No Coexistence With Monsters - "The Keep"

Earlier this year James told me about an obscure Michael Mann film called The Keep that he watched and wanted me to see and discuss with him.  I really like Michael Mann's work and The Keep is an adaptation of a book so if you're even sort of familiar with my writings you can probably guess what happened next.

I obviously read the book and then watched the movie with James.  It's set in Romania during World War II and involves German soldiers getting thrashed by a supernatural force inside a keep they've commandeered.  (There's more to it than that but I'll give a less crude plot summary later.)

The film is kind of a wreck but it was an interesting watch after reading the novel, which I enjoyed but have some ambivalence about.  Most of the events in the movie are from the book but it still manages to be pretty different, in part because of scenes that are just obviously missing but also because of some changes in the framing.  Some of those framing differences are no doubt because of all the missing material but some appear not to be and I'll be getting into that along with lots of other stuff in this latest edition of Matt's Whimsical Book Adaptation Nonsense Fusillade or whatever the hell I'm calling this genre of essays.

Background

The Novel

The Keep is a 1981 horror novel by F. Paul Wilson (born 1946.)  It was Wilson's second novel and the first in his Adversary Cycle, though it's unclear to me if it was intended to kick off a series or if it was included retroactively.  It tells a complete story and functions just fine as a standalone novel.

It was a New York Times bestseller and was obviously successful enough to get a movie adaptation. There's really not a lot about it online but it is still in print so it's not a completely obscure work.  We're not quite in The White Buffalo territory.

Neither here nor there but Wilson is also a medical doctor.

The Film

The film is a 1983 adaptation written and directed by Michael Mann.  Mann is an acclaimed director best known for his noir-ish crime films such as Heat (1995), Collateral (2004), and Manhunter (1986).  He has a distinct but not irritatingly idiosyncratic style and I quite like his movies.  His films always seem to have memorable soundtracks and I would say The Keep's score, by German electronic band Tangerine Dream is no exception.  (Mann also worked with them on his first film Thief (1981) and they have a lot of soundtrack credits, especially in the 80s.)

The Keep stars Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellan, Alberta Watson, and Scott Glenn.  It had a troubled production and was heavily fiddled with by Paramount.  (Allegedly Mann's first cut was 210 minutes long but the theatrical version is 96.)

The Keep flopped and was not received well critically.  Mann has kind of disowned it, Wilson didn't care for it, and it was difficult to scare up until the film restoration and distribution company Vinegar Syndrome released a limited edition Blu-ray last year.  Bilge Ebiri, in his essay "A Freudian Fairytale on the Nature of Fascism," says that The Keep "hasn't enjoyed the renaissance or retrospective reassessment that some of Mann's other work has."

The Plot

Spoilers, btw.

Wermacht Army Captain Klaus Woermann and his men are sent to occupy a mysterious keep in the remote Dinu Pass in Romania, ostensibly to guard against any Russian incursion into the German allied country.  (Operation Barbarossa, where the Germans invaded Russia and set the two powers at war has not happened yet.)  Shortly after arriving the Germans start getting brutally killed and Woermann sends a message to headquarters that "Something is murdering my men."  In Portugal a man named Glenn senses something has awakened and starts making his way to Romania carrying a mysterious box.

SS officer Erich Kaempffer, on his way to open a Romanian concentration camp, is assigned to solve the problem.  The entity in the keep happily starts to pick off the newly arrived SS, to grim satisfaction of Woermann.  (Woermann never joined the Nazi party and hates it. especially the SS who he regards as evil cowards.)

The Germans find a dying Romanian-Jewish scholar named Theodor Cuza and bring him and his daughter Magda there to unravel the mystery, as they have both extensively studied the keep.  The killing entity makes contact with Theodor and, claiming to be an immortal Wallachian boyar named Molasar, seems to recognize him as a fellow Romanian.  Theodor is convinced Molasar is in fact a vampire.  After Theodor reveals what the SS are planning to do to the country's populace, Molasar vows to destroy the invaders and then go to Berlin to kill Adolf Hitler if Theodor will find the source of Molasar's power buried in the keep and hide it in the mountains for safekeeping.  Molasar heals Theodor.

By this time Glenn has arrived at the village next to the keep and he and Magda fall for each other.  After some shenanigans, Glenn reveals that he is actually named Glaeken and has come to kill Molasar, who is not actually a Romanian vampire but a much older evil named Rasalom that Glaekan has battled throughout the ages before imprisoning him in the keep.  The talisman Rasalom wanted Theodor to find is not the source of his power but what binds him to the keep.  If it is taken beyond the walls Rasalom will be free to enslave the world.

Theodor finds the talisman, but Magda stops him from crossing the threshold and takes it from him.  Glaeken arrives with the item from his box, which is actually a blade that fits into the talisman and makes a sword that he kills Rasalom with.  The end.

That's the plot of the novel, though as I alluded to earlier, the broad strokes of the film's plot are the same.

Some thoughts on the Novel

Structural Stuff

The Keep starts out really strongly.  It's creepy and authentically tense at times and Wilson likes to use character pairings to explore ideas, set up realistic interpersonal conflict, and reveal character psychology.  And for the most part (foreshadowing) he executes it pretty well.

The conflict between Woermann and Kaempffer, who know and despise each other, is compelling and Woermann is an interesting point of view character to follow.  The interactions between Theodor and Magda are also pretty well drawn, with some nice sublimated resentments bubbling to the surface through the stress of it all.  The potential devil's bargain between Theodor and Rasalom is one of the best ideas in the whole book.

The last character pairing of Glaeken and Magda is where things start to veer off target and the book definitely starts to wobble once their relationship takes the center stage a little more than halfway thorough.  It's not all that compelling and it kind of grinds the novel to a halt while they court each other.  It felt almost shoehorned in and I think the story could still have pretty easily worked without it.  The focus on the romance also means the book kind of loses track of Woermann and Kaempffer here; they vanish for what feels like a very long time and their end is pretty perfunctory given their importance in the first half

Some of this is because Glaeken plays his cards close to the vest and is kind of hard to track, which makes in-universe sense because of his immortal estrangement, but it doesn't make for particularly riveting reading.  Honestly if the rest of the character stuff was worse I might not have noticed but as it stands it's a pretty jarring contrast.   

From a plot perspective there's a pretty good twist near the end when Glaeken reveals that Molasar is not a 15th Century vampire but has been playacting as a means of manipulating Theodor into freeing him, a kind of cautionary tale about using evil to fight evil.  But this is all revealed in one big exposition dump to Magda just before the final confrontation so, while it served the purpose, it was a less elegant than I would have preferred.  I wouldn't go so far as to say the book goes completely off the rails at the end but it definitely doesn't live up to the promise of the beginning.

Though I appreciated the subversion regarding Rasalom I'm a little ambivalent on the expansion of the lore near the end during Glaeken's exposition.  Finding out that he and Rasalom are the last two people from a mythical First Age of Man that was erased by a cataclysm in the cosmic fight between the Light and the Otherness, of which they were the champions is kind of cool, but maybe stretched incredulity a little too much?  Maybe if it had been explained less explicitly and neatly it would have added a sort of cosmic horror element but it almost made it feel like the book's genre changed right at the end.

There's some tantalizing ideas in there though, like the Light not necessarily being Good and the oblique reference to Glaeken being made champion against his will and being in a sense condemned to fight this battle forever, despite the powers of Light and Otherness having lost interest in this world ages ago.  Maybe its just that it all hits way too late in the book to really land.

The reveal of Rasalom's true game and his obvious evil means the reader doesn't really have to grapple with Theodor's interesting moral question "Should I unleash this monster to kill Hitler?"   As the reader you know his release means the end of the world and the death of everyone Theodor was trying to save so there's no ambiguity or doubt as to the correct answer.  That's not necessarily a criticism; the book just ends up not being that kind of story.

Men Writing Women - Magda

Overall the writing in The Keep is fine.  It's not mind-blowing or anything but it's fine with some nice turns of phrases and some powerful moments.  The brief section in Woermann's point of view after he's been murdered and made into one of the undead is a really chilling and standout example.

My main critique of the actual writing mechanics has to do with Magda.  I'm not really the right person to unpack this in detail but some of the descriptive passages of how attractive Magda is under all her Romanian coverings were very...male gaze-ish though admittedly they did not really approach the "she breasted boobily" level of male writers writing women embarrassingly poorly.

One example:

She was beautiful. Try as she might to cover her hair in that old kerchief and bundle her body in those shapeless clothes, she could not conceal her femininity. It radiated through all her attempts to minimize it. It was there in the softness of her skin, in the smoothness of her throat, the turn of her lips, the tilt of her sparkling brown eyes. (p184)

This kind of thing crops up a couple of times and it makes her feel like a romance novel archetype, the uptight woman who loosens up when she meets the right man.  That's mitigated a bit by Glaeken also being treated like a romance archetype with regards to Magda, the morally dubious loner who is inexplicably drawn to this unusual woman he's just met.  The romance stuff was just a little clumsy and felt like character shorthand in a book that mostly avoided that pitfall.

Probably the most egregious, though very unintentionally funny, instance of this comes at the end when Glaeken takes the talisman from Magda before the final confrontation:

"Thank you, my Lady," he said softly. "I knew you had courage—I never dreamed how much." Magda glowed in his praise. My Lady...he called me his Lady. (p405)

Hey Magda, the evil monster is about to end the world, you want to keep your eye on the ball?

Having said all of that, flawed though the novel is, I enjoyed it and thought it had a lot of good stuff in it.  It was also a fast read so it isn't like it was a slog or a huge time investment.

Some Thoughts on the Film

In "A Freudian Fairytale on the Nature of Fascism," Ebiri says that:

Mann found in F. Paul Wilson's 1981 novel a good premise with which to pursue his own ideas, but he wasn't a great admirer of the book itself.  "Let's face it, the book was very messy," he told Starburst Magazine at the time.

Um...irony incoming...

Into the Chopper

Scott Tobias, in a piece for The Dissolve, quotes F. Paul Wilson as saying that the film was “visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible.”  That's... pretty dead on.  (Tobias says this opinion is "as close as an opinion comes to a statement of fact.")

It's obvious watching this film that there are scenes missing and even if I didn't know about the alleged 210 minute cut that was chopped down to 96 I would have guessed it got savaged in the edit, rather than being poorly written or having a lot of important things that were never shot.  A tell to me is that right before the final confrontation, Eva (the film equivalent to Magda) says to her father that the talisman "belongs to Glaeken Trismegistus not Molasar."   This is like 3 minutes before the end of the film and is the first time we've heard either name.

I found a script labeled as "First Draft: 04/13/82"on Script Savant and it does establish the character names far earlier and pretty much where you'd expect they'd be established.  Also, interestingly, this first draft script is far closer to the novel than the final film is, with all the missing scenes that make the movie incomprehensible being present.  So, again, the state of the final film doesn't seem to be a writing or intent issue.

If the book wobbles once Glaeken shows up, the movie completely falls apart.  The cause and effect of what is happening is muddled at best, inscrutable at worst and the climactic confrontation with Molasar and Glaeken is deeply weird and feels very... half assed and perfunctory.  The finale as written in the first draft script is very similar to the novel, but per Paul Bryan McCoy in a piece for the horror website Psycho Drive In, Paramount "refuse[d] funding additional footage for the originally planned ending – an epic effects-laden battle between Glenn and Molasar on top of the keep’s tower."

Adding to the chaos, special effects supervisor Wally Veevers died before post production finished and the filmmakers didn't know how he planned to finish the effects.   And then Paramount kiboshed the ending.

Given all of this it's understandable why the weapon Glaeken "assembles" is very poorly established and looks like a quarter staff lightsaber shotgun thing that he just shoots Molasar with in an almost laughable burst of 80s TV quality effects.  It looks like the filmmakers slapped an ending together last minute for as little money as possible.  Which they did.

It's a mess, but it was kind of fascinating for being such a wreck.  It's like we could see exactly when the budget ran out.

Filmmaking Stuff

Apart from the finale, the rest of the movie looks pretty good and has an interesting aesthetic.

Ebiri quotes Mann as saying:

The novel was the usual sort of solid gothic horror and I wanted to make something much more expressionist and basically make the whole thing as a dream.

And that's not director horseshit; it pretty accurately describes what the film's like.  It felt at times like a filmed stage show, especially inside in the keep, which put it in an odd middle ground between the reality of standard film and the unreality of live theater.  The effect is really interesting and is reinforced by the synth heavy Tangerine Dream score, obviously anachronistic to the World War 2 setting, which contributes to the not-quite-reality feel.

Even Glaeken and Eva's sex scene was really dreamlike to the point where it almost felt allegorical.   It's also kind of emblematic of the issues with the film; the scene looks great, is really portentous, atmospheric and surreal but, narratively, it comes out of nowhere, is not earned by the story, and has way too much emphasis for how unimportant it is to the rest of the film.  (More on this later.)   "Visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible" indeed.

Not surprisingly for a Michael Mann film, particularly one meant to be dreamlike, The Keep has and prioritizes a distinct sense of atmosphere.  Unlike in the book you don't get a good sense of the layout of the keep, or indeed even an establishing shot of the whole structure.  To me that made it feel really ominous, just this forbidding almost brutalist entryway, and then a dark almost featureless interior with small shafts of light making the shadows feel more threatening.  The place is otherworldly, a dark stage for this violent morality play.

The opening scene, following Woermann's convoy traveling to the keep feels very Michael Mann, and had a similar vibe to something like his film Manhunter or the cab driving scenes in Collateral.  Also weirdly it kind of reminded me of Bladerunner?   It's a really intense and gripping opening.

All of this good stuff in a movie that ultimately doesn't work very well is pretty interesting.  Usually a movie this messy is a mess all the way through because of incompetence or mismanagement but The Keep isn't a lazy cash grab by a hack director who didn't give a shit. Mann, after his Neo-noir debut Thief, deliberately branched out into horror and in a contemporary interview with Harlan Kennedy, seems excited for it.  He wanted to make this and had something he wanted to say.

Scott Tobias put it this way "The Keep is an authentic failure not a generic one."

Adaptational Stuff

Molasar / Rasalom

Probably the single biggest difference between the novel and the film is how they handled the antagonist, both in his framing and his ultimate nature.   Note that as the film doesn't have the reveal that Molasar is actually Rasalom, I'll be saying "Molasar" for the film character and "Rasalom" for the book one.

The film drops the misdirect that Molasar is a vampire and in fact it strongly frames him as a golem.  A golem is a creature from Jewish folklore, made of clay and brought to life by placing the name of God on it.  A famous golem story relevant to The Keep is the golem of Prague.   

In one version of that story, the 16th Century Rabbi Loew creates a golem to protect the Jewish residents of Prague from imminent pogroms and persecution.  But the golem goes on a rampage and destroys a bunch of the city.

In the film, the only statement about Molasar's nature comes when Eva posits that he's a golem and nothing in the film disputes this.  This golem framing does more strongly support the conflict the film seems most interested in, which is Theodor wanting to unleash Molasar to wipe out the Nazis without considering what might happen next.   

This conflict is present in the book but it doesn't carry the narrative weight it does in the film.  As I said earlier, Glaeken reveals that Rasalom is telling Theodor what he wants to hear as a manipulation to secure his release.  Rasalom clearly has no intention of holding up his end of the bargain but the film is so ambiguous on this point that, to me anyway, the framing tilted toward Molasar probably carrying through on it.

Molasar's first real appearance in the film is almost angelic.  He has just saved Magda from being assaulted by the SS and he carries her to her father as a swirling, hypnotic column of smoke, backed by ethereal music.  And this is not a character's perspective on him, as Eva is unconscious and Theodor isn't present yet.

In his first interaction with Theodor, Molasar says "You collaborate!" which, in absence of the manipulation angle, makes it seem like Molasar actually is genuinely offended by the Nazis.

Book Rasalom, even in his appearances before Magda and Theodor, is horrifying and oppressive with the stench of evil and death and his corruption of the town outside the keep as his influence grows is given far more attention in the novel.   The film only has two brief and, for a cold viewer, extremely confusing sequences with Father Mihai to show the wider effects Molasar is inflicting by his presence.  Rasalom seems far more evil in the book than Molasar does in the film.

All of this framing pushes the film's Molasar more in line with the golem of Prague story.

Film Glaeken does tell Eva that Molasar is the same as the evil afoot in the world but it's almost in passing and the visual language of the film doesn't confirm that statement.  And a statement like "he's just as bad as the Nazis" kind of requires you to show your work, which the book, for its part, does, however inelegantly at times.

(The word "golem" doesn't appear in the novel, by the way.)

Woermann and Kaempffer

I really liked how the film portrayed Woermann and Kaempffer, the characters I found the most compelling in the book.  Jürgen Prochnow (Woermann) and Gabriel Byrne (Kaempffer) are both excellent.

The first half of the book spends a lot of time in Woermann's point of view and you get a lot of insight into his thoughts and perspective and Prochnow captures these layers very well.  The film does a good job externalizing Woermann's distaste for the Nazi Party and revealing what was internal monolog in the book to the viewing audience.   For example, at the very beginning Woermann says to his subordinate Oster, who expresses a desire to go where the fighting is, that "We're all done fighting. Now we are the masters of the world."  Prochnow puts just a touch of bitterness on the second sentence, a subtle tell that he doesn't see the ascendence of the Nazis as a good thing.

Watching the film, I did miss the flinty satisfaction of book Woermann when he receives word the German Command is sending the SS to help;

Let the SS come. Woermann was now convinced there was an unarmed civilian of sorts at the root of all the deaths in the keep. But not the helpless cringing sort the SS was used to. Let them come. Let them taste the fear they so dearly loved to spread. Let them learn to believe in the unbelievable. (p20)

The film version of Kaempffer is less complex than the book version but Byrne is frightening in the role.  In the novel Kaempffer has a deep seated sense of inferiority to Woermann who is a decorated war hero and decades earlier witnessed Kaempffer's own cowardice on the battlefield.  This goes a long to way to explain why, despite his bluster, he is ultimately deferential to Woermann who is fairly insubordinate.  Kaempffer is also desperate to never show any weakness or fear, both because of the back stabbing nature of the SS politicking where someone is always looking for an excuse to take you down, and his own personal insecurity.  The book handles all of this pretty deftly but the film doesn't explore these aspects of Kaempffer.  It doesn't particularly matter, though; it's just a different take and nothing feels missing.

The film is more explicit about the parallels between Nazi evil and Molasar.  The book and film both have Woermann say to Kaempffer "what if this killer is like you?" when the SS officer kidnaps villagers to use as hostages to deter the as yet unrevealed Molasar, an act a repulsed Woermann doubts will work, but the film emphasizes this point when Woermann says, in a film only speech:

For once you're right, Kaempffer. I'm only half a man.  All that we are is coming out, here in this keep.  The man sees the truth.  And what truth do you see?  What are you discovering about yourself, Kaempffer, huh? 'I murder all these people therefore I must be powerful!' And you smash them down because only that raises you up. It's a psychotic fantasy to escape the weakness and disease you sense at the core of your souls. You have scooped the most diseased psyches out of the German gutter. You have released the foulness that dwells in all man's minds. You have infected millions with your twisted fantasies! And from the millions of diseased mentalities that worship your twisted cross what monstrosity has been released on this keep?  Who are you meeting, Kaempffer, in the granite corridors of this keep? Yourself.

Kaempffer, who doesn't have any history with Woermann in the film, responds by murdering him.  I think this is a good change for these versions of the characters and makes psychological sense: Kaempffer's only response to anything is to murder.  He proves Woermann right and then is killed by Molasar soon after.

This end for the characters is a more satisfying payoff than they get in the book as it gives their deaths some thematic resonance rather than just be a thing that happens.  They learn something about themselves and about evil.  It also helps that they don't really disappear from the film like they do for long stretches of the novel.  It's a positive side effect of the film cutting almost all the Glaeken and Eva stuff.  Speaking of which....

Glaekan and Magda/Eva

This pairing is really interesting to me because the book and film are pulling in opposite directions.  The book spends too much time on it and the film speeds through it so quickly that it's kind of incoherent.   For all my critiques of how Glaeken and Magda's relationship taking center stage works to the detriment of the more interesting ideas the book Is exploring, their relationship is at least set up, established, and makes a certain amount sense.  I just didn't find it compelling.

In the film, Glaeken shows up, meets Eva, and immediately sleeps with her in a scene that, as I mentioned, is super emphatic and feels like it should be the consummation of some epic love that had been deferred for too long.  It's framed like it's absolutely pivotal.  And it isn't.

It happens so quickly and after such minimal interaction between them that it honestly reads like he hypnotized her or something?  I don't think he's meant to have but it's so baffling that it's kind of the only explanation.  This is a moment a viewer unfamiliar with the source material is going to say "What the fuck is happening?"

I realize this weirdness is potentially because of how much of the film was left on the cutting room floor but based on something Mann said in that Harlan Kennedy interview, I think the dislocation might have been intentional.  He says this:

Now when Glaeken shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those characters was to make then not black-and-white. I put in things that are not normally considered to be good into Glaeken and qualities that are not evil into Molasar.

If that's the explanation as to why this plays out the way it does, I appreciate the big swing I guess, but it's still a miss.  Glaeken just isn't really a character in the film, he's just kind of an event, so it's hard to use him for anything other than direct plot functions.  Way, way, way more so than the novel, their "relationship" could be cut completely and have no effect on the rest of the story.   At least in the book their love is why he explains everything to her and why she believes him.  I suppose in the novel, then, that there's a critical expositional component to its inclusion but the film doesn't have this because Glaeken doesn't really explain anything.

It's weird.

Theodor Cuza

The last character I want to touch on from an adaptational perspective is Theodor, specifically regarding the differences in his faith and his agency.

Not surprisingly given the state of the final edit, Theodor's interactions with Molasar are extremely cut down in the film.  As I said, the Rasalom-pretends-to-be-a-vampire angle has been dropped and there is something interesting that is lost because of that.  In the novel, Rasalom, still pretending to be a vampire, recoils in horror from both a crucifix that Theodor was given and the name of Jesus Christ.  This causes a crisis in Theodor, as it seems to confirm that Christianity and not Judaism is true, as Rasalom has no reaction to Jewish holy words.  This is all part of Rasalom's con to shake Theodor's faith before conveniently offering him a service.

In the film, Theodor is an atheist and he never shows Molasar the crucifix.  Molasar reveals that the cross has no effect on him to Kaempffer, who tries to ward him off with it before being killed.  (Molasar almost gently taking it from Kaempffer and then slowly crushing it was a really cool moment.)   I'm a little torn on this as I think both choices are fine but I liked Theodor's crisis of faith, both as an idea and how it was written.

Well there's one thing in the film that is weird regarding this.  There's a late scene where Theodor's friend from the village Father Mihai screams at Theodor about how his own Christian faith is correct and Theodor was wrong and that Theodor will burn in hell.  It's the first sign of Molasar's creeping corruption of the village but it comes out of nowhere; presumably this was left over from a version of the film where the characters thought the cross worked on Molasar, but as it stands it's a confusing non-sequitur that probably should have been cut.

Theodor also has more agency at the end of the film than he does in the book.  In the film he realizes Molasar is lying to him when Molasar tells Theodor to kill Eva, who has arrived to stop Theodor from leaving the keep with the talisman.  Molasar overplayed his hand and it makes Theodor pause long enough to realize that if the talisman is the source of Molasar's power, he shouldn't be unable to touch it.  Theodor refuses to go any farther, giving Glaeken time to show up and kill Molasar.

In the novel, Theodor attacks and tries to to kill Magda when she arrives.  She manages to turn the tables and knock him out.  It's only when he wakes up and sees that Rasalom's talisman, which Magda is wielding to ward off the undead German soldiers Rasalom has raised to be his puppets, something film Molasar does not do, that Theodor asks any questions about the talisman.  It's a small change for the film, but I think a significant one for his character.

This also sidelines Eva even more than she already is.  She plays a pretty pivotal role in the climax of the novel, bravely and basically single-handedly stopping Rasalom from getting free at great danger to herself.

Gallimaufry

• Vinegar Syndrome is doing the Lord's work re: film preservation.  A note about the company name and mission from their website:

Our namesake is a constant reminder of what we’re fighting against. Simply put, the term ‘vinegar syndrome’ describes a chemical reaction that deteriorates motion picture film over time. Film preservation is a race against time, especially with long-neglected genres and underground films.

• The film keep is a little under-crossed.  Alexandru the caretaker says there are 108 crosses in the walls.  In the book there are 16,807.   (This isn't a real criticism, I understand that 16k crosses is a lot for a production.)   The abundance of crosses in the book is a great detail, though; it's kind of a disturbing and ominous sign.   

  
  

• Also: the crosses aren't actually crosses, they're sword hilts like the talisman keeping Rasalom in the keep.  Like I said, this is very much not conveyed by the film and the final weapon doesn't look like a sword anyway.

  
  

• The book has some nods to Lovecraftian horror, like the stash of occult books the Germans find in the keep.  One of the books is basically the Necronomicon from Lovecraft's stories.  Wilson is a fan of Lovecraft but The Keep itself isn't really a cosmic horror novel, not in the least because most everything is neatly explained. 

• Film Molosar explodes heads and sucks life energy rather than slashes throats and desanguinates bodies.

  
  

• In the novel, the Germans track down the Cuzas in Bucharest after the village innkeeper reveals that they have visited the keep a lot.  In the film, they get the Cuzas out of a concentration camp after Father Mihai tells them Theodor has studied the keep.  I like this change a lot.

  
  

• The book has a good build up of eerie dread at the beginning and takes its time showing the Germans getting picked off, one a night.  The film speeds through this and once Lutz is killed after accidentally freeing Molasar it skips right to day 5.   I would have liked to have seen how Mann built the tension.

  
  

• Rasalom's message to the invaders, scrawled in blood on a wall, is "Strangers leave my home."  In the film it is "I will be free!"  In both versions, the message makes Kaempffer think they are dealing with Romanian partisans.  Novel Rasalom is trying to keep the Germans at the keep so he can grow stronger from their fear and the message is meant as a taunt to get them to bring more men.  (He's also careful to not kill the officers, lest the enlisted men use the absence of authority to flee.)  Molasar's message in the film doesn't really have this subtext.

  
  

• The film's pan out shot of Lutz looking into the darkness of the keep's sub-cellar with only his head illuminated by his flashlight is really cool.  As the camera pulls away from him he's more and more isolated in the frame.  At the moment where Lutz is almost just a point in the blackness, the glowing light of Molasar flies towards him from behind where the camera is.  It's a great sequence.

  
  

• The light of film Molasar's early manifestations, before he has consumed enough life energy to have a body, reminded me of the deadlights in Stephen King's It.  (The Keep predates that novel by three years.)  The film also adds similar white light powers to Glaeken who can flash them from his eyes which visually suggests a connection to Molasar.

  
  

• The Dinu Pass where The Keep is set is fictitious

  
  

• Glaeken goes by Glenn he first arrives at the keep.  In the film he is played by Scott Glenn.  Coincidence!?!?  Most certainly.

  
  

• I wonder if Molasar's early appearance as swirling mist while holding Eva is a reference to the pillar of cloud that the Israelites follow in the book of Exodus.

  
  

• The Rabbi Loew from the golem of Prague story was a real person who live from 1524 to 1609.  Per the official Prague tourism website, according to legend he heard about the rampage while at worship while his synagogue was singing Psalm 92 and when he returned from de-animating the golem the congregation sang it again.  Because of this tradition, Psalm 92 is always sung twice in that synagogue.

  
  

• The Vinegar Syndrome 4k Special edition somehow looked like it was filmed on a digital camera, like it was almost kind of hyperreal the way something shot in greater than 24 frames per second looks on a high definition television.  As a cinephile, James doesn't have the motion smoothing on on his television so I don't think it was that, but maybe it was a result of the 4k restoration. (You should turn the motion smoothing feature off, too, or your movies will look more like soap operas.  Also, Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise will call you personally and yell at you.)

Conclusion

So where do I land on all of this?

Even with all my critiques I'd still recommend the book to anyone intrigued by the premise.  I don't think it's, like, essential reading but I liked it and it has lots of interesting things going on, even if it doesn't quite stick the landing.

As for the film, I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you are really interested in film, are curious about Michael Mann's oeuvre and style, or if you've already read the book.  From a technical perspective and as a failed adaptation it is pretty compelling and I've been thinking about it a lot.  It's a fascinating companion to the novel but on it's own it just doesn't work.  I had a lot of things to explain to James and he'd seen it once already.  A lot of the elements are great but as a narrative it's way less than the sum of its parts.

This piece really has been the spiritual successor to my series on The White Buffalo: a lot of ink spilled on an obscure film adaptation of an obscure novel where the book is far better than the movie.  (The White Buffalo is the better novel but The Keep is the more interesting film.)

Wait, is this, like, my thing now?

Bring it on, I guess.

-m