Cthulhu Calls!

The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft really hits me in my sweet spot. Its blend of weird mysticism and quasi-science along with the very mundane nature of the characters involved really is a heady tonic. Lovecraft's protagonists are always very flawed types, overly intellectual often and limited in their understanding of an existential threat by their reliance on reason. Lovecraft's world makes sense of a sort, but it's never sensible. I first ran across Lovecraft thanks to those great books you could order at school. I drank of Lovecraft early and since then, very often.


My favorite Lovecraft story is "The Colour Out of Space", but a close second is "The Call of Cthulhu", the seminal story around which scores of later writers have fashioned a broader mythology ripe with demons and threats of all sorts. The success of this story, like many of Lovecraft's is the way it's told, through limited perspectives and a faux documentary approach that grounds the hyper-weird happenings making them seem all the more fantastical.

A weakness of broad universes filled with magic and such is that eventually it all gets too commonplace. Lovecraft's work still has that neat flavor of the real world with just a tiny dash of bizarre. It's there, but if you choose not to look in its direction you can spend your life completely at ease and die a reasonably happy soul. But if you should ever chance to catch sight of the danger lurking just behind the shadows, you are destined for a less happy end. Once seen, it can never be unseen, and it transforms the life and the soul perhaps of the unfortunate to fall into its clutches. That's horror!

The Call of CThulhu is a wonderful adaptation of the Lovecraft classic, by people who clearly get the Lovecraft thing. The H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society made a silent movie, a throwback as if someone in Lovecraft's own time had made a movie of the events that H.P. writes about. There is a compelling nature to the story as it unfolds from bits and pieces of information and the threat builds and builds and builds. But alas like any attempt to capture the macabre essence of Lovecraft on film or even in any graphic image, the thing rendered is almost always somewhat less than the thing imagined. Lovecraft was the absolute master of almost describing a thing in such a way as you almost saw it. He actually was able in a way to describe the "indescribable", and that's a master trick few if any other writers have been able to tumble to.

The movie falls victim to this when inevitably Cthulhu must be seen. It's a pretty good rendering of the ancient demon, but still falls short (as it must) of what I imagine the ultimate terror to be. That's not really the fault of the film, just a flaw in the nature of the medium. That said, the movie is very successful at establishing the mood and mileau of a Lovecraftian world.

Here's a trailer for the movie.

I highly recommend this movie if you can snag a copy. It's good fun and the extras talking about how this shoestring project got made are pretty interesting too, though it will dispel even more of the magic of the storytelling.


Do answer Cthulhu's call.

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