BOOKS OF EVIL

By: Casandra Vicario.

Image: Internet.

Much is said about the importance of reading: it gives us culture, transports us to other worlds, expands our vocabulary, and so on. Books have been, are, and will continue to be an inexhaustible source of stories, and many of them have made it to the big screen — horror cinema is no exception.

This time, I don't want to write to you about films based on true stories, or grounded in legends or urban myths, nor do I want to talk about the work of great authors like Poe, Lovecraft, or King, who have become genre classics or box-office hits. Today, I want to use this space to share with you some films in which books are the protagonists, the axis of the film, or the reason the terror and slaughter are unleashed.

What do you say we start with a classic? It's the story of a group of young people who escape to a cabin in the woods to drink, smoke, and have a good time. In the basement of the cabin, they find a book bound in human skin and a recording containing a reading of the strange characters the text holds. The verses unleash demons that end the kids' lives in bloody, brutal fashion — all but one of them, who goes by the name Ashley. You already know which film we're talking about, right? Of course, it's "Evil Dead," Sam Raimi's 1981 classic. The book at the center of this story is none other than the famous Necronomicon.

As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the Necronomicon is a fictional book created by H. P. Lovecraft; it's first mentioned in his story "The Hound" and has its own "real" history, according to which the text was written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. It's a book of ritual magic whose reading brings madness and death — the perfect breeding ground for great horror stories.

Getting back to the topic at hand, in our next film there's no doubt that the source of all evil is contained in a book known as "Necronomicon Ex Mortis": it's "Evil Dead 2. Dead by Dawn," once again directed by Sam Raimi. In this installment our hero Ash returns, and the story of the first film repeats itself somewhat, except now there's more blood and brutal sequences. To put an end to the evil and the demons seeking to overrun the earth, it becomes essential to read a few loose pages from this book — and the result is not what either the protagonists or the audience expect.

And since we're on the subject of the famous Necronomicon, the next film in which books are the protagonists, or the axis of all evil, is aptly titled "Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead," an anthology of horror stories directed by Christophe Gans, Shusuke Kaneko, and Brian Yuzna.

The story begins and ends in a library, where the writer Howard Philips Lovecraft seeks out the copy of the Necronomicon kept locked away by a group of monks. He manages to gain access to it and copies down some of the stories. The film is divided into four parts: "The Library," "The Drowned," "The Cold," and "Whispers."

Now we jump to 1999 to uncover the secrets hidden in "The Ninth Gate" — better known in Mexico as "La Última Puerta" — directed by Roman Polanski, starring Johnny Depp, and based on Arturo Pérez Reverte's novel "El Club Dumas."

Dean Corso is a book fanatic; thanks to his reputation, Boris Balkan, a collector of satanic texts, hires him to find the last two surviving copies of the legendary manual of satanic invocation, "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows." Corso finds himself caught up in a series of dangers and temptations, terrifying surprises, violence, and unexpected deaths.

Next up is "Book of Blood," based on the books of the same name written by Clive Barker, only this time the film is directed by John Harrison, and it's the story of Simon Mc Neal, a character whose body is used by spirits as a blank notebook to tell stories — in other words, they turn him into an entire anthology of horror tales.

We can't talk about books without talking about writers: their work can cause tragedies and have a particular influence on people's lives, and that's the case with our next film, starring Sam Neil and directed by John Carpenter: "In the Mouth of Madness," or "En la Boca del Miedo."

John Trent is a private investigator hired by a major publishing house to track down Sutter Cane and the manuscript of his latest novel, In the Mouth of Madness. Although our investigator believes it's all a publicity stunt, he eventually realizes something strange is going on, discovering that Cane's novels — beyond simply being huge hits — seem to provoke violent actions in some of their readers.

Lastly, we should also mention "Tenebre" by the Italian master of horror Dario Argento, in which a killer copies the crimes described in a best-selling novel. We can also mention "Secret Window" or "La Ventana Secreta" by David Koep, in which a writer in crisis is harassed by a character who claims the writer plagiarized a story from him; the matter will end in a chain of events that lead the protagonist to write one of his best works.

And that's all for now on films in which books are the protagonists — I hope you enjoyed it. Do you know of any other films like this?