Release Year: 2005
Country: United States
Starring: Ralph Lucas, Chad Fifer, David Mersault, Noah Wagner, Clarence Henry Hunt, D. Grigsby Poland
Writer: Sean Branney
Director: Andrew Leman
Cinematographer: David Robertson
Music: Chad Fifer, Ben Holbrook, Troy Sterling-Nies, Nicholas Pavkovic
Producer: Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, Chris Lackey

As previous reviews here at Teleport City have shown, the most successful Lovecraftian movies either aren’t actually based on a specific one of his works (e.g. In the Mouth of Madness), or they’re based on his less beloved works (Dagon, Re-Animator, From Beyond). In part, this is because of the impossibility of living up to the standards of creating images that will truly turn one mad upon merely beholding them; and in part, it’s probably because it’d take some brilliant people and a very large budget to even acceptably approximate that effect for an ultimately narrow target audience.

Thus, Sean Branney, Andrew Leman: I salute you. For amongst the most perilous stories for a filmmaker to tackle would be the Great Old One of them all, the beating heart of the Lovecraftian canon: “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Cthulhu is almost as famous, if not more famous, than Lovecraft himself. I guess there’s something oddly personable about an anthropomorphic squid-jellyfish-bat monster from outer space. So it’s probably worth pointing out that the first appearance and development of Cthulhu marks a turning point, maybe even a breaking point, in Lovecraft’s fiction. There are certainly continuities that run across the entirety of his writing; even his earliest stories feature people whose minds are torn apart by unthinkable truths, although sometimes this truth is nothing more than that one’s great-grandfather was actually a gorilla. Much of his early work, though, owes a massive debt to Poe and Dunsany.

At which juncture, I guess I should mention that Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany (thanks, Wikipedia), was in his day a widely-acclaimed fantastical writer, and one of few members of real royalty to legitimately achieve that sort of distinction. He wrote plays, poems, short stories, and novels, and among those works, his The Complete Pegana is credited as constituting the first full fictional pantheon. Dunsany is also regarded as an influence on both Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien, which demonstrates a sort of connection that few would probably otherwise care to draw.

Dunsany’s writing, however, is a poor model to imitate–not because of any artistic failings, but in fact, quite the opposite. Read a passage of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and you will be confronted with inimitable eloquence; Dunsany’s visions are often evocative and inspiring, like the best of all fantasy writing, but in truth he could have written a chapter about a leaf falling from a tree and made it spellbindingly poetic without seeming pretentious.

Now, I think that Lovecraft is generally treated a bit unfairly as far as his writing skills, but I doubt even his staunchest supporters would say that effortless, graceful poetry was what he was best suited to as a writer. This isn’t to say that Dunsany’s influence was fruitless for Lovecraft; but stylistically, Dunsany just wasn’t a model fit. Lovecraft’s greatest strength was in the almost visionary power of his imagination, and the closest that his Dunsanian pastiches come to that power would probably be “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” It’s a tale set in a world of dreams populated by creatures such as gugs, ghasts, ghouls, and night-gaunts; and while it’s kind of an uneven story, there are many memorable moments that make it well worth reading. S.T. Joshi has suggested that “Dream-Quest…” was Lovecraft’s final bow toward Dunsany before moving into a newer direction that better suited his talents and tastes. That move was precipitated by a story that Lovecraft had finished just before beginning to write “Dream-Quest”: I speak, of course, of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Drawing on Lovecraft’s thematic use of dreams, as well as building on the theme of ‘untold horrors in our midst but beyond our ken or capacity to comprehend them’ (a la “From Beyond”), “The Call of Cthulhu” is probably one of Lovecraft’s best-written tales, one of his most famous, and it marks that sort of crystallizing point where all the nebulous forces and influences sort of coalesce into something that makes Lovecraft truly stand out from all other authors (other than the use of “nefandous,” anyway).

The prestige of the story, and the difficulty of effecting the special effects, aren’t the only two challenges for the aspiring filmmaker, however. As most of us know, Lovecraft’s typical plot structure involves the protagonists gradually assembling fragments of a truth which, once they glimpse the least bit of it, drives them to madness or causes them to collapse in paroxysms of fear. “The Call of Cthulhu” sets the bar for that approach, in that the story consists of a narrator discussing his study of his late uncle’s collected notes, such that the story itself consists of fragments which are basically loosely tied together by the narrator. So it’s episodic, and each episode has a totally or almost-totally different set of characters, set in a different part of the globe.

We thus begin in a room with a box of papers, then move to a man recording the strange dreams of a skilled young artist, then move to newspaper clippings, and one of those clippings takes us to more discussion of a police raid of a strange cult in the Louisiana swamps years earlier, followed by more news clippings which correlate strangely with the dates of the other events, followed by the story of a seaman whose vessel was lost under strange circumstances during those dates… and so on. Trying to reconfigure the entire plot structure would probably anger the niche audience; likewise trying to creatively weave things together so as to make a film feature-length. And then of course, we can’t forget about the difficulties of special effects, as well as the difficulties inherent in delivering Lovecraftian dialogue in a convincing way.

The filmmakers made some pretty smart decisions here. First, they adapted the story almost exactly, retaining the plot structure (with very minor changes) and sticking to a running time of about 45 minutes. Second, they decided to make it a black-and-white silent film. And then they came up with surreal miniature sets which are probably enhanced by being shot in black-and-white, and special effects consist of conspicuously-stylized stop-motion, which is all at once antiquated, cool, and exonerating in terms of “not representing Cthulhu the way he *really* is.”

And I guess I’ll indulge in going down that path again, as well. In depicting Cthulhu, one is once again confronted with the challenge of depicting the unknowable and unthinkable. Cthulhu’s very name is supposed to be a deep, guttural grinding that can’t really be replicated by humans, much less transcribed faithfully. In fact, the “Cthulhu? Bless you!” joke might actually be closer to the original vision than pronouncing the letters correctly, provided that the person in question has a particularly baritone sneeze and manages to cough and retch a couple of times in the middle. Most people do remember that Cthulhu is depicted as having a squid head, batlike wings, and so on. They don’t as often remember that he’s also supposed to be pseudoplasmic and thus defy all material categories, nor that he’s extradimensional and thus we can’t necessarily see all of him in this plane at a given time, any more than the shapes in Flatland could see a sphere. So saying that he “has a squid head” is kind of like saying “That cloud looks like Chewbacca!”

The choice of silent film adds to the surrealism and makes it much easier to deal with Lovecraftian dialogue, since instead of making the poor actors deliver it, it’s served up to us on title cards. This does place a new burden on the actors, in that now they are called upon to silently portray things like “sinister cachinnation,” but hey, at least it’s a reduced burden.

I guess there are shortcomings here and there, but overall, it’s an outstanding effort. Few films have managed to feel as Lovecraftian as this one does. Of course, this film was made by and for Lovecraft fans. I think you have to like his writing on some level to really appreciate the film… but on that note, if you like his writing on any level, you have to really appreciate this film.