Dierdre99

R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll is a bachelor in his 50s with no need of a life companion. Yet almost all the films give him either a wife or a girlfriend. H.P. Lovecraft's Charles Ward is a teenager with a passion for knowledge who grows to his mid-20s by the end of the book. He has no time for girlfriends or any other other option. The Charles Ward imagined by Roger Corman, Charles Beaumont and Francis Ford Coppola is an anti-intellectual concerned only that the 'palace' that he has inherited may be worth something, and who brings along his trophy wife who is a full generation younger. This is a gratuitous heterosexualization that ruins the story. Unlike Stevenson's, Lovecraft's life and work have not opened up to queer readings, but heterosexuality is something alien to their asexuality.

'The case of Charles Dexter Ward' is first and foremost a tale of an obsessive intellectual quest. This gives it its power and its charm. As the film jetisons this completely, there is no way that the film can work. It is also the secondary quest of Dr Willet who attempts to follow young Ward's path. Who, having read the novel, could forget the lone journey of Dr Willet in the tunnels he finds under the farmhouse (not palace), and what he finds before and after losing his light, and the intervention of the literal deus ex machina. What is in the film is a pale shadow.

There are many good ideas in the novel. Corman, Beaumont and Coppola seem to be afraid to use them. Their influence is the horror-movie cliches of the '60s, and they are afraid to deviate from them.