The Call of Cthulhu [2005]

An ambitious, polished amateur effort, directed by Andrew Leman and scripted by Sean Branney of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. It faithfully adapts Lovecraft's key 'Cthulhu Mythos' story into a 47-minute silent picture, adopting the cinema style of Lovecraft's times. It's no surprise that the story hasn't been done as an above-ground film, since it's very recalcitrant - an interlocking series of anecdotes which take place over fifty years and are assembled by a scholar going through a collection of documents left by an eccentric great-uncle. Here, we get dramatisations of every one of Lovecraft's nested tales with individual sequences highlighting a sculptor [Chad Fifer] who has created a clay bas-relief of the squidhead God after a bad dream, an explorer who remembers losing an eye in 1877 to a Cthulhu-worshipping 'esquimaux', a police raid on a degenerate swamp society of voodooists [Lovecraft's feelings about 'lesser folk' show through here] and, most elaborately, a ship which encounters briefly-risen R'lyeh and Great Cthulhu itself.

Using black and white cinematography, stylised acting, a certain amount of Caligarism for swamp and sunken city sets, and effective glimpses of stop motion, the film manages to approximate Lovecraft's peculiar vision. Especially good is a flash of Cthulhu reaching out, Night of the Demon style, as the prow of a ship on a rolling sea briefly makes him visible to terrified sailors. Much of Lovecraft's prose makes it to the screen, either in intertitles or highlit on manuscripts left by Professor Angell [Ralph Lucas] and it signs off exactly like the story with the passage about man's merciful inability to correlate all the information he knows. This is the key to Lovecraft's approach, asking the reader [now viewer] to consider all the evidence and draw a terrible conclusion - Great Cthulhu is Coming! - then see all manner of diabolism, madness and degeneracy as symptoms of a great evil sweeping across the globe.

The film resists leaping ahead in time and, say, tying in the story's ill-omens with the rise of fascism. Though he moderated his opinions later, the Lovecraft of 1926 would more likely have seen the Rise of Cthulhu as an allegory of that invented conspiracy of Jews and other undermen that the Nazis harped on about. The upshot is a film to please purists, with an entire mode of narrative that probably counts as an in-joke - but its silent film techniques aren't employed the way Guy Maddin uses antiquated cinema to wrestle with the material. If anything, this is the Merchant-Ivory take on Lovecraft - faithful to the letter, refraining from argument with the ideas or the characters [what there are], admirable and charming [and occasionally chilling] but essentially a reminder of how good the story is rather than how fine a film can be.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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