The Call of Cthulhu
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“The Call of Cthulhu,” by H.P. Lovecraft
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The Call of Cthulhu, directed by Andrew Leman
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
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Context can be a terrifying thing.
Imagine—a room. Just a regular old room. Which isn’t scary, until you realize the room is full of people. Of course, that’s not all that scary either; except most of the people don’t look quite right. There’s the guy with the hockey mask and the machete. The woman with the severe facial burns and finger knives. The pale man with fangs and a yellowed tuxedo shirt. The wolf on two legs with the ragged brown hair.
Still not exactly the horror to end all things, but it’s certainly something, right? Especially when you notice the little girl hiding in the corner. She crouches in the shadows, staring in all directions. Nobody’s noticed her yet, but dear god, it’s not that large a room, and sooner or later, heads will turn. And then—ah Christ, it’ll be terrible.
But it’s not quite done yet. Because you haven’t noticed the orange and black streamers. Or the punch bowl. Or the Jack O’Lantern on the window sill. The guy lifts his hockey mask to take a drink, the woman takes off her finger knives to give a friend a hug, and you relax. The vampire’s fangs keep popping out, and the werewolf has a zipper down his neck. Somewhere, someone screams, but you recognize it coming from the television down the hall.
The little girl is fine. Just up past her bedtime, is all.
Except… Her eyes don’t quite fit her face. She leans into the light. She’s perfectly normal—but there’s a zipper down her neck, too.
By themselves, few things are inherently horrifying. The knife troubles us only because of the arm that wields it; the dark infects our dreams because of what we suspect may be lurking inside. The trick of any good horror writer is to provide a context for a threat that resists assimilation. Perhaps no other writer of fantastical fiction understood this quite as well as H.P. Lovecraft. Much has been said of Lovecraft’s ability to conjure up ancient gods and gibbering beasties, but the single most important unifying fact of his oeuvre, at least in terms of its effectiveness, is his contextual genius—knowing that presentation and circumstance are at least as important as the event itself. The gloom beneath your desk isn’t nearly as awful as the darkness of a moonless night; only Lovecraft could combine the two, and present us with some terrible day when we look down from our work to see inky blackness spreading across our legs, a blackness that can neither be accepted nor repelled.
The Cthulhu mythos is the perfect example of this narrative knack, providing us with just enough information to suspect what’s at stake, but never enough for us to be sure. While most horror fiction is content to show creatures operating behind the scenes of a recognizable world, Lovecraft works to reverse the standards, inducing a queer sort of vertigo; humanity becomes a mere afterthought to the existence of beings so monstrous and ancient that we can barely begin to comprehend our danger, let alone confront it.
The typical Lovecraftian narrator is a man who, for reasons never precisely described, has striven to touch the face of God—and having succeded, become immediately desperate to forget the existence of his own hands. Francis Wayland Thurston, the protagonist of “The Call of Cthulu,” is no exception. In fact, the story in many ways represents the Platonic ideal of Lovecraft’s work; it’s certainly his best known piece, and the titular nasty his most infamous creation. “Call” give us the rules, so to speak: there are beings old as the stars themselves called the Great Old Ones, who slumber beneath the sea in cities of hideously aberrant architecture, worshipped by the criminally malformed, awaiting only the correct conjunction of the cosmos to awaken and lay waste to our presumption of civilization. Cthulhu itself has achieved a level of fame nearly beyond that of its creator; but no matter how many plush dolls are made in its likeness, the bewinged octopoid monstrosity still possesses at least some power to shock. There’s something unsettling about its very design—so clearly ludicrous and yet undeniably affecting. Like the infamous anti-Euclidian angles which compromise its home, Cthulhu works because it shouldn’t work, and that paradox of nature unmans us.
Or it unmans Francis Thurston, at any rate. While he may be the quintessential Lovecraft “hero,” Thurston has the rare distinction of never coming in direct contact with any of the mystery he unravels. Despite a good deal of globe-trotting, Thurston spend all of his time playing catch-up to the research and adventures of those who’ve gone before him. In the end, all he has are notes, some newspaper clippings, and the accounts of near madmen. The closest he comes to the Big Bad itself is the bas relief left him by his grand-uncle. But these bits and pieces prove enough to drive him to despair; because once combined, the picture they form is of a universe where man is an after-thought, and beings of unfathomable awfulness lurk just past the edge of sight.
This particular vision is what makes Lovecraft’s work so memorable; but it’s also why adapting his fiction to film has proved such an elusive prospect. We have certain expectations when we watch a movie, and primary among those is that we get to see. You can play games, you can be oblique, you can imply and hint, but at some point, you’re going to have to show us something—as soon as we see the giant moving pyramid things of “The Shadow Out of Time,” we’re going to start giggling, and the whole experience is ruined. Unquestionably, a writer whose work which relies so heavily on the terror of concepts which are beyond human comprehension is going to suffer in a medium that demands explication. But part of the problem as well is our modern expectation for special effects. We’ve been spoiled by technology into believing that anything that can be imagined, can be represented; so once Cthulhu makes his appearance, and it’s just a slightly weirder-than-usual looking kaiju, we fail to be impressed.
The Call of Cthulhu looks to solve this problem by ducking it entirely. Shot entirely on video and running just under fifty minutes long, it posits a rather clever “what if”—what if, after “Call”’s original publication in Weird Tales in 1926, it was optioned by filmmakers and made into an early silent feature. By changing the rules, expectations are subverted. It’s simply another bit of context trickery; while we know that modern movie makers have access to any number of tools, the silent era was forced to work within a stricter set of guidelines. Camera movement was limited, acting required already hammy theater-trained professionals to over-sell every unheard line, and, most importantly, the effects required a more aggressive suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience than the films we see today. If the standard Lovecraft theme is of Man faced with horrors which he is utterly unequipped to deal with, why not make a movie in a time where the director and crew are nearly as unable to render the horrors of their story as the story’s narrator?
First, the drawbacks: no matter how much digital distress is done to the image, video does not look like film. From the opening minute, any illusion you might have that this really is some sort of lost classic is shattered—not only are the movie’s digital origins exceedingly clear, the director (Andrew Leman) chooses to begin with a camera movement that seems sorely out of place for the intended time period. Also, the actors, while not terrible, look modern. It’s hard to describe it otherwise; it’s like the old saw that certain faces go out of fashion as time passes, and without a bit of effort, it’s impossible to imagine any of them existing in the same period as Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney.
But to the good, once that effort is made—and since this movie is a bit off the beaten path, one can assume that any viewer will be going in with at least some willingness to cut slack—the rewards are surprisingly rich. While the actors might not seem quite chronologically appropriate, their performances are aided immeasurably by the conceit of silent film; what would seem hammy or flat in a sound picture works quite nicely, due largely to the written dialogue and direction. (Which isn’t to say the actors themselves are poor. Only that, like the special effects and everything else, you end up judging them by different standards.)
The music, constant through nearly the entirety of the running time, is excellent, both period appropriate and wonderfully evocative. It lends each scene a weight they might not otherwise have. The script, hewing very closely to Lovecraft’s original story, keeps the pace moving briskly, and (at least partly helped by the running time) the movie doesn’t lag or seemed particularly padded. There’s no forced love interest, no attempt to alter the source material into a more conventional structure. While working outside a studio meant money was that much harder to come by, it also gave the filmmakers more creative lee-way, and the results are there on the screen.
As for the effects work, it’s quite neat. There’s a lot of green screen, some on-camera effects and a bit of nifty stop motion at the film’s climax; it’s not exactly seamless (the green screen in particular is impossible to ignore), but rather that throw you out of the story, noticing the strings (so to speak) in this case actually involves you deeper. Having willingly accepted the film’s chronological conceit, as well as understanding the real world somewhat humble origins, one find’s one’s self much more willing to see faults as virtues. Besides, it’s not as though cheap (or cheaper) effects can’t be spooky in their own right. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but something about the gap between what I’m watching and what’s being hinted at behind the clay and sets, is sort of eerie.
Adaptation-wise, as previously mentioned, the movie plays straight pool. Thurston is still following in the footsteps of his deceased grand-uncle’s investigation; we still learn of the terrible swamp rituals interrupted by Inspector Legrasse and his men, and the film climaxes, like the story, on an island in the ocean that simply should not exist. While I haven’t seen all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, I don’t feel all that uncomfortable going out on a limb and saying this one is the most faithful. It’s a nice change of pace, really; one hopes (in vain, most likely) that other filmmakers might follow screenwriter Sean Branney’s example in the future.
Still, there are a few changes worth mentioning. There’s a framing device that shows Thurston (referred to in the credits as simply “The Man") in an asylum, passing his work to another and pleading that it be destroyed. It’s a hoary enough cliché that I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary; on the one hand, it shows us how much Thurston has been affected by his travels, but on the other, we’ve seen this sort of thing so many times before that it’s lost what little power to shock it might have had. It does make for a rather nice shot near the end where Thurston is wheeled away into darkness, though.
Thurston’s involvement with the Cthulhu cult is altered slightly as well. While he still never comes in direct contact with any cult member, his studies do drive him to a nightmare not entirely unlike the dreams recorded by his grand-uncle. While the sequence itself is inventive (I especially liked the giant, slightly burned books), it again feels overly familiar. The implication in the short story is that original dreamers, suffered largely by artists and poets (ie, the more traditionally “sensitive") over a specific period of time, were experiencing visions because of events on the other side of the world. Thurston’s dream happens after the most immediate danger is past, and while you can argue that it’s a dream more inspired by his nature of his current research than by any true psychic phenomenon, it still somewhat undercuts the power of the recorded visions.
Both the story and the film climax with the ill-fated crew of the Emma and their discoveries on the Pacific Ocean. In the story, the Emma finds its way blocked by the aptly-named Alert, a gunship manned by dangerous, vicious men who order the Emma to return the way they came. The Emma refuses, and after the Alert opens fire, her crew is forced to board the attacking ship. Due to the abhorrent nature of the Alert’s crew, the men of the Emma murder every crewmember to a man; then the captain decides to continue on their way as before, sailing the newly acquired Alert (the Emma having been sunk) in the direction the criminals were so desperate to keep them away from.
In the film, the Emma is set on by a tremendous storm, and just happens to bump into the abandoned Alert. The Emma is again sunk, this time by the weather, and the captain decides to visit an area on the maps as indicated by the Alert’s logbook, largely because he’s found a statue of Cthulhu and he’s curious.
This seems sort of clunky to me. I’m willing to bet that the filmmakers didn’t have time to shoot a tremendous ocean battle, but the timing of the storm is all wrong; the big storm in the story happens after the Emma’s crew has stumbled onto Cthulhu’s island, being an indication that the island has sunk back into the sea. Plus, having the captain decide to go on a new course just because he’s curious as to what killed an entire ship’s crew seems sort of unmotivated. At least in the original, the island was in the way of their original path. Here, everyone goes significantly out of their way to die horribly, and it’s a little silly.
One last minor complaint: as I mentioned, the acting works quite well, but I do think there was one slight misstep. Part of the point of “Call,” as with most Lovecraft’s stories, is the decent of the narrator from a position of skepticism to one of haunted, doomed certainty. In the film, however, the main character doesn’t have all that steep a slope to fall down. As played by Matt Foyer, he seems wasted and ruined even before he realizes what he’s dealing with; comparing the first scene of him in the asylum with him later in the movie, and there’s no real difference between the two. It’s somewhat traditional to present Lovecraft’s protagonists like Edgar Allan Poe’s—all twitches and nerves and bad dreams. But Lovecraft’s work is most effective when you can clearly see how it convinces and destroys even the heartiest of minds.
Still, these are all quibbles. Call of Cthulhu is a labor of love aimed squarely at Lovecraft enthusiasts, and on those terms it succeeds without question. Its faithfulness does it credit (they even have the wonderful moment on the island where a sailor falls into angle which should not exist), as does its cleverness. Whether not it entirely rises above its central gimmick is a matter of personal taste; speaking for myself, it’s an enjoyable curiosity, more notable for the potential it represents than for the film itself. I’m not sure I’d want to see more adaptations of Lovecraft “set” in that time period, but it does put lie to the assumption that his work can never be translated to the screen.
I can’t help but wonder if more could’ve been done with the concept. If Cthulhu and his ilk are beyond the ken of human experience, how creepy would it be to have their presence in a film prove beyond the experience of the film makers? What if you spent forty minutes with slightly cheesy Dr. Caligari sets and goofy fake moustaches, only to have the last ten minutes become something else entirely? The giant door pulls back, and we caught the actors being “scared”—only there’s a sound. A terrible sound. And the actors panic and realize they’re trapped, and the camera starts to shake, and inexorably we are drawn back to the open space. Where something rises up to blot out the sun.
Regardless, the movie is worth checking out. It’s one of the few adaptations I’ve seen that might actually have gotten Lovecraft’s approval.
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“Ph’nglui mglw ‘nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”