For finishing up this year’s october halloween theme I went with two films I’d been wanting to see for years but had not been aware of their availability. These adaptations of the H.P. Lovecraft stories done by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society with the conceit that the films were done on the same year that Lovecraft wrote the stories.
The first of these two films, Call of Cthulhu was done in the style of a German Expressionist silent film. As with the book it follows an unnamed scholar as he researches a world wide plague of dreams while being drawn towards the terrible truth of the dread sleeping god Cthulhu.
You can tell the crew is in the process of learning their craft and it’s easy to spot technical errors if you’re in full critic mode, an obvious blue screen here some off lighting there… but this is just nitpicking. Otherwise they do a wonderful job capturing the mood and the period and any of my complaints of the other mistakes are easily forgiven by the way they were able to turn Thomas Street, in my home town of Providence Rhode Island, into a 1920s version of itself using a combination of masks, clip art and model cars.
The rest of time the style they are cribbing does wonders, allowing the team to do the non euclidean architecture of R’lyeh in cardboard and even the cheap stop motion animation of the Cthulhu puppet works to make it look like it’s something that exists outside of our perception.
Their next project, Whisperer in the Darkness brings us to the golden age of the Universal Monster. Telling the story of an academic who is contacted by a Vermont farmer who is fighting a loosing battle against an alien presence known as the Mi-Go, Whisperer in the Darkness has always been one of my favorite of Lovecraft’s stories because it was the first story that transformed the mythos for me from something that was just a monster of the week, which I found mildly derivative of Edgar Allen Poe, to the disturbing cosmic horror that he’s known for.
The movie does a very good job following the story abandoning the harrowing correspondence that makes up much of the original short story’s narrative but at the same time embellishing not story extensively This is all well and good. If I have one main problem with Lovecraft as a writer is that while a master of building up the mystery and tension would frequently, for lack of a better word, blow the punchline. While this is certainly a constraint of the magazines he was writing for it usually spoiled the story for me. Here the writers give Whisperer in the Darkness, which suffered from one of those endings, a third act which makes for a more exciting and sit on your hands terrifying climax.
As mentioned before the team behind the HPLHS have done have improved their craft exponentially. The cast does a wonderful job in their roles and the look of the thing is spot on. The 1930’s vibe allows for realism to be a very relevant thing to the point where you are able to fudge quite a lot since things are supposed to “look fake” therefore they were able to hide a lot of the budgetary constraints in this format. Because of this The Mi-Go Look great looking like well made puppets when they are really fairly reasonable cgi. It also allows for very convincing makeup effects allowing for a very convincing Charles Fort to be a supporting character
