Horror Fest Day Two: The Call of Cthulhu

Of all the movies playing at Horror Fest this year, I was the most curious how The Call of Cthulhu would play, because it takes a pretty audacious set of fanboys to make a movie in the digital era of H.P. Lovecraft's best known story and present it as an authentic silent film.

It doesn't always work, I'm afraid; there are a handful of instances where the editing is a little to well done and they didn't add quite enough grain and scratching to convince anyone it isn't actually from 1925 (and having watched mostly films from the silent era in the last few months, even the best restorations can't make movies like Metropolis or The Gold Rush look as good as The Call of Cthulhu does), but even still, the short film is quite a feat.

Without losing any of the dread of Lovecraft's story, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society manages to compress it all into forty five minutes and still not look hokey or stupid where many films might have. The silent acting is showy but not obvious, the music is very appropriate (where certain scores for Nosferatu are painfully not) and the art design, lighting, and effects really sell the dream world of the elder gods. Even something that has the potential to be disastrously silly, like the Louisiana swamp sequence, are still eerie and atmospheric. The Cthulhu statues look good, and so does the big guy himself, even as a stop motion puppet (ala the dinosaurs in The Lost World).

Overall I'd have to say that the quibbles are minor and that the short itself really is a success where many Lovecraft adaptations are failures (or very good bastardizations, like Stuart Gordon's filmography.)

As I was walking some folk outside early this morning, our neighbors downstairs (who were having a party) asked them if they were "coming out of Horror Fest?" when they replied in the affirmative, one guy asked "damn, was it scary?"

I felt good. Our reputation precedes us.