Get ready for everybody's squid-headed death-god! It was once said of The Pixies that while hardly anybody heard them everybody who did went out and started a band. The same thing can be said of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulu mythos. Lovecraft has never been, and never will be, popular with the masses but his influence is simply staggering, his much tentacled vision inspiring intense loyalty for better than eighty years now. The Lovecraft influence is obvious in Mike Mignola's Hellboy but his own work has seldom been adapted, typically deemed impossible to take off the page and on to the screen. Leave it to a group of self-financed Lovecraft fanatics to prove that notion wrong.
2005 saw the release of The Call of Cthulu, a forty seven minute short film adaptation of Lovecraft's most famous work. Put together by a group calling themselves the H.P. Lovecraft historical society the film is a loving homage to the man's work, a direct adaptation of the original story short as a black and white silent, holding as tightly as possible to the techniques that would have been employed when the story was originally written in 1926. And it works fantastically well. What would stretch credibility if too explicitly rendered in CG comes off without a hitch in this world cobbled together with cardboard, tape, mirror tricks, copious sparkles and a fantastic piece of stop motion animation.
The story itself is rather slight on the plot level, beginning with a dying man begging a friend to burn a collection of research notes compiled by his uncle and himself. The story then plays out in flashback, bits of the uncle's story blending with the nephew's, both of them increasingly obsessed with the strange dreams and scraps of information pointing to the existence of a mysterious death cult worshipping an ancient, hostile, squid headed god long dormant and now trying to force its way into our world. We find Cthulu worshippers in the Arctic, others in the Louisiana bayou, and finally find the god itself in a remote island temple.
Essentially a remarkably well done fan film The Call of Cthulu rises above the vast majority of fan made films for two primary reasons. First, the film makers show a remarkable degree of dedication to the source material, going to great lengths to recreate the world as it was when Lovecraft was alive and working. Second is the fact that the key people involved all work professionally in the film and theater world. The film ties ensure that things are taken care of on the technical end but it is the theatrical link that pays the biggest dividends, old style silents owing far more in tone to live theater than to current film.
The film is well presented on DVD with an excellent transfer and a stack of language options for the intertitles, twenty four language options in all including a few that must have been thrown in just for kicks – Luxembourgish, Euskera and Galician. It's a pretty fair bet that if you live anywhere in the world where people have a clue who Lovecraft is that you'll be able to watch the film in your native language. Also included on the disc is a fantastic behind the scenes documentary that gives a good look at the process, yes, but is mostly an exercise in infectious enthusiasm. Personally I'd have loved to have seen more of the wry camera man in there … light on content, per se, but absolutely hilarious stuff every time he opens his mouth.
The Call of Cthulu is a very rare thing: a film that could only have been made as a labor of love that is so well made that it deserves to spread well beyond the Lovecraft family.