I suspect that imdb may be to blame, not the film makers. Director Richard Stanley (Dust Devil, Hardware) discusses this at [
www.filmthreat.com]:
"#5 Why adapt “Mother of Toads†by Clark A. Smith? He’s a rather obscure author. I mean, I’m a fairly well read person and I had never even heard of him until now.
A: Strictly speaking, it isn’t really an adaptation. I thrived on Smith and Lovecraft when I was a child and I tried to weave elements from both private cosmologies into our ‘lil cinematic homage. Smith was drawing in elements already found in European folklore. But truth be told, we were given the heads-up by the Ouija board. Scarlett and I were screwing around with a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board that we had just picked up from Toys R Us and it told us very specifically to read the Smith story and mount a modern day re-imagining of the text.
#6 In my review I said your segment was a short story told with images rather than words. I said this not because it was adapted from the Clark story, but because I felt that it’s as if there’s a silent narration behind every scene, that every image is intended to be poetry. Do you feel the same way? Was that something you consciously tried to do, or is it just something that I’m seeing?"
While the film as a whole may well be a bit of a dog's breakfast, the excerpts from "The Mother of Toads" that I've seen look pretty decent (keeping in mind that this is an adaptation, not a transliteration into another medium). I am very excited by this!
Scott