Main cast: Rupert Grint (Walter Gilman), Ismael Cruz Cordova (Frank Elwood), DJ Qualls (Jenkins Brown), and Nia Vardalos (Madame Levine)
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Dreams in the Witch House is another episode that is loosely based on a HP Lovecraft story, The Dreams in the Witch House.
I cringe each time I see a live action adaptation of this story, because it has a rat with the face of a human being, which always leads to some awful CGI in display. The last time that happened, it wasn’t pretty.
Then there is the director, whose only ties to horror are the classics Twilight and Red Riding Hood. Why again is she here? Oh, right—by the invitation of Guillermo del Toro. He’s probably doing her a huge favor.
Anyway, I don’t know why they even want to give this episode the same name as Mr Lovecraft’s story, because aside from the names of key characters, there is nothing here that resembles the story. Gone are the child sacrifice angle and any other element in the original story can be scare people.
Instead, Ron Weasley plays Walter Gilman, a man still haunted by how, as a boy, he saw his sister Epperley die and then witness her soul somehow manifesting in front of him before she is dragged away by invisible forces through a portal into what he learns later to be the Forest of Lost Souls.
Since then, he has searched for a means to enter that place and rescue his sister. He consorts with mediums and takes part in seances, but all roads lead to dead ends until he rents a room in the house belonging to a witch, Keziah Mason. Can he rescue Epperley, or will he inadvertently unleash Keziah and her human-faced rat familiar Jenkins Brown back into the world?
I really don’t like this episode. I may like it better if it had been called something else—maybe Ron Weasley’s Not Having a Good Day Today–and scrubbed of any references to Mr Lovecraft’s story, but as it is, it’s too much of a departure from the source material. In fact, it’s an entirely different story altogether!
Even after discounting the disparities of this episode from the source material, this episode is another one that suffers from a filler first half. Everything prior to Gilman staying at Keziah’s mansion (heh) feels dragged out and unnecessarily prolonged just to pad the screen time. Sure, the production value is top notch as always, but come on, I’m getting bored.
I sigh when I see Keziah Mason and cringe when I see the rat. Sure, the rat looks better than the one in that Masters of Horror episode, but it and the witch are just very, very cartoon-y things that make an already scare-free episode resemble something I’d find at some theme park.
The whole thing just isn’t scary. It’s not cosmic horror, it’s not Lovecraft-ian either. It’s just an all around meandering, forgettable excuse to give Ms Hardwicke a gig after every one of her last few high profile gigs bombed in a most spectacularly embarrassing manner.
