| Title | The golden age of horror: The Call of Cthulhu (2005) |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel and Grandy Peace |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | October 13, 2014 |
Chris: Conceived, written, and created by a group of H. P. Lovecraft enthusiasts, this film aims to bring the pulp horror author's best known short story to the screen for the first time in a faithful adaptation..
Read the full articleI randomly came across this movie on Netflix a year or so ago and I really enjoyed it. The choice to make it in this style really helps play up the strange and mysterious nature of the story. Not something I thought I would like, but it works well.
Thanks for the scoop, gents. This sounds quite intriguing.
One of the few movies in your series I've actually seen. One overriding image abides in my mind from this, and it's not Cthulhu or R'lyeh. It's when a patient in an asylum (is it Matt Foyer's "The Man"?) is wheeled backwards out of the room where he was being interviewed. He has this horrified or desperate look on his face--I forget if there was dialogue to go with it--and with his period make-up and the lighting as he gets swallowed in the darkness of the doorway... it just felt like the moment when the film lived up to all its ambitions. It's genuinely creepy and startling. It is enhanced by the silence, as you imagine the sound of his crying voice. It sucks you in for a moment when a lot of the movie, unavoidably, forces you to keep it at arm's length. I don't know if this shot stood out for you guys, but as you can tell, it really did for me. Need to see this again.
Did anyone see their Whisperer in the Darkness? I was excited for it when it was about to come out, but then I never could find a place to see it and eventually forgot about it.
I haven't yet seen Whisperer in the Darkness, but I think I will seek it out in a few months when I'm in the mood for something like it.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of this. Must check it out!
For some reason I'm reminded of ''Whistle and I'll Come to You'', a creepy British 1960s tv movie. It isn't Lovecraft, but it feels influenced by that stuff. It's surprisingly scary, and does great things with basically nothing.
Guys,
So happy that you picked this one. The descent into madness must have been a fun thing to act out in a silent film.
I am bummed that I won't have instant streaming for this one on Scary Movie Night later this month.
The director, Andrew Leman, does great guest narration on http://hppodcraft.com/ for extra credit Lovecraft fans.
And no, I do not work for those guys. I just like good pod-casts. That's why I am here!
It was on cable a few months ago, and I didn't realize it was by the same crew until just now. It's not as effective (which I think is partially due to the fact that if you know the twist going in the whole story really isn't as effective), but tonally it manages to accomplish the same thing. It feels a lot more like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone than anything else.
Somewhere in the recent past I either read something about this movie, or perhaps a book/short story it was based on? I'll check it out, sounds very cool.
I'm so glad to see this movie getting some love. I can only second everyone else's comments, that I was hoping for a cute diversion and came away thoroughly impressed with it, back when I saw it a few years ago. Excellent choice!
I have not seen Whisperer but I want to. I had forgotten about the project until this re-watch.
It's weird how this micro budget indie flick recreated a 1920s silent movie a hundred times better than Oscar winning The Artist.
Let's not go crazy, here.
I know you sort of addressed this already, but HP Lovecraft is a great writer. It's not that the octopus gods and various death-cheating schemes he describes are so brilliant; it's the writing that's given him cultural longevity.
Lovecraft's writing is frequently wooden, to say the least. He has his good moments, but nobody looks back and talks about Lovecraft specifically because of his writing. His ideas and visions were amazing though, and why he has a legacy (a deserving legacy).
I really need to check this one out. Regarding the comments about Lovecraft not being a very good writer - I don't see that as particularly controversial. Don't all (most?) Lovecraft fans recognize that his themes often resonated in spite of his clumsy prose?
What my man Grandy said. Lovecraft came up with incredible ideas and there are a lot of his short stories I love. I love them, though, in spite of his writing, which I think should say something for just how good he was at the imagination part of things. As a stylist, yuck. I've had people try to tell me that this was how people in the 1920s wrote and I want to throw a Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, or Stein novel at them and say "No! They didn't!".
I have a theory about Lovecraft, but I'm going to involve music in it, so feel free to roll your eyes and move on. ;) Let's say that you and a couple of your friends have kind of cool Mod 1960s haircuts. Let's say that you and your friends play instruments, too. Let's say that a rich uncle bequeaths to you a bunch of Vox guitars and amps, and you and your cool Mod friends start a band. It's only natural that the first thing you're going to sound like is going to sort of be maybe Beatle-ish, or Stones-ish, or Kinks-ish, right?
Lovecraft was a big fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, and Bulwer-Lytton. As a young man, he actively emulated those guys, and when you're imitating the style, you're going to start imitating the substance a bit, too. That's what Lovecraft's fiction is doing, I think. It's a clumsy imitation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's style from 60 years' previous, but thanks to the need to write for pulps, and thanks to Lovecraft's own imagination, it evolved into something of his own vision. And yes, that's praising him. Very, very few writers are good enough to transcend their stylistic limitations. H. P. Lovecraft is one.
