Short Film Friday: The Eldritch Dreams

Well-calculated and with Necronomicon included

This week in my "whatever takes my fancy" corner, have something rather special, namely a 1945 episode of the great, classic audiodrama show SUSPENSE (bold caps brought to you by DRAMA) adapting Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror".

Apart from being a Lovecraft adaptation having been made decades before the real Lovecraft renaissance, this is also an early example of what I like to call POV horror (you may go with found footage, of course), pretending to be an actual newscast, though a very peculiar one. It's not the first one of its kind, obviously, at least Welles's "War of the Worlds" did this sort of thing earlier and more straight-faced.

Add Ronald Colman (I probably should call him RC) to the mix of HPL, POV and one of the best old time radio shows, and you my kind of catnip.

If you don't already know the adaptation, why not give it a listen here:

The Rizen (2017)

1955, in what we will later learn is an underground research facility below Kent. A woman (Laura Swift), let’s call her Frances for that’s what her documents say, awakens while being dragged through a dark – probably dank – tunnel by a humanoid creature with a bandaged head. I hope you like this tunnel, for you’ll look at it for large parts of the rest of the film. Anyway, Frances manages to bash the creature’s head in, and begins to make her way through the underground facility. Unfortunately, she’s suffering from a bout of amnesia, so she has no idea where she is, why she’s there, or what she is supposed to do. Gradual flashbacks (aka the only parts of the film not taking place in the grey and black tunnels) reveal that she has been prepared – programmed more like it – to do something very important indeed. But what? Who knows? On the positive side, she is rather good at killing the bandaged creatures, and soon saves a fellow amnesiac wearing the uniform of a movie scientist (Christopher Tajah) to team up with. Eventually, they realize the researchers have ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe through which something very nasty is trying to enter.

Not completely to my surprise, given how many of my favourite plot and background element The Rizen hits, I found myself enjoying Matt Mitchell’s piece of cosmic pulp horror quite a bit. It’s a film where I have to give fair warning, though. This was clearly shot for very little money, so there’s quite a bit wrong with the film on a technical level: there’s the general tediousness of watching characters spending much of their time in blackness with greyish walls that suggest little money for production design, acting that’s often pretty terrible (with Swift the obvious exception by being alright for many of her scenes and actually good in the rest), and a running time that’s about twenty minutes too long and could have been much improved by cutting out the ineffective humour and the ill-placed “romance”.

There’s also the strange phenomenon of how much better the flashback sequences look – they even have actual set design! -  and how much more professional the actors in them are as well – even Swift who is in both seems just much more in control in these scenes.

The thing is, despite the flaws, there’s a fine creative core to the film, with some well realized ideas about weaponized occult research, some mysteries that work well because the film isn’t answering them, and some really fun monsters, all involved in a plot that really knows how to do the pulpy side of cosmic horror justice. Despite its low budget, The Rizen effectively builds up the background to its horrors in the flashbacks, and ends on a genuinely exciting climax. On the monster side I am particularly fond of the bandaged head design we get for most of the time. It’s much creepier than cheap masks or CGI and uses the power of a viewer’s imagination to good effect, while also getting an excellently weird explanation later on. The action scenes, even though a bit repetitive, are much better realized than is normal in this sort of thing, too. They feel weighty and desperate, while still keeping the silliness that makes this pulpy rather than classicist cosmic horror. I suspect Swift’s background as stunt performer helped quite a bit in this regard.


While The Rizen obviously resonates with those parts of me that thrive on Lovecraft and what something like “Delta Green” made of some of his ideas and creations, there are some thematic concerns on display here that belong to it alone, thoughts about free will, heroic sacrifice and heroism that fit very well into the rest of the film’s ideas. It seems rather telling – as well as awesome – that the most important heroes here are a woman and a black man.

Past Misdeeds: Die Farbe (2010)

aka The Colour Out of Space

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The 70s. The father (Patrick Pierce) of Arkham academic Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise) disappears while retracing his own steps during and shortly after World War II in rural Swabia. Jonathan, deeply concerned, follows him, only armed with a pack of old photos.

At first, Jonathan seems to be completely out of luck in his mission. Nobody in the small village he traces his father to seems to have seen him, but at last one of the villagers, a certain Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch), recognizes the elder Davis not on the contemporary photo but at least from a thirty year old army picture.

Pierske tells Jonathan a weird story about how he met the elder Davis when he himself came home from the front, and tried to warn Davis and his men off of visiting a neighbouring farm for reasons Pierske then goes on to explain to Jonathan by way of flashing back to a time shortly before the War.

A meteorite crashed down on the farm of Pierske's (in the flashbacks played by Marco Leibnitz) neighbours, the Gärteners (Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider, Leon Schröder, Philipp Jacobs, Jonas Zumdohme). The scientists coming to investigate were confused by the thing's curious properties: meteorites don't, after all, generally shrink over time, nor do they have properties strangely at odds with what we know about physics. Shortly before the meteorite disappeared forever during a lightning storm, the scientists found some sort of capsule inside of it, setting free an unearthly colour when trying to take a sample.

With no physical evidence at all anymore after the disappearance of the meteorite, the scientists left. However, strange things began to happen on the Gärteners' farm. Fruit (and later some animals) started to grow freakishly large, but they also developed a foul taste that made them unsalable; the trees in the family's orchard took on disquieting properties, moving when there wasn't any wind to move them. And slowly, one by one, the family members began to change, growing unstable, mad, and ill through the agency of something not of this Earth.

Of course, the Gärtener's farm is the one Jonathan's father was visiting after the War; and it might just be that something he saw there has now called him back in some way.

Huan Vu's (whom you might know as the director of the Warhammer 40K fan film Damnatus that was killed by the angry lawyer brigades of Games Workshop) Die Farbe is a very fine adaptation of one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, the wonderful "The Colour Out of Space". At first, I was rather sceptical concerning the story's relocation from New England to Southern Germany, but for the most part, this change of location is to the film's advantage. Sure, a viewer has to make a bit of an effort to accept the actors speaking English with clear (yet not very heavy) German accents in the film's beginning as Americans, and then, once the film's narrative has relocated to Germany, Ingo Heise's Jonathan speaking German with a fake American accent, but the alternatives would surely have ruined what is after all an independent low budget production. Trying to pretend Germany is New England would have either robbed the film of its often impressive and mood building outside location shots, or threatened to make unintentionally funny what desperately needs to be earnest. A bit of accent trouble is much preferable.

This is especially the case because Vu uses the individuality of rural Swabia so well, giving the film the all-important sense of place that - as I can't help but repeat again and again in write-ups - is one of the most effective ways for a low budget movie to gain a character all its own; competing with high budget films - European or American - on their own terrain generally means ignoring the advantages this kind of production has over them. Plus, the Swabian-Franconian Forest can be - filmed in the right way like it is here - an excellently creepy place, just the kind of locality where the intrusion of the Weird seems believable.

Die Farbe not only manages to evoke a place, but also specific times, through simple yet effective tools. Initially, I thought the three time levels of the narrative were unnecessarily complicated, however, it soon became clear that the nested flashbacks really were the best way to tell Vu's version of Lovecraft's tale, and that - not a given in independent horror - Vu actually knows how to handle this sort of structure without the resulting film becoming tedious or needlessly confusing. It's also nice to see a Lovecraft adaptation that does not feel the need to permanently include winks and nods towards the author’s other works. There's a guest appearance of the Danforth Memorial Library at the beginning, but that's mostly that.

This admirable sense of restraint runs through the majority of the film's writing. The movie prefers to underplay many of its dramatic and horrifying beats, all the better to be able to get its viewers with those it doesn't underplay. It's spiritually as close to Lovecraft's writing in this particular story as possible, using those of the writer's techniques that are applicable to film, and only changing the story's framing instead of its major beats. The only part of the writing I'd criticize is the twist in the last act that doesn't ruin the film, but also doesn't do anything to improve it. As plot twists go, it isn't horrible, it just seems a bit unnecessary.

On the visual side, Vu makes the interesting decision to film in black and white, except for the Colour itself, which is a clever and elegant way to get around the question of how one shows a colour that is indescribable - when the world is black and white, any colour will look Weird. For once, I also find it impossible to be annoyed by the use of CGI; in fact, CGI seems to me the right method to bring a living colour without a body as we understand it to life (such as it is). After all, a thing without body mass can't suffer from the typical problem of low budget movie CGI of looking like it has no body mass.


All these elements (plus some decent to good acting) add up to a piece of contemporary independent horror cinema I for once find easy to praise; I am, as it turns out, a sucker for films whose directors make one intelligent decision after the other and even improve on these decisions through thoughtful execution.

In short: The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2015)

Venice, California. When his son Jason (Eric Gorlow) asks retired private detective August T. Harrison (Jerry Lacy, who apparently in younger years played another private detective on supernatural soap “Dark Shadows”, among other roles) to help out an acquaintance of his with an investigation, the old gent soon finds himself confronted with rather more cosmic mysteries than he could have expected.

That acquaintance, Eleanora Williams (Maggie Wagner), asks August to find a former associate of hers named Drake Johnson (Max Landwirth) who has disappeared; or rather, she wants August to find some film footage Drake apparently absconded with. At first, the elderly detective’s investigation seems to lead nowhere, but eventually, he’ll learn a bit more about the true nature of the universe than can strictly be good for anyone, and will have to try and prevent the end of the world as we know it. He might even meet one Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Nathan Wilson), deceased yet rather sprightly.

Lovecraftian microbudget horror is something of a sub-genre all of its own. As it goes with microbudget horror, a lot of the films in the sub-genre aren’t terribly good, but then, that’s inevitable with any kind of human expression, and most certainly with the sort of things made by semi-professionals and amateurs in their spare time. Just look at the blog you’re reading! In the last few years, I’ve increasingly avoided writing about the examples of the style I’ve seen and didn’t like; it’s generally neither fun nor useful for anyone to get grumpy about other people’s labours of love, and if I feel the need to get cranky about movies, there’s crap not made by human beings like the Tom Cruise Mummy to maul.

However, Ansel Faraj’s The Last Case of August T. Harrison isn’t one of those Lovecraftian microbudget films that make appreciating them difficult. Sure, it does bear the marks of its budget. It is sometimes rough around the edges of framing and staging, but for every awkward moment, there are two that are clever, atmospheric or simply effective. The acting feels generally more natural than it does in many a microbudget film, with dialogue (and dialogue direction) that flows nicely where you’d usually expect a stop and start affair full of awkward pauses and strange performance decisions. As a whole, Faraj’s script is one of the film’s greatest virtues. It is well paced, well plotted, clever in its allusions to Lovecraft without making them overbearing, and full of neat little ideas the film then goes on to execute well.

I also found the way August’s private troubles and the cosmic ones intersected very effective. Entwining the emotional and human side with the cosmic actually is something a lot of cosmic horror in the movies struggles more than a little with, either by laying it on too thick or by ignoring human affairs completely, so the thoughtful approach here is appreciated.


And of course, there’s the fine core performance by Jerry Lacy that provides the film with grounding as well as an emotional core.

In short: The Void (2016)

On a slow night, deputy Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) picks up a hurt and bloody man from the side of the road. The closest emergency room is run by a skeleton crew in a hospital that’s nearly abandoned after a fire some time ago. As luck will have it, Daniel’s separated – they lost a child - wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) is working there this night. These personal problems won’t be the worst thing on Daniel’s mind for long, though, for soon enough he and the handful of other characters in the emergency room, will have to cope with much worse things. A gang of white-robed knife-wielding cultists surrounding the hospital not letting anyone leave or make contact with the outside world will turn out to be the least of their troubles.

I am not at all surprised that Astron-6’s Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski made quite a film in their first “serious” outing (and without the Astron-6 moniker), seeing as their more parodic work demonstrated not just surface knowledge of genre cinema as a whole but what looks like a lot of deep understanding, enthusiasm and talent, certainly all things they demonstrate here in great amounts.

After hearing The Void described as a Lovecraftian film, or at least one of cosmic horror, I did expect a much slower film as the one I got. Properly defined, The Void is cosmic horror and Lovecraft filtered through Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Lucio Fulci and body horror, which means its psychologically grounded cosmicism finds a dancing partner in huge amounts of practical effects that suggest a diet of the aforementioned directors and the best of the Silent Hill franchise. The monsters and the effects get going much faster than I had expected, too. Fifteen minutes in, and things become gooey and grotesque and never stop for long from then on out, very much to my satisfaction.

The pace does get – rather appropriately – weird after some time of the directors playing with something of an inverted siege scenario (nobody seems to want to get in to hurt the characters, they’re just not allowed to leave because of something locked in with them). Once parts of the cast make their way into a cellar that acts as a place where the layers between our reality and something much grimmer have grown thin through abuse, things turn ever more dream-like, visions and hallucinations breaking the until then classically plotted movie’s timing until it turns strange. At first, I was a bit displeased by how this approach seemed to throw the film out of whack, further thought and exposure convinced me it is actually a rather brilliant way to let the audience share into some of the psychological effects of the characters’ contact with the Cosmically Weird, while providing even more opportunity for these fine effects.

Three Films Make A Post: WARNING: If you've ever been hypnotized, do not come alone!

Devil in the Dark (2017): Tim Brown’s film concerns two estranged brothers trying to rebuild bridges by going on a camping trip in an area that has a dark connection to something strange that happened to the younger brother when they were children. Something monstrous has been calling to them.

This is one of these perfectly decent, competently realized horror films that just never manage to truly capture anything dark, interesting, or insightful, plodding along well enough through its running time without ever hitting the right spot that would turn the film exciting in any way, shape or form. In this particular case, I’d argue this would have been a better film if it had started from where it stops and went onwards from there (probably with strategic flashbacks), because the last minute or so actually does manage to capture the imagination.

The Creature Below (2016): This British Lovecraftian indie is not as slick as Devil in the Dark but felt much more interesting than the US film. While the story isn’t particularly original when you know your Lovecraft pastiches, there aren’t terribly many long-form films going that way. Director Stewart Sparke manages to tell a tale of cosmic horror on a personal scale, trusting in a good performance of lead Anna Dawson to portray her character’s slow descent into properly Lovecraftian madness. There’s some awkwardness with a not exactly ideal sound mix, the special effects aren’t always great (unless in those moments when they absolutely are), and the verbatim quotes from HPL in the dialogue don’t really work, but these aren’t exactly show stoppers in indie horror of the really independent sort. Otherwise, the film is atmospheric and flows well and even ends on a high note in one of its best shot scenes. Okay, and on iffy CGI, but I didn’t find myself caring about that at all.

House of Wax (1953): André de Toth’s film is probably the best wax figure cabinet horror movie ever made (which is actually a surprisingly strong field as sub-sub-genres go), featuring as it does silly 3D gimmicks, what is one of the founding – and thoroughly great - performances of Vincent Price’s career as a horror actor (I do count his radio performances, nit pickers), an early larger – and pleasantly creepy - outing for Charles Bronson before he took that name, comic relief that is often not terribly odious, a wrily presented sense of the macabre, and a use of colour in a period set horror film that to me seems to prefigure things like Corman’s Poe cycle or the part of the Italian gothics that were shot in colour.

De Toth being de Toth, there’s also quite a bit of barely suppressed subtext concerning eroticism and male obsession with an imaginary ideal (potentially sublimated into art) that really shouldn’t work with the gimmicky nature of the kind of cinema that uses ping pong balls swirling at the camera to really prove its 3D merits but does.

Well, it’s Lovecraft’s 125th Birthday Today

So have a short film we found on the Internets, old gent.

 

 

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In short: Necronomicon (1993)

Every couple of years, I re-watch the Brian Yuzna-produced Necronomicon, asking myself – making a ridiculous and puzzled face, I suppose - why I don’t remember anything at all about it beyond the fact that Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the film’s wrap-around segments. Then, having watched the film, I realize I don’t remember anything about it because it’s far from a memorable movie, which in turn will of course lead to another round with it in five years time, unless I take a look at this useful post right here.

Because I’m a rather relaxed person when it comes to that sort of thing, I can’t even get angry about a film supposedly based on three Lovecraft tales generally having fuck all to do with the stories. I’m really rather more interested if the segments in themselves are any good. Alas…

Yuzna’s wrap-around tale is a good bit of fun, with Combs being Combs, Lovecraft being a rather two-fisted version of himself that is as much Indiana Jones as the old gent from Providence (pretend I’m now blathering on for ages about the man’s racism, because clearly that’s relevant and worthy of burning hatred when talking about a man who died in 1937), and the plot being silly, short, and with neat monster designs.

Christophe Gans’s highly gothic tale of a man (Bruce Payne) mourning the death of his wife, and nearly repeating the mistake of an ancestor (Richard Lynch), is probably the high point of the film. Sure, it has nothing whatsoever to do with The Rats in the Walls which it is supposedly based on, but the motives – if not its emotional base in love, one of Lovecraft’s least favourite emotions – it uses are very much Lovecraftian, and Gans is pretty great at building a mood that does resemble Corman’s Poe adaptations to a pleasant degree, until everything is wrapped up with fine monster designs and a shift towards nearly swashbuckling action that is the sort of thing the later director of Le Pacte des loups did already so very well at the time this was made.

I am a big admirer of Shusuke Kaneko’s 90s Gamera, perhaps the best kaiju eiga made after the original Gojira but his segment here is just a mess, finding neither a visual, nor a thematic nor even just a plot focus, with little happening in it that isn’t obvious, and nothing at all that’s interesting, unless you were always dreaming of watching David Warner in an awkward sex scene. On the more positive side, this segment does actually use plot elements of Lovecraft’s Cool Air, just not sensibly or to any effect.

Last but not least, we have Brian Yuzna’s segment, which is a very typical series of ever more grotesque effect scenes, the kind of thing I find entertaining enough as long as I’m in the process of watching it – particular with creature and, well, stuff design like it is here – but that not really makes for a satisfying climax when the grotesque isn’t in service of anything. Again, it’s no surprise I won’t remember any of this in a few years.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,lovecraft,christophe gans,brian yuzna,shusuke kaneko,jeffrey combs,david warner

Three Films Make A Post: MONSTER MACHINE VS. HELPLESS BEAUTY!

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956): Despite its climax in a pretty awesome battle for and semi-destruction of Washington (effects by the glorious Ray Harryhausen, of course), and its status as a demi-classic I've never been that fond of Fred F. "The Giant Claw will forever overshadow all those decent movies I made" Sears's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. I think it's actually some of the film's virtues that drag its entertainment value down for me. The comparative lack of nonsense science (apart from a bit of "that's not how time works, guys!"), the avoidance of the usual horrifying romance by letting hero Hugh Marlowe and heroine Joan Taylor already be married, and other elements like them do look good on paper but the film doesn't offer much that's interesting or entertaining in their stead before it's time to destroy Washington DC. Sure, there's the usual "the aliens are communists" subtext, but that's neither interesting nor commendable - and worked better in much crazier films.

The Haunted Sea (1997): The only remarkable things about this decidedly boring horror movie are a) the curious fact it needed two directors b) its idea that cursed Aztec gold can turn a man into a were-snakeosaurus c) the clear enthusiasm with which its early scenes look for pretences for Krista Allen to take her shirt off, and d) the appearances of James Brolin and Joanna Pacula who are slumming even below their usual slumming standards. The rest is an especially uninteresting case of corridor horror that can't even be saved from the tedium and stupidity of its plot by those scenes of Krista Allen taking her shirt off.

The Haunter of the Dark (2011): One of the most pleasant aspects of keeping track of Lovecraft fandom is that one will again and again stumble upon decidedly awe-inspiring pieces of fan-driven art like this computer animated short movie adaptation of Lovecraft's final story (freely available to watch here). There's so much obvious love and passion oozing out of every minute of the film it seems somewhat churlish to criticize it for anything; helpfully, there really isn't much about the short to criticize. The animation gets a bit rough from time to time, and not every voice actor is doing quite as good a job as Richard Grove does as Robert Blake, but that's the sort of minor complaint a film like this transcends by doing so much right.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,horror,sf,fred f. sears,ray harryhausen,joanna pacula,krista allen,biggstrek,richard grove,lovecraft,animation

On WTF: Die Farbe (2010)

The Colour out of Space is a Lovecraft story that is exceedingly popular with filmmakers, even though its central monster seems to be especially problematic to adapt. Consequently, adaptations of the story tend to be not very good at all (as - to be fair - do many other Lovecraft adaptations).

Until now, that is, for Huan Vu's Die Farbe manages not only to be a successful Lovecraft movie (a thing interesting to Lovecraftians like me, yet not necessarily the rest of the world), but also just a successful horror movie.

Click on through to my column on WTF-Film to learn more about the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,other places,horror,lovecraft,huan vu,michael kausch,ingo heise,marco leibnitz

In short: The Unnamable (1988)

Arkham, Massachusetts in Ye Olden Tymes as represented by costumes a high school play would be ashamed of and accents of particular ropy-ness. A man knowledgeable in magic - as evidenced by his large library of books about magic - is murdered by his rather inhuman looking daughter aka the Unnamable. The local officials decide to seal his house off forever.

But in the late 80s, interest in the old manse very suddenly rises again. Randolph Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) and his student buddies have an intense discussion about the possibility of something being truly unnameable, a dispute that can only be solved by the sceptic of the team spending a night in the still sealed off house. Not surprisingly, the Unnamable is still alive and kicking and kills the poor guy dead.

The very next night, while Carter and his buddy Howard (Charles Klausmeyer) are still not thinking all that much about the disappearance of their friend, some other college kids - their relations to our heroes and each other too boring to explain - are also breaking into the old house and meet the Unnamable. A bit of killing and much running around and screaming ensues, until Randolph and Howard waddle in for the rescue. Let's just hope Randolph's library use roll succeeds before everyone else is dead.

Fans and admirers of Lovecraft aren't usually well served by what goes as movie adaptations of the author's work. Most of the adaptations don't have much to do with Lovecraft's world view (exceptions are just that), and even less with the works they are supposed to adapt, and those films that keep close to the master's work are usually pretty amateurish as films (again, there are exceptions, and you know them). It sure does not help filmmakers' case that Lovecraft's work with its de-emphasizing of action and it's unnameable and indescribable horrors generally isn't exactly ideal for adaptations at all.

The Unnamable manages the admirable feat of starting off pretty close to Lovecraft - well, at least the discussion about the unnameable is - but then runs out of material to adapt because the story it is based on is particularly short (and also a pretty minor part of Lovecraft's work). Instead of making up something interesting like Stuart Gordon would do, director Jean-Paul Ouellette decides to just go for that horror movie staple of non-characters running screaming through a derelict building for an hour or so. Except for Carter, who reads a book for most of the time until he conjures up the monster's father in form of a tree.

As this sort of films go, The Unnamable is neither particularly bad nor particularly entertaining, it's just kind of there. There are the usual flaws like the sometimes hilariously bad acting (especially Stephenson is big on the scenery chewing and the unfulfilled wish to be Vincent Price), and not much apart from running around happening - nothing I haven't experienced (or not experienced?) in dozens of other movies from the 80s on the same level of quality or anti-quality.

On the positive side, Ouellette does know how to light a scene moodily and is not an enemy of camera movement, the Unnamable's costume is rather neat (and even includes the hoofs from the original story, though in a less unnameable manner), and some of the dialogue is rather funny. It's difficult to say if consciously funny or un-, but I'll take what I can get.

I suspect neither the Lovecraft purists nor the fans of 80s low budget horror will be all that happy with the film, for there's just not enough Lovecraft or enough 80s cheese, yet I can't bring myself to hate the film, for I have seen so much worse.

 

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Binding Silence, a neat Lovecraftian short

Binding Silence from Ray Zablocki on Vimeo.

(via Video Junkie)

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,lovecraft

The Yellow Sign (2001)

Tess Reardon (Shawna Waldron), the owner of an unsuccessful art gallery, needs some sort of monetary success to keep herself afloat. As luck will have it, she has a peculiar dream of herself as a little girl and the paintings of a certain Aubrey Scott.

Tess is quite surprised when her friend Edith (Andrea Gall) explains to her that Aubrey Scott isn't a figment of her sub-conscious mind, but a real painter. For mysterious reasons, Aubrey had only one exhibition a few years ago and disappeared from the eye of the art world directly afterwards. Edith suggest Tess should try and seek out the artist to propose a new exhibition in her gallery.

Seemingly at the end of her rope, Tess agrees. She has no trouble in finding Aubrey (Dale Snowberger). He lives in a run-down apartment building full of ghosts (I'm not speaking metaphorically) and is in fact still painting. After some ranting and raving about painting what one sees (which stands in marked contrast to the certainly non-naturalistic art the man produces), Aubrey agrees to an exhibition of his new works. He has one condition, though. He wants Tess to model for him for one last painting before he can sign any agreements with her.

The young woman agrees to the painter's demand. Sitting for Aubrey however, taxes her mind quite a bit. She starts to have strange dreams of a yellow sign and someone she (and Aubrey) call The Watchman (David Reynolds). The words and symbols from her dreams soak into the waking world, until Tess has problems discerning between dream and wakefulness, as well as sanity and insanity. A play (of course The King in Yellow) the painter gives to her which is supposed to explain what his happening to her only lets her drift off even more. Everything she experiences has something to do with strange happenings in her childhood she had mostly repressed. The question is (as it always is), if she has seen the Yellow Sign.

Robert W. Chambers' handful of stories containing elements like the Yellow Sign and the King in Yellow were of course a major influence on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Later writers in the Cthulhu Mythos started to incorporate Chambers' ideas into the Mythos itself, with The King in Yellow often becoming an avatar of Hastur. The appeal of a Mythos figure which lends itself to use in stories set in decadent and/or experimental artistic circles Lovecraft's antiquarian leanings didn't usually permit him to use should be obvious. The King is often and with panache used in Mythos tales that want to show the effects of Lovecraft's cosmic horror on a more personal or psychological level, reality as we know it slowly being replaced by another reality that follows an alien logic.

RPG writer John Tynes (in the context of the Delta Green setting for the Call of Cthulhu RPG) used Chambers' creations with special verve and creativity, turning the King in Yellow itself (in a stroke of genius) into a meme, a mental entropic virus.

That same John Tynes is also responsible for the script for The Yellow Sign (the sign here always represented in the form Kevin Ross developed for Call of Cthulhu), causing something like an RPG/Mythos-nerdgasm in your easily excitable reviewer. The short film is very much the sort of thing you'd expect Tynes to write when you're familiar with his RPG work. There's a strong and clever sense for creating the unreal out of cheap and simple materials at work, as well as an obvious love for the script's sources.

Tynes' script needs to limit itself to the cheap and easily realizable, because director Aaron Vanek obviously didn't have too much of a budget to work with. We are in the world of independent shoe-string budget filmmaking here, made by creatives straining to make the limited budget work on screen. The Yellow Sign has some of the typical hallmarks of this type of film: the unpleasant look of digital film, the post-production effects made on home-grade equipment aka a middle of the road PC, the actors not quite on the level (although they certainly aren't bad), the pseudo-string synthie score.

Vanek (and the script) does however manage to work around these problems very well. It is quite clear that everyone involved in the production is trying very hard to make a film that is as good as possible, and actually knows what "good" in the context of the film they are producing means.

What distinguishes The Yellow Sign from your typical backyard horror film is that it works. The film sets out to produce a feeling of reality drifting away, and, although you can see and feel how difficult it is to achieve, arrives at that mood. That's truly all I demand of a short film like it, and that's what the film delivers.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,lovecraft,aaron vanek,john tynes,shawna waldron,dale snowberger

Brought to you by the people who made "Casting Call of Cthulhu" & "Elder Sign"

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Well, 119 years are a reason to smile

 

Technorati-Tags: lovecraft

Lovecraft's Dagon, as machinima

made with Lionhead's The Movies.

via Grim Reviews

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Casting Call of Cthulhu

A perfect antidote against remake-induced phases of homicidal anger is this wonderful, funny short film:

Technorati-Tags: lovecraft,american movies

In short: AM1200 (2008)

After a little embezzlement by financial business person Sam Larson (Eric Lange) leads to the suicide of Sam's boss (Ray Wise) - who rather ironically was also the person who put the whole idea into his employee's head -, Sam goes on the run, driving across the USA in the sort of blind flight across highways that has never ended too well in any film.

At night, the broadcast of a religious nutcase radio station turns into a sort of emergency call, pleading for anyone hearing it to come to the station and help out with some sort of medical emergency.

Sam's not planning on answering the call, but ends up at the radio station regardless. Inside the building, he finds the aftermath of a fight (though strangely enough no bodies) and a man, probably the DJ/preacher (John Billingsley) handcuffed to a radiator. It is obvious that something terrible and deeply strange has happened there.

David Prior's AM1200 is an excellent short film of Lovecraftian horror, not terribly original as a piece of its sub-genre, but really thriving on the quality of its execution.

Its professionalism in every technical aspect alone would be enough to elevate it above a lot of the "independent horror cinema" (read "some misguided dudes -and it's always men - with a digital camera and fake entrails trying to sell their home video as a movie") I keep complaining about. This is an actual movie, probably not an expensive one, but still one with professional level acting, excellent camera work and lighting and people behind it who give a damn for the end product of their struggles.

It is quite admirable how much the film's script trusts its audience to be able to think, keeping info dumping and explanations as far away as they belong from cosmic horror.

Instead, Prior effectively builds a mood of dread and keeps it up throughout the forty minutes of runtime, which is exactly as it should be in this type of film. There's not much else I can say about the film - it simply does what it sets out to do in excellent fashion.

And for once people interested in an independent horror film don't have to wait for a distributor to snatch a film only to keep it away from a possible audience until its existence is forgotten - Prior sells the DVD on his website.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,david prior,lovecraft,in short

The Other Gods

In lieu of insightful commentary or - rather more typical for this blog - inane ramblings, my fever-addled brain instead presents you, dear readers, with this, a short film that was supposedly (which is to say, obviously not) made in 1924 adapting Lovecraft's The Other Gods, one of his dream cycle stories.

In any case, it is an excellent piece of work.

 

Technorati-Tags: lovecraft,stuff