![]() ![]() Understandably that several corners were cut for reasons of costs, but their love for Lovecraft did make up the rest. ![]() ![]() They did the same for their previous 47 min short "The Call of Cthulhu", which paid itself back eventually. We learned about the 350K$ budget, financed by the film makers out of their own pockets. The director was present at the screening and answered several questions during the final Q&A. In anticipation I was a bit afraid that parts of the film would develop slowly, not unexpected given the original material, but my fear proved completely unjustified. I hate intervening text boards showing the dialog, known from silent movies. I'm very glad that we got sound with the film. It even seemed the natural way after some minutes. The film makers decided to run the film in black&white, which did not hinder me at all. I'm prepared to accept that my reading sample was wrong and my bad impression is just as wrong. Many alternative books and stories in this same genre that I've read, attracted me much more. Though not having read any within more than 30 years, I'm still stuck with an impression of adjective-overloaded descriptions of monsters and their attributes. I must confess that I'm not fond of most Lovecraft's stories. I booked it out of curiosity, wondering how a modern film maker would treat the 1930's source. I saw this film as part of the "Imagine" film festival 2011 in Amsterdam. Highly recommended!Įntertaining modernized adaptation of an old Lovecraft story, but still faithful enough to its original source You just have to love movies, especially ones with great atmosphere and straight-up acting and a storyline that keeps you involved every step of the way. You don't need to be a Lovecraft fan to love this movie, though it wouldn't hurt you probably don't even need to be a fan of old movies. The monsters are more or less what one might expect to see in an early 1930s film based on an HP Lovecraft story, but that doesn't make them any less menacing or eerie. (Lovecraft's story ends at about the one-hour mark of the film, which continues for another 40 minutes or so.) The atmosphere is terrific, and the style of the story-telling really permits the audience to feel themselves back in the early 1930s, even up to the various mad-scientist gadgets that evoke such classics as the lab in the original "Frankenstein" film. This film, created by a collective called the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, is clearly lovingly made ? done in black and white and in the style of the early 1930s, it tells one of Lovecraft's more evocative tales and then expands upon it. And that is just the beginning of the discoveries that await him. But when he arrives in the hills of Vermont, the local folk he meets all seem downright hostile, and when he arrives at the farm, he finds that Akeley himself is not well. So when he receives a strange letter from Akeley that completely up-ends the farmer's previous fears about alien creatures and that invites Wilmarth to come to the farm to discuss the wondrous things that he has learned, well, Wilmarth can't possibly turn the invitation down. Wilmarth is curious, especially after he finds the original manuscript of a very rare book of folklore collected in Vermont back in the 1800s, containing stories which seem to correspond to what his farmer correspondent, Henry Akeley, has described in his letters. He has also been carrying on correspondence with an intelligent, yet fearful, farmer in Vermont, who insists that the strange beings seen in the floodwaters are real, and are all around his farm. In 1928, Miskatonic University folklore professor Albert Wilmarth enjoys debunking theories of the occult, even though he is roundly trounced ? on radio, no less ? by Charles Fort when they have a debate on whether certain stories in Vermont that have come to light following a flood are based in fact. An Excellent Adaptation of "Unfilmable" Lovecraft ![]()
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