This is, hands down, the most faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's writing ever made. It is also the best. Frankly, I don't know what movie people who've posted here saw, but it was either not "The Call of Cthulhu" or they were just too drunk/stoned/out of it to get it. I mean, I'm reading reviews complaining about the lousy CGI work and/or the dumb fight scenes
except that there are NO fights and NO CGI AT ALL used, it's all done via stop-motion animation. In one of those "stroke of genius" moves that were actually caused by budget limitations, it was decided to make it just as if a studio in the 1920's had decided to adapt HPL. Thus, it came out a silent movie, in black and white, and using (as much as possible) the techniques and technology of 1920's movie-making. Somehow, the old-fashioned technique, coupled with the filmmakers' adherence to HPL's dictum that the most important component in horror is atmosphere and not action, makes this little 47-minute film work very, very well.
The film is divided into three parts, with a wraparound story that connects them just enough to get the sense of world-wide, psychic weirdness that Lovecraft was so good at conjuring. The story begins with an unknown man, pale and drawn, working on an impressionistic crossword puzzle and pleading with another man to take a sheaf of manuscripts that are his life work and burn them burn them all. The manuscripts tell three stories: the increasingly surreal and frightening dreams of a young Boston artist named Wilcox that culminate in an attack of "brain fever" that wipes out all memories of his dreams, the narrative of a New Orleans police inspector investigating reports of strange rituals and missing people in the swamps, and the deliriously bizarre narrative of the lone survivor of a ship that encountered a strange city of cyclopean masonry and bizarre non-Euclidean geometry in the South Pacific and the lone inhabitant they meet there dread Cthulhu himself. As the young man is taken away in a wheelchair, he pleads with his interviewer one last time to burn it all. The film ends with the interviewer opening one of the manuscripts and reading two ominous paragraphs that are actually the very first paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu".
The noirish lighting and naturalistic acting go a long way towards selling this movie. The score (presented in Mythophonic sound!) is also a crucial component in helping to maintain that sense of unfocused other-worldly dread, that there are things and events in motion that we are (almost) powerless to prevent because humanity is not much more than an after-thought in the plans and schemes of beings that are as far above us as we are from an amoeba. And that's where the horror lies, in the realization that if we could see how little we humans really matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things and how powerless we really are, we would run screaming from the light of knowledge to the security and safety of ignorance and a new dark age.
Here's to the people at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for a job well done. Let's hope that this is not their only attempt at filming Lovecraft because when a ballplayer hits a home run on his first at-bat, you know you're seeing the start of a Hall-of-Fame career.
The film is divided into three parts, with a wraparound story that connects them just enough to get the sense of world-wide, psychic weirdness that Lovecraft was so good at conjuring. The story begins with an unknown man, pale and drawn, working on an impressionistic crossword puzzle and pleading with another man to take a sheaf of manuscripts that are his life work and burn them burn them all. The manuscripts tell three stories: the increasingly surreal and frightening dreams of a young Boston artist named Wilcox that culminate in an attack of "brain fever" that wipes out all memories of his dreams, the narrative of a New Orleans police inspector investigating reports of strange rituals and missing people in the swamps, and the deliriously bizarre narrative of the lone survivor of a ship that encountered a strange city of cyclopean masonry and bizarre non-Euclidean geometry in the South Pacific and the lone inhabitant they meet there dread Cthulhu himself. As the young man is taken away in a wheelchair, he pleads with his interviewer one last time to burn it all. The film ends with the interviewer opening one of the manuscripts and reading two ominous paragraphs that are actually the very first paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu".
The noirish lighting and naturalistic acting go a long way towards selling this movie. The score (presented in Mythophonic sound!) is also a crucial component in helping to maintain that sense of unfocused other-worldly dread, that there are things and events in motion that we are (almost) powerless to prevent because humanity is not much more than an after-thought in the plans and schemes of beings that are as far above us as we are from an amoeba. And that's where the horror lies, in the realization that if we could see how little we humans really matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things and how powerless we really are, we would run screaming from the light of knowledge to the security and safety of ignorance and a new dark age.
Here's to the people at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for a job well done. Let's hope that this is not their only attempt at filming Lovecraft because when a ballplayer hits a home run on his first at-bat, you know you're seeing the start of a Hall-of-Fame career.