The Moamrath Papers:
Moamrath in the Media
by S. Dale
M. M. Moamrath, in keeping with his being the most neglected and yet least talented of H. P. Lovecraft’s imitators, rarely wrote anything that translated successfully to other media.1 This has not, however, deterred some from essaying adaptations. Perhaps the earliest such attempt was a dramatization of “The Man Who Came to Dinah,” broadcast on Tales of the Uncalled For on March 10, 1939. This tale of transvestitism, cannibalism, and psychoanalysis2 was not received well: parents were alarmed by its subject matter; younger listeners were simply bewildered up to and past Dr. Ionescu’s climactic declaration to Morbide, “For, you see, you are Dinah!”
Next came Buck Eldritch, a daily newspaper comic strip that made its debut on December 17, 1943, and lasted until the following Tuesday, when a mob broke into the offices of the Benighted Features Syndicate and hanged everybody who worked there.
During the early 1950s, adaptations of Moamrath stories appeared in certain disreputable (even for 1950s crime and horror comic books) 1950s crime and horror comic books: Crime Must Pay the Fine, Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted, Horror Stories From the Bible, Eye-Popping 3-D Picto-Terror, and — representing one publisher’s last-ditch effort to deflect the wrath of anti-comics crusaders — Happy-Ending Horror Tales.
In 1957, low-budget filmmaker Roger Farful appropriated the plot, such as it is, of the Ophidian Batrachos story, “The Sneezing Lithuanian” (“by Mortimor [sic] M. Moamrath”) for My Gun is Fun, released on a double bill with Farful’s High School Lynch Mob. Budget constraints compelled Farful to dispense entirely with the story’s fantastical elements. The Batrachos character duly became a down-on-his-luck American soldier-of-fortune named Rick Winston, and the Sneezing Lithuanian himself became a Cuban with a smoker’s cough.
Two years and seventeen films later, Farful produced and directed The Unleashed Menace, based on an undetermined Moamrath story. Farful wrote the screenplay but is no longer able to recall the title of the story in question, having died under somewhat spectacular circumstances in 1968, and no print of the film is known to exist.3 Reginald Schreck, Rod Todd, and Noma Gazonga starred, but Schreck appeared in so many films during the 1950s that he was notoriously incapable of keeping them straight in his mind, even while working on them, while Todd and Gazonga, as so often happened with supporting actors in Farful productions, never worked in Hollywood again and have not since been heard from, or of. No one else connected with The Unleashed Menace is available for comment, and, so, practically everything we know about it is contained in the brief notice that appeared in Your Entertainment Dollar for July 1958. The unsigned, one-sentence review reads: “The survivors of an atomic war are chased by dachshunds draped in what appear to be carpet remnants.”
Rumors persist that many as a dozen low-budget Mexican crime and horror films were based on various Moamrath works during the 1950s and 1960s, but only ¡Monstruo, Muerte! ¡Monstruo! (“Monster, Die! Monster!”) has been confirmed at this time. This starred “Morris Barloff” (real name: Ernest de Pachuco) and numerous masked wrestlers, and borrowed freely from several unrelated Moamrath stories. Robert Anton Danton, a longtime Moamrath scholar and author of the Illiterati trilogy, has described it as “not just your usual Lovecraft-refracted-through-Moamrath stuff, but Moamrath as translated from English into Spanish by somebody whose mother tongue was Hindustani, and the translation as boiled down to a one-line synopsis for a producer who can’t read; and then as filmed with a cast consisting of some beery guys in ski masks and two big-haired sweeties in tight dresses and high heels wandering around in the middle of nowhere; and next as left on the cutting room floor by someone like Roge Farful; and eventually as salvaged and reassembled by an outpatient from the state school for the visually impaired; and finally as shown on TV well after midnight, all patched and popping and interspersed with weird commercials. I loved every minute of it, but, then, I was high on drugs at the time.”
The most recent attempt to adapt Moamrath to the screen was 1981’s Night of the Living Brain-Dead, produced, written, and directed by Lyle Permit. Allegedly based on “Harry Houdini — Revivifier” and featuring a cast of unknowns, amateurs, and relatives, it did so poorly at pre-release screenings that it was, in fact, never released at all. Moreover, the film may no longer exist as such, Permit having recouped his investment by going into the guitar-pick business.
Finally, just as a bad rock band called H. P. Lovecraft tried to cash in on the psychedelic craze of the late 1960s, so did a really bad rock band called M. M. Moamrath try to exploit the 1970s disco craze. An album, released in 1977 on the now-defunct Melmac Label, is long gone even from bargain bins, and copies of the single, “Staying Undead,” are little prized by collectors. Yet some of the group’s original compositions threaten to linger just this side of obscurity. Bobbi Zaftig performed an uptempo rendition of “Ain’t Misbegotten” on her Home Box Office special, Don’t Take Your Eyes Off My Buns. More recently, Them Magazine revealed that even Marie Ozymandias knows the words to “Don’t Be Krill.”
1 Just so, there is but one known instance of Moamrath’s work having appeared abroad, “Das Underzee-Böot ayf der Prairie,” in Rooten-Tooten Veztern (January 1958), a translation of either “A Gringo in Greenland” or else “The Gent From the River Styx.”
2 Moamrath evidently gleaned most of what he knew about psychoanalysis from an eight-line filler in the March 1, 1932 edition of the Hatcheck Herald-Halloo.
3 Farful probably owned the only complete library of his own films, from The Gorilla Can’t Help It (1956) to The Girl in the Soluble Bikini (1967), but the collection perished with him in that meteor fall.
Copyright © 2005 by Bewildering Stories
for S. Dale and the Moamrath Project
