#171: The Call of Cthulhu, the movie
Hollywood is notoriously averse to Lovecraft adaptations, so a bunch of nerds made one themselves
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 26, 2019.
Initial release: June 6, 2005
Director: Andrew Leman
Adapting the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft can be a tricky business. When your whole schtick is “indescribable, unspeakable horror” that doesn’t tend to translate to film very well (to say nothing of the man’s deserved reputation as a turbo-racist anglophile weenie.) It hasn’t stopped the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society from trying, though!
It’s worth talking about those guys for a minute, actually — founded in the mid-1980s, they started off as essentially a LARP group for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG. Over time, the group expanded into producing all sorts of Lovecraft-related media, from radio plays to audiobooks, and even a couple of movies. While they don’t fashion themselves as Lovecraft historians (you want S. T. Joshi for that) they have made their place in the broader Lovecraft fandom for their creative output.
There’s quite a few stories the Society could have chosen to make an adaptation, many of which, in my opinion, are better than The Call of Cthulhu. But I’ll grant that, at least in the early 2000s when Lovecraft, and his monstrous creations, were only just beginning to filter into the broader pop cultural conscious, it was probably the most logical choice to go with Lovecraft’s single most famous story, and honesty, it probably worked the best with their budget.
Said budget is still pretty low, though. To make this film they combined old-school and modern filmmaking techniques to basically create a modern-day silent film deliberately intended to look like an older work from the 1920s, when Lovecraft (and silent film) were at their peak. What this results in is something of a janky film with a sharp disconnect between the medium and the intended impression. The big issue is that they used digital over film as a cost-saving measure, resulting in an unnaturally smooth-looking 60fps; there’s very little in the way of filtering or other techniques to emulate older film stock, either. Other budget saving measures include very fake-looking “water” (really just a sheet with people underneath poking at it with brooms) and, on the other end, some clever use of miniatures that remind me of the work of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (think classic British shows Thunderbirds and UFO.)
While there aren’t a lot of sets to this film (though it was fun recognizing a couple locations in exterior shots, as I’ve been to Providence, Rhode Island where part of the film was shot) the best part is R’lyeh itself, every bit as confusing as you’d expect, reminding me of the set design from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
In terms of acting, the cast did a fine job, especially the lead, Matt Foyer. I think some people expect silent film acting to be particularly easy since you don’t even have to technically speak, but they forget how visual silent film is, and how dependent it is on expression. I must be honest though, the soundtrack is a bit of a snoozer — most of it is very boilerplate orchestral stuff of the kind you’ve heard a million times. It’s not terrible, per se, and it’s certainly period-appropriate, but it doesn’t help the sometimes goofy feel of the film.
I said earlier that The Call of Cthulhu is Lovecraft’s most famous story, and it is. For whatever reason, it’s the story that’s stuck out most in readers’ minds, perhaps because it, alongside The Shadow Over Innsmouth, are among the few truly dynamic stories he wrote. So it’s odd that there don’t seem to be more film adaptations of the story proper. Oh, we have plenty of things that use the name — the tabletop RPG, the video games based on the tabletop RPG, a number of films borrow the “Cthulhu” name without actually being an adaptation — but the only other adaptation of the actual story seems to be… well, an Avengers comic back in the 1970s written by Harlan Ellison of all people. (Avengers vol. 1 #88 in case you were wondering.) Perhaps this is why it’s long been believed that the story is unfilmable. I can’t imagine why, though, as it’s not a terribly complex story. R’lyeh would require creative set design and camera tricks (assuming you don’t greenscreen it all) and the finale requires some fancy effects, but other than that it’s very much a standard mystery drama you don’t even need a lot of CG for. But Hollywood has long been resistant to adapting Lovecraft, for a variety of reasons (though I’ve heard good things about that Nicolas Cage take on The Colour Out Of Space.) Cosmic horror in general seems to be fairly thinly represented —2020’s The Empty Man is a great film but has gone almost entirely unnoticed, largely due to criminally inept marketing. Nonetheless, things are better now for the genre than they were before, but there’s still a long way to go before we can really consider cosmic horror cinema to have had a golden age.
At any rate, at just 47 minutes this is an awfully short film for an adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s longest works, which… perhaps shows how thin the source material is. And yet this is a smooth, slim adaptation that, if not perfect, is proof that the unfilmable is, indeed, filmable.
