Dreams in the witch house
The Dreams in the Witch House ( The Dreams in the Witch House ) is a short story by HP Lovecraft . It first appeared in the July 1933 issue of pulp magazine Weird Tales .
content
The student Walter Gilman moves into a rotten attic room in a legendary house. In the witch craze of the late 17th century, Keziah Mason, a woman accused of witchcraft , is said to have experimented with changes in the space-time continuum until she disappeared without a trace.
Gilman increasingly neglects his studies, since he only deals with occult books and his confused dreams. On the other hand, he suddenly shows astonishing knowledge of astrophysics and philosophizes about the curvature of space and contacts with extraterrestrial inhabitants of strange, far-flung regions of the galaxy . Again and again he imagines himself in his dreams in surreal landscapes, in which he meets the old witch who tries to introduce Gilman to the black man Nyarlathotep . Gilman knows this figure from the legendary Necronomicon and has more and more doubts about his sanity, as he feels drawn to a certain point in the night sky by an inexplicable power. It soon turns out that his dreams are not a manifestation of his tense state of mind or illusions, as his roommate tells him about a purple glow in his room. It is the same one that surrounds the old witch in his dreams.
From then on his life was determined by wild feverish fantasies, sleepwalking and the perception of strange noises. He fantasizes about an alien landscape and barrel-shaped creatures. Gilman is close to madness when the next morning he finds the statue of such a barrel-shaped being in his room. The properties of the object defy description, it definitely seems out of this world. The infernal agony of the soul finally leads to the death of the young man. As a result of the damage to the accursed house by a heavy storm, one finds horribly mutilated body parts and ancient documents in a foreign language.
expenditure
- HP Lovecraft: The Dreams in the Witch-House . In: Weird Tales , July 1933.
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Dreams in the Witch-House . 1937. pdf
- German translations
- Dreams in the witch house. Fantastic stories by Howard Ph. Lovecraft, Edgar A. Poe et al. Ed. Kurt Singer. Transferred by Joachim A. Frank. Frankfurt a. M. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag (1983). ISBN 3-596-28088-5
- Dreams in the witch house. In: The creeping chaos by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, translated by Andreas Diesel, Festa-Verlag, Leipzig (2006). ISBN 978-3-86552-056-2
Films / adaptations
- Dreams in the Witch House . Horror movie. Directed by Stuart Gordon, with Ezra Godden, Jay Brazeau. 2005.
- The film The Witch of Count Dracula is loosely based on Lovecraft's tale.
- The 100th episode of the horror cabinet turned the story into a radio play in May 2015.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Illustration of the title page on collectorshowcase.fr
- ^ Sneak film - film review for "Dreams in the Witch House". Retrieved January 17, 2013 .
- ↑ Review of Horror Cabinet 100 . Retrieved May 13, 2015 .
