and this freak eventually emerges from the shadows to start knocking people off. Yeah, John is not cool.Īs in the original film, there is a hideous freak lurking in the castle that likes to creep and perv on people while they have sex. And invites some of their friends there for a housewarming party, despite Rebecca understandably wanting to leave their partying days behind. And when Rebecca learns that she has inherited a castle in Albania from the biological mother who gave her up for adoption, John goes with her to check it out. That hasn’t ruined their relationship, though. In the Steinsiek and Charles version, Rebecca (Clair Catherine) is a twenty-something who was blinded in a post-party car crash where her boyfriend John (Jake Horowitz) was driving. There was John, his wife Susan, and their teenage daughter Rebecca – and they were a miserable bunch, as John and Susan’s marriage was crumbling and John was recovering from alcoholism after being behind the wheel in a car crash that took the life of their son J.J. Gordon and Paoli’s story had centered on a family that inherited a castle in Italy from an aunt they didn’t even know they had.
But I can’t deny that it did make this Castle Freak even more Lovecraftian, in a way, than its predecessor was. So what was basically a very simple slasher-esque story has been turned into something more complicated, with a “cosmic horror” twist that I really wasn’t into. For the reimagining, director Tate Steinsiek and writer Kathy Charles decided to work in elements of Lovecraft’s “elder god” Cthulhu mythology, including the Necronomicon, the god Yog-Sothoth, and ideas from the story The Dunwich Horror. When he finally escapes, a bloodbath ensues.
Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli turned that into a story of a man who was kept imprisoned by his mother for more than forty years and subjected to torture and mutilation. Finally escaping from the place, he realizes that the people he comes across are terrified of him because he has a monstrous appearance.
Gordon’s take on Castle Freak had drawn inspiration from the Lovecraft story The Outsider, a simple story about a man who has been trapped in a castle for as long as he can remember. Crampton was such a Castle Freak fan, she even produced a remake (or “reimagining”, as she preferred to call it) of the film twenty-five years after starring in the original. Lovecraft-inspired horror film Castle Freak – in fact, I even have a greater appreciation for it now than I had when I wrote about it just seven years ago – but one person who clearly always had a spot in her heart for the concept is Castle Freak cast member Barbara Crampton. It took me a long time to warm up to director Stuart Gordon’s 1995 H.P.
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