- Udo Kier as Baron Frankenstein - "Flesh for Frankenstein"

Dreams in the Witch House, which concerns a young university student plagued by nightmarish dreams involving a witch and a rat with a human face, is certainly not the best of all Lovecraft adaptations. It certainly pales next to Gordon's other works. You could argue that it's not a fair comparison, as you're comparing the medium of film, to a television episode with restrictions such as content and running time. That is hardly a fair argument, however, as the works of H.P. Lovecraft were seldom more than a handful of pages. A short film should allow for a truer adaptation because fewer liberties would need to be taken to pad the running time.

I should note that Dreams in the Witch House is one of the few Lovecraft stories I haven't read, so I can't comment on it's faithfulness to the original story. Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon have been incredibly faithful in their adaptations to date, and although the story has been modernized (There certainly weren't many laptop computers when the story was written in 1932), I'm certain it's as faithful an adaptation as their previous efforts. I personally believe Gordon's Dagon is the strongest and most faithful adaptation of a Lovecraft story to date, and it is, in essence, an original work by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, only loosely inspired by the original story. However, no film before or since, has better captured the feel and tone of an H.P. Lovecraft story. This is how strong a grasp Gordon has on the world of Lovecraft.

This is exactly why I couldn't help but feel let down by Dreams in the Witch House. It is certainly a competent piece of filmmaking; quite good actually. It's even one of the better entries in the Masters of Horror series. However, it never really feels like a work of Lovecraft, until the third act. It's certainly a step backward from Gordon's previous adaptations.