And in case you didn't know, "Re-Animator" is also a Lovecraft story. 
So is From Beyond. Gordon is a Lovecraft nut.
And not that it matters, but that was your 11111th post
I've never heard of From Beyond, but I just looked it up and it's an earlier story, so it's probably really good. I'm going to have to find a collection containing it! Gordon is awesome!
I just finished watching The Dreams in the Witch House, and it was pretty good. It's one of my favorite stories, so there was a high bar to reach, and if he didn't make it then he came damn close.
The major difference between the movie and the story in the unwed teenage mother. In the story, his neighbour is a man, and he crashes on that neighbour's couch when things start to go weird. The baby in the movie was a random kid, I think, I don't believe it came from the apartment. And there was no beginnings of a love story, however brief, that's 100% Hollywood.
The story talked a lot about angles, obviously, so I was wondering how it would be portrayed. The angle in the corner is almost exactly how I'd pictured it, which was good. It's interesting how the film was brought into the future (considering it was written in the 1920's where there were very few laptops), so the filmmaker was able to use "quantum physics" where Lovecraft could only use mysterious math/physical relationships. It's nice how we have abstract theories in the real world these days, which makes explaining things a lot easier.
The one thing that really bugged me was that he tried adding elements from the story that he couldn't develop in the timeframe. For example, the flour on the floor went nowhere. He was supposed to sleep with the flour a few different nights with interesting results (go read it
). Also, the growing insanity: in the story, he spent a whole lot more time going crazy, including waking up miles from town in his underwear (with no trail in the flour to see how he left). He slept in his friend's room a couple nights, but always ended up back in his own, without ever opening the doors. Another thing was signing the book. That was a fairly long scene involving some contact with the Great Old Ones (most notably,
Nyarlathotep), who were trying to get him to sign the book in his own blood to give his soul to Azathoth. I think that these things (with the exception of the insanity) should have either been more developed or skipped completely because, for the most part, they don't add to the movie at all.
I think the biggest annoyance in the movie (like a lot of other movies) was that he just had to include the Necronomicon. While the Necronomicon was familiar to the main character, which is how he recognized Nyarlathotep and Azathoth, he didn't actually read it during the story, much less wake up on it. But the worst part, by far, is that they took the design of the Necronomicon from Evil Dead! That was totally wrong!! And also, the copy at the Miskatonic Library is latin, a translation from the original (which is Arabic). The translation most definitely wouldn't be bound in human flesh (which is the implication, since they used Evil Dead-style). Of course, that's just being picky
<edit> Oh yeah, and that rat familiar was named Brown Jenkins. How could they not reveal that!?
