potential financiers are any indication. He sure does know how to deliver an upsetting, fucked-up horror show, though, and I hope it doesn’t take another two decades before he’s allowed to stage another one.

-Brandon Ledet

Cross-Promotion: Dagon (2001) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I was recently featured as a returning guest on an episode of the We Love to Watch podcast discussing two Stuart Gordon-directed adaptations of classic HP Lovecraft stories: Dagon (2001) & “Dreams in the Witch-House” (2005), as part of the show’s ongoing “Summer of Lovecraft” series.

Aaron & Peter were incredibly kind to invite me back after previous discussions of The Fly (1958) & Xanadu (1980). It’s always super fun to guest on their podcast, since I regularly listen as a fan. Their show is wonderfully in sync with the sincere & empathetic ethos we try to maintain on this site (especially when covering so-called “bad movies”), so I highly recommend digging through old episodes & clips on the We Love to Watch blog if you haven’t already. And, of course, please start by giving a listen to their episode on Dagon below.

-Brandon Ledet

From Beyond (1986)

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Despite my lifelong obsessiveness as a horror fan, I have several personal taste hang-ups with a few directors considered to be the titans of the genre that I cannot explain, but cause me great shame. I cannot put into words, for instance, why 80s splatter mayhem excites me to no end when Peter Jackson’s behind the camera, but I’m not at all amused by tonally similar work from Sam Raimi. There’s no accounting for why the works of George A. Romero tend to bore me, but I have deep love & appreciation for the gore hound & social critic devotees that followed in his footsteps. I’m not at all proud of these “I don’t get it” reactions to a select few horror greats, but I do have to admit that Stuart Gordon is among the spooky titans whose appeal escapees me. I can laugh & swoon over the misshapen oeuvre of a Brian Yuzna or a Frank Henenlotter without ever tiring of their cartoonishly juvenile sex & violence, but Gordon’s own additions to that exact aesthetic, most notably the Re-Animator series, has always left me cold (except maybe in the case of Dolls, which feels more like a Charles Band production than a standard Gordon film). As I’d obviously much rather enjoy his work than decry it, I recently sought out Gordon’s surrealist, Lovecraftian horror From Beyond (made largely with the same cast & crew as Re-Animator) in hopes of finding something that would finally clue me in on what makes him so beloved. It was only a moderate success.

Produced by Yuzna and starring returning Re-Animator players Jeffery Combs & Barbara Crampton, From Beyond follows a classic HP Lovecraft/”The King in Yellow” plot about people who get too curious about supernatural forces and are subsequently driven mad by their experiences with a realm beyond normal human comprehension. A scientist is accidentally killed and his assistant is driven mad by an invention known as The Resonator. Through a series of intense purple lights and bizarre sounds, The Resonator is a machine that “accesses the imperceptible,” syncing up what we understand to be the world with an entirely different dimension of invisible threats & dangerous sensations. The mental capacity to access this invisible world is linked to schizophrenia and the pineal gland (which protrudes & throbs at the skull walls of characters’ foreheads like a tongue pressing against the inside of a cheek), but its ramifications extend far beyond our understanding of science. Invisible sensations (later echoed in titles like Final Destination & The Happening) terrorize the film’s characters as The Resonator’s immeasurable effect introduces them to Lovecraftian tentacle monsters & increases their desire for kinky, transgressive sex. Even in scrawling this plot description at this very moment, I’m shocked that From Beyond wasn’t instantly one of my all-time favorite films. Assuming I would’ve loved this exact setup with the touch of a Cronenberg or a Ken Russell behind the camera, I have to assume it’s Stuart Gordon himself who’s holding its potential back.

The major letdown of From Beyond is that for a movie about unlocking a sinister realm of infinite possibilities, the places it chooses to go are disappointingly unimaginative. On a visual craft level, I’m wholly in love with the film’s D.I.Y. feats in practical effects mindfuckery. The soft, shifting flesh of the film’s oversexed, inhuman tentacle monsters from another dimension are deserving of audiences’ full attention & awe. The story told around those creations is disappointingly limited in its juvenile white boy masculinity, however, which makes me wonder if you have to be a preteen horror nerd when you experience Gordon’s work for the first time to fully appreciate him as an auteur. Of the four main victims to The Resonator, it’s the two white men who most fully experience its mindbending wrath and transform into surreal monstrosities. The remaining two victims, The Black Man and The Woman, are treated with a much more limited imagination. Dawn of the Dead’s Ken Foree’s character as “Bubba” Brownlee (even that name, ugh) is an ex-athlete bodyguard who throws out lines like “I know this behavior. I’ve seen it in the streets” in reference to Resonator addiction. His being locked out of the machine’s more extreme effects is disappointing, but what’s even worse is the way Barbara Crampton is immediately sexually violated in her first monster encounter, then asked to sexily model fetish gear. She also never fully devolves into the pineal gland demon her male colleagues transcend to despite her equal exposure to The Resonator. This should be a movie about an endless galaxy of cerebral terrors, but instead it’s mostly about impotence & other sexual hang-ups of white men in power, which is disappointingly reductive at best.

I can see so much DNA from some of my favorite horror titles seeping in at From Beyond’s fringes (Society, Slither, Videodrome, etc.) that it’s a huge letdown that the film is ultimately just Passably Entertaining. The feats of practical effects gore are impressive enough that I enjoyed the film more than Re-Animator’s more minor pleasures, but that isn’t saying much. There’s a violent, over-the-top goofiness to Gordon’s work that I appreciate in the abstract, but he’s so unselfaware about the unimaginative cruelty in the way he treats certain characters (especially women & PoC) that stop me short of heaping on praise. I might have been a lot less critical of it had I seen it for the first time as a kid, but I can’t help but find it a gross letdown now, especially since the infinite possibilities of its premise should have opened it up to so much  more. Then again, this all might just be a matter of taste, and there’s no accounting for that.

-Brandon Ledet