Posts tagged Lovecraft

Howard Lovecraft’s thematic influence is all over the popular media these days, draped like a flaccid mass of fetid shoggoth protoplasm over everything from comics to My Little Pony to the films of Guillermo del Toro, a director who gets HPL and mostly gets his world and Mythos right. But for every del Toro, there’s a dozen lesser directors for whom the addition of some tentacles and a raving scholar or two constitutes the apex of what can now be called “Lovecraftian horror”, a term that’s pretty execrable due to the raft of cinematic garbage it floats in on, sadly.

Still, there are some moviemakers out there who are #KeepingItRlyeh, and this without resorting to the obvious. (I’m leaving out direct or glancing adaptations of Lovecraft’s actual stories.)

The following are my Top 5 Films That “Do Lovecraft” Better Than Lovecraft…

5. Absentia
(2011, directed by Mike Flanagan, starring Katie Parker and Courtney Bell)
Part of the power of Lovecraft’s fiction derives from the extreme paranoia he brought to his conceptions of life and the universe. In Lovecraft’s worldview, the boundaries of our existence are porous and fragile, and the threshold between our world and other, more raw and powerful worlds is constantly being tested, probed, and violated. His Great Old Ones walk “primal and unseen” just the other side of our perceptions; indeed, they are “as one with [our] guarded threshold.” Director Mike Flanagan’s excellent Absentia plays with these concepts to chilling effect, situating one such porous boundary in a simple suburban underpass, a short tunnel regularly used by joggers and commuters. It is, of course, also a “weak spot” in reality, and the things that live and roam and abduct humans at random from behind the tunnel’s seemingly solid concrete walls are cleverly shown not-at-all, or at least only suggested at. An indie film that knows and practices the excellent rules for effective monster-ing: don’t show. Don’t show, and barely tell. Thanks to the two lead actresses, Parker and Bell, Absentia is not only terrifying, it’s sorrowful and bleak, and the Black Gnosis their characters reach through their exposure to the unknowable is tone-perfect and Keeping It R’lyeh.

4. The Corridor
(2010, directed by Evan Kelly, starring Stephen Chambers, James Gilbert, and Nigel Bennet)
The five-friends-go-to-a-cabin schtick has been done to death in horror films, but this brilliant Canadian production manages to turn the trope on its head and gift the viewer with great characters, believable male relationships, compelling interpersonal histories, and a completely bizarre terror wedded to wince-worthy depictions of madness and death. The terror is largely a psychic one, involving the augmentation of merely human senses, with the expected costs to human sanity. What makes this film Lovecraftian, aside from the elements of super-science and the supernatural, the uncanny and the unknowable? Unlike the vast majority of “cabin in the woods” thrillers, there are no women present: The Corridor is an all Y-chromosome joint. Removing the female dynamic and gender & power differentials from the narrative strips it down to some very base, and therefore genuine, places. There are no heroes in the film, no one to save and no mind that’s safe from what’s coming. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the all-male casting is often spoken of as a negative (which isn’t entirely untrue – certainly some diversity would likely have benefited HPLs stories) but here, you can see how it works. It’s Man (or men) laid bare and vulnerable before something incomprehensible, and with no ladies present, the import is all the more stark.

3. Communion
(1989, directed by Phillipe Mora, starring Christopher Walken)
Mora’s film, based on the runaway bestseller by Whitley Strieber, didn’t exactly hit the sweet spot of the public consciousness during the “alien abduction” craze. It was pretty much universally panned at the time (I blame the soundtrack by Eric Clapton – fiendish! inappropriate!) Watching it with hindsight now, one can see why folks couldn’t get excited about it. Clearly, the Greys (and their stubby little grunting servitors) were only interested in abducting and messing with the heads of sensitive creative types like Streiber (played wonderfully by the irrepressible Walken – the film is worth watching for his performance alone, though Streiber himself disapproved of his portrayal). And that’s why Communion (dated and overlong as it may be) is a Lovecraftian film that’s Keeping It R’lyeh: as an examination of the psyche of a human being pushed beyond reason by forces outside his ken, it’s excellent. But more importantly for our purposes here, it’s the manner in which Streiber tenaciously pushes through his eldritch experiences and out beyond the place of madness to a kind of grudging acceptance of his place in the universe, if not a full understanding of that place and the beings that reside there. For an 80s audience primed to expect Close Encounters-style alien shenanigans, Communion was likely too cerebral and preachy. Still, worth a viewing, with some genuinely ominous and unsettling imagery…

2. Pontypool
(2008, directed by Bruce McDonald, starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly)
A common theme running through Lovecraftian media products is the idea that Language Is The Key. Know the Right Words, Intoned from Some Black Book, Pronounced Correctly in the Proper Conditions? Good. You’re on the fast track to Madness and Death. The “magic word” is resonant because it’s kind of half-true already: language does have an almost viral affect on the world, or at least our brains, which we use to shape the world. But as a plot device it’s been so overdone for so long (it was a gag long before Bruce Campbell stood in that graveyard talkin’ “neckties”) that when a film like Pontypool comes along and subverts it, we almost don’t notice. On the surface, this Canadian production (yes, another one – “true North, strong and weird!”) is a zombie film (and was marketed as such upon release) but it is so much more. It’s an examination of language and meaning itself (or at least the malleability of language) and the insidious ways meaning (and its attendant phantom of Truth) gets its hooks into the meat of us and makes us dance. For the viewer with a R’lyehian mindset, Pontypool  is almost a cautionary tale on the dangers of locking the Self down with arbitrary meaning. All words are made up / all words are magic / meaning is a cage / cages kill … embrace the Black Gnosis and be free? Sure. Good enough for me. Bonus points for a brutal and Lovecraftian not-happy-ending, and a very strong performance by Stephen McHattie doesn’t hurt either.

"Most Boss Lovecraftian Protaganist Ever"? I'ma go with YES. So grizzled.

1. Beyond the Black Rainbow
(2010, directed by Panos Cosmatos, starring Michael Rogers, Eva Bourne, and Scott Hylands)
I’ve written a long-ish review elsewhere of Cosmatos’ one-of-a-kind film. It’s my top pick here for a thousand reasons, not least of which is Michael Roger’s thoroughly unsettling portrayal of a man of Science invaded, used, and ultimately discarded, by an alien intelligence. Black Rainbow has a glacial pace, and yet every second is packed with dire foreboding, very bad very mad science, and Lovecraftian implications. These latter may be missed due to, yes, the pacing, but also the hyper-nostalgic 80s film techniques Cosmatos clearly loves (the story is set in 1982, after all) and emulates to perfection. There is a portal (of sorts) and an entity (of a kind – and, again, never seen, only hinted at) and an asylum-like institution (clean and minimalist in its lines, but crawling with a madness-inducing sterility) but besides these subtly Lovecraftian set pieces, it is the utter dread evoked by Black Rainbow, the slow, crawling, inexorable build to destructive revelation that puts it in the top spot. People will tell you to see it while high, and mean it as a slight against the film and its viewers, but don’t. Or at least, see it sober first. Best advice I can give? Sit with it, breathe with it, get inside it … and let it in. “Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who, in antique and shadowy Khem, even took the form of Man?” Light is dark, and dark is light, babies! Enjoy. My full review is HERE

Honourable Mention: AM1200
(2008, directed by David Prior, starring Eric Lange, Ray Wise, and John Billingsley)
AM1200 is a short, so not technically a feature-length film, but that hardly matters, since once you’ve sat through its 40 minutes once, you’ll immediate want to do it again. And then possibly a third time, or maybe just from the moment Eric Lange’s on-the-run embezzler flees the flashlight in the woods and finds his way to the radio station.

...or at least until this guy gets out of his handcuffs because DAMN! That's not right!

That’s enough of a tease, right there. Go find this film. Watch it. And keep on Keeping It R’lyeh!

* * * * *

Are you Keeping It R’lyeh?

You may be, and just not know it! Unclear on the concept? Curious about the #BlackGnosis? Wondering how you, too, might take the #Cthulhusattva Vow? Order your copy of When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality by Scott R Jones and get right with the Great Old Ones! Limited physical copies remain, ebook versions plentiful like the electrons they’re made of!

* * * * *

Scott R Jones is the author of the short story collections Soft from All the Blood and The Ecdysiasts, as well as the non-fiction When the Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. His poetry and prose have appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku II, Broken City Mag, and upcoming in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.