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THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
Easily the BEST EVER short film to be adapted from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN is a small classic from 1980 that fully retains the haunting aura of Lovecraft’s incomparable story of the same name while weaving a powerfully effective spell in its own right.
The Package
Certainly filmmaker John Strysik had his work cut out for him when he
decided to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s 1921 story “The Music of Erich Zann” for a
student film project at Columbia College. The story might seem like ideal
student film material on the surface--it only has three characters, after all,
and a single setting--but presents a filmmaker with any number of all-but
insurmountable obstacles. It was one of Lovecraft’s personal favorite stories
(and remains my own favorite of his tales), being the admirably compact,
concentrated account of a young man ruminating on his experiences at a Parisian
boarding house situated on the mysterious Rue D’Ausiel, a street the man has
never subsequently been able to locate on any map. It seems that while there he
heard the hauntingly weird violin music of Erich Zann, which he attempted to get
the old musician to play for him; Erich Zann shunned the request, until one
fateful night when the narrator found himself in Zann’s top floor room and the
latter suddenly grabbed his instrument to do battle with an unearthly force
lurking outside...
Lovecraft never explicitly describes Zann’s weird music and devotes even
less verbiage to what the narrator sees when he finally peers out Zann’s
window. Thus any prospective film adaptation is automatically doomed to at
least partial failure, as the filmmaker has no choice but to create music for
Erich Zann and show what lurks outside the window. My own ideas of the above
are, I feel, far more effective than what John Strysik gives us in his
adaptation, but I found the film deeply effective nonetheless.
I’m pleased that THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN is finally available on DVD as
part of volume three of Lurker Films’ “H.P. Lovecraft Collection” of shorts
culled from the Portland based H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, of which ZANN was
one of the inaugural entries back in 1996. In my view the present film is, as I
mentioned above, the best of the lot, and was an admitted inspiration on many of
the others, most notably Bryan Moore’s COOL AIR (from 1999, which is nearly as
potent).
The Story
The naïve young Charles Dexter Ward finds himself staying at a boarding
house on the mysterious street Rue D’Ausiel during his studies in Paris. In his
room each night he hears haunting violin music emanating from the building’s top
floor, where, he learns, an old man named Erich Zann lives. He convinces Zann
to play for him one night, but when he asks the old man to play the eerie
refrain that drew Ward to him, Zann violently refuses and asks the building’s
proprietor to re-locate Ward on a lower floor.
The music continues to haunt Ward’s dreams, however. One night he hears a
falling sound from Zann’s upstairs room and knocks on the door to see if he’s
okay. Zann invites him in and promises to write down the full explanation of
his “blasphemies.” After he’s filled several handwritten pages, however,
strange tones are heard coming from Zann’s curtained window; the musician grabs
his violin and commences playing it in an apparent attempt at keeping whatever
is lurking outside at bay. During the melee Zann’s papers are blown through the
window and Ward takes the opportunity to part the curtains and look out...and is
confronted with all manner of unearthly visions.
The Direction
THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN has received rapturous praise from the renowned
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi and the fantasy writer (and Lovecraft confidante)
Fritz Leiber, and was furthermore a finalist for the Student Academy Awards.
It’s easy to see why: the film is superbly photographed by cinematographer
Michael Goi in seductive lamp lit hues and has a measured pace and foreboding
atmosphere that favorably conjure the spirit of HPL, something few other films,
student or otherwise, have managed to accomplish.
A few of Strysik’s effects fall flat: in an attempt at conveying the
hallucinatory description “In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy
satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely”, Strysik utilizes a
silhouette of a dancing woman, an effect that simply doesn’t work (I found
myself wondering who the lady was and how she got inside Zann’s room). Much
criticism has also focused on the final 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY-esque lightshow
the protagonist sees outside Zann’s window (a vision Lovecraft imparts via the
following ambiguous stream of words: “the blackness of space illimitable;
unimagined space alive with motion and music”), but I quite liked the
effect, which rounds the film out on a memorably trippy note.
Vital Statistics
THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
Essential Saltes Productions/Lurker Films
Director/Screenwriter/Editor: John Strysik
Producers: John Strysik, Robert Rothman
Cinematography: Michael K. Choi
Cast: Robert Ruevain, Robert Alexander, Darryl Warren, Barbara Snapp