Flickers on the Wall: Halloween is a Time for Elder Gods

A brisk wind rustles the orange and brown leaves that still cling, tentatively, as if they are afraid of what might happen if they let go, to silhouettes of oaks and elms.  A cackle echoes under the sounds of creaking branches.  Or maybe not.  It’s hard to tell.  The light confuses everything; how light can confuse sound is a question for stark daylight. The gleam is orange and comes from the grinning mouths of poorly carved pumpkins that laugh at anyone who glances back, wondering if there is something in the darkness.  It is time to shiver and shake, or dance in the moonlight, depending on what side you’ve joined.  It is Halloween, the time of ghosts, goblins, and elder gods.

Is there a better month for movies than October?  Thirty days of creature features leading up to All Hallows Eve, which for me is a marathon of the very best in creepy cinema.  So let’s see if I can conjure up an elder god or two for your viewing pleasure.  My actual conjuring hasn’t produced results besides a lot of melted candles, irritated virgins, and fussy goats.  It’s hard to reach an elder god.  No local zip code.  Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much more luck in film where, more often than not, a character saying the word “Necronomicon” is an omen that you’re in for a pretty boring time.

For the few of you not in the know, I’m referring to H.P. Lovecraft.  His stories are required reading for anyone who wants to claim any knowledge of horror.  His Cthulhu mythos have sparked the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of readers and carries something powerful deep within his verbose prose.  I’ll leave a discussion of Lovecraft’s writing skills to a literary column.  It’s the films based on his works I’m interested in, and most of them are far from “cyclopean.”  For every Re-Animator, there are four The Dunwich Horrors.  Part of the problem is his languid protagonists, who have a tendency to faint—not exactly roles for the likes of Clint Eastwood.  Of greater difficulty is the cause of all that swooning.  Lovecraft writes of sights that cannot be comprehended, that a mere glimpse of will cause a man’s rational faculties to snap.  That’s hard to put on-screen, and should a group of filmmakers succeed, they’d go out of business from all the lawsuits. 

The situation is amplified with shorts.  The under-sixty-minute crowd has been painting Lovecraft’s stories on celluloid for years, with limited success.  No writer has more short films based upon his work.  No one even has half as many.  It isn’t surprising.  Lovecraft invokes fanaticism. It doesn’t hurt that his stories are generally considered public domain (there’s some debate, but as no one can find records of copyright renewals, almost everyone treats the stories as fair, and free, game).  Fanaticism and a lack of royalty payments don’t make up for low bank balances. Studios may not be able to pull off sights that will break minds, but they tend to do better than cash-strapped indie shorts makers.  

But all is not lost.  There are a few diamonds in the rough.  A thorough examination of Lovecraftian shorts could fill a book.  I’m less ambitious today and will take a look at just a few of the best.  For stalwart Lovecraft fans: don’t worry, I’ll revisit this subject in later columns.

Lovecraftian Silliness
Successes take several forms.  Lovecraftian films often work best when they stray far afield.  Sleeping, unknowable, and rather unpleasant gods cry out for spoofs and parodies.  Generally, it’s a one-joke routine, so the shorter, the better.  Few are more skilled at brief giddiness than the inspired devotees over at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.  Their music videos, Carol of the Old Ones and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen aren’t films but slideshows accompanying songs, but those songs will put a smile, and perhaps a little dread of ancient evils, on the faces of little tikes on Christmas morn.  Carol of the Bells goes for beauty over Xmas excess and so does its reformulated version, taking its message of solstice doom seriously, with just a wink.  Fishmen, with its faux-1950s crooning, just plows straight into wackiness:

I’m beginning to hear a lot of fishmen,
right outside my door;
as I try to escape in fright
to the Innsmouth Moonlit night,
I can hear some more. 

The jokes will be lost on anyone who’s never heard of this Lovecraft guy, but if you hold your copy of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos dear, or at least have read a story or two, you’ll laugh yourself into Arkham Asylum.  If you find the imagery just stuffing, but want more carols, you can pick up two complete CDs of apocalyptic holiday ditties: A Very Scary Solstice and An Even Scarier Solstice.
[Update: The fine folks at The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society dropped me a line to let me know that they are responsible only for the music; the videos are from anonymous souls who are lost in some alien cyclopean universe.]

For a more equitable balance between picture and sound, there’s The Lovecraft, a take off on the opening of The Loveboat.  When your ship’s doctor is Herbert West and your cruise director is Asenath Waite, you know you’re going to have a good time.  Again, the gag is for mythos aficionados only, but if you’re one, this is a pretty funny two and a half minutes.

Lovecraftian Influenced
For something a bit longer and with some meat in the humor, there’s Late Bloomer (13 min. Director: Craig Macniell, Writer: Clay McLeod Chapman).  Now I’ve always found coming of age stories odd.  Adolescence, for me, was an enjoyable time without any confusion over who I was or what I wanted.  Nor was I troubled by my discovery of what made females, well, female, and how the two genders fit together.  But apparently, I’m in the minority.  Late Bloomer takes us to Miss Lovecraft’s sex education class and to a boy who is having more trouble than most growing up.  It becomes clear to him that the strange drawing on the blackboard of lips within lips can only be a hideous monster that strives to take over the souls of innocent youths.  That such a being exists within his female classmates is almost enough to shatter his sanity.  And that’s before he learns of his own creature that cannot be named.  It all leads to a ritualistic summoning of elder gods, or their close equivalent.   

Chapman narrates for the boy as an overdosing speed freak.  Wonderfully warped, Late Bloomer is a hysterical (both in the sense of funny and insane) look at reproduction and the accompanying desires.  You can watch this SunDance selection online at cinema.lycos.com.

Lovecraftian Horror

While serious adaptations of Lovecraft’s works have fared poorer than comical ones, from time to time, one manages to capture the horrific aspects and still be entertaining.  From Beyond (10 min.  Directed/animated by: Michael Granberry) is one of those.  A man, responding to a note, sits alone in a room while his friend, Professor Tillinghast, speaks from a television.  Tillinghast explains how he has created a device, currently active in that very same room, that allows those within its field to see into another plane of existence, and vicious denizens of it can see out.  If you move, those monsters will destroy you.  

Taking his influence in equal parts from Lovecraft’s story, Stuart Gordon’s feature-length take on the same story, and Hellraiser II, Granberry creates a bizarre world of twisting, morphing creatures of clay.  The strangeness of that other land is clear, and it doesn’t seem at all surprising that one’s sanity could be stripped away from seeing too much.  The focus is on fear and the bizarre, without extra chatting.  The tale has been tightened up, giving the viewer no time to tire of the parade of images.

You’ll have to catch From Beyond at a local horror film festival, though you can find the trailer online at Red Hatchet Films

The pinnacle of Lovecraftian adaptations is the HPLHS’s The Call of Cthulhu (47 min.  Directed by: Andrew Leman. Adapted by: Sean Branney).  Modern film is an objective art form, even if you include David Linch.  You can interpret what the events mean, but not the events themselves.  What you see on-screen is—for the most part—what’s happening.  Lovecraft doesn’t translate nicely to that form.  His antiquated sentence structure (and word choice: “esquimaux”) and lyrical dialogue set inside theatrical melodramas come off as quaint when examined in stark reality.  Plus, there’s the whole problem of sights that will break the mind.  Leman and company found an elegant solution.  Why not use a different form of filmmaking, one that is lyrical, where nothing on-screen is meant to be real, and where overwrought is the norm?  The result is a silent Call of Cthulhu, edited to look like it was made in the 1920s, complete with white-powder makeup, intertitles, and the occasional hair on the lens.  A good choice, as that is when Lovecraft wrote the story and when it is set.  Silent films always had a dreamlike quality, and Lovecraft’s stories are best viewed as dreams. 

The plot follows the short story with hardly any alteration.  Scanning a deceased relative’s papers, a man learns about a worldwide cult that worships a sleeping elder god, Cthulhu.  He reads of dreams of a non-Euclidean city beneath the sea, of earthquakes and storms, and of the return of the old ones.  He believes what he discovered in those notes but goes on with his life until he sees an article about a ship returning from uncharted seas with one survivor and a strange stone idol.  Investigating further would only lead to madness, but that doesn’t matter.

The goal was to create a faithful adaptation, and in that, no film has ever been more successful.  No additions, no subtractions—except a brief alteration in how the crew of one ship boards another. This is Call of Cthulhu.  If you loved reading it, then you’ll be thrilled seeing the words come to life.  If the story bored you to tears, you may still have fun with this retro-expressionistic piece, where one silent image can replace a hundred adjectives.

It helps for the viewer to have a tolerance, if not a genuine affection, for the movies of the ’20s.  Part of my enjoyment comes from comparing the impossible angles of R’lyeh with those of the streets in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. If you need color and CGI and can’t name a movie that came out before 1980, you may find yourself out of your depth.

One thing that’s changed in eighty years is music.  There’s no chipper, out of tune organ here.  The lush score intensifies the action and the dread, making this Cthulhu more Lovecraft than Lovecraft.  The DVD offers the option of listening to the soundtrack with the clarity we’ve all come to enjoy or to switch over to “Mythophonic sound” for the tinny, hiss-filled experience usually granted by silent films.

Call of Cthulhu is the point of comparison for all future Lovecraft movies, and for all past ones.  When I include feature films, it is not the best (though it is high on the list), but it is the standard, and not to be missed.  I was lucky enough to catch it on the big screen, but it loses little upon home viewing.  It is available from Amazon.com.

So, pop enough corn for two or three giant, space-faring creatures, crack open the Necronomicon, and invite the nameless horrors into your home for a Lovecraft film festival. It’s the sane thing to do.