Reel Progress

“The Call of Cthulhu is a novel adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name.  What makes it unique is that unlike other films based on Lovecraft’s writings, The Call of Cthulhu was shot in the style of a 1920s-period silent film.

Lovecraft often told his tales from the survivor’s perspective.    A ‘You will not believe what I am about to tell you, but these horrific events happened just as I am about to tell them’ style of thing.  The Call of Cthulhu starts out in an asylum.  The inmate is pleading with he therapist to destroy certain manuscripts, and he goes on to tell him why.  In flashbacks we learn that the manuscripts were collected by the man’s great uncle, George Gammell Angell, who had been investigating a Cthulhu cult.  In flashbacks within flashbacks we watch the Angell’s investigations into the mysterious Cthulhu cult.  As the great-nephew, Francis Wayland Thurston, goes through his uncle’s papers, he discovers newspaper clippings telling of an earthquake and episodes of mass hysteria and manic behaviour around the world in 1925.

The first vignette follows Angell, as he visits a young artist named Henry Anthony Wilcox.  Wilcox presents the uncle with a bas-relief depicting a tentacled monstrosity, and says it was inspired by terrible nightmares he’s been having.  At Angell’s behest, Wilcox keeps a diary of his dreams.  Angell sees a correlation between young Wilcox’s dreams, and the outbreak of hysteria across the globe.

In the second segment, it is 1908.  Angell is at the University of Saint Louis attending the American Archaeological Society’s annual meeting, when Inspector Legrasse enters the room and produces a small statue of Cthulhu – which closely resembled Wilcox’s claywork.  Lagrasse is seeking information on the idol, in connection with his investigation into the activities of a group of cultists in the Louisiana swamps.  None of the archaeologists know what it is, until William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, speaks up to say that he had encountered such an object before, in Greenland.  Webb says that an ‘Esquimaux’ shaman of a ‘devil-worshipping’ tribe ‘uttered the strangest words: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’  Webb admits that he has no idea what the words mean.  But this Lagrasse already knows.  After raiding a gruesome ceremony deep in the swamps, one of his prisoners tells him that it means ‘In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’

In Act III Angell chances upon a newspaper article about a derelict vessel, the Alert, that was found by the crew of the schooner Emma.  Angell reads about ‘The Thing That Cannot Be Described’ in the diary of a Norwegian sailor from the Emma.

It would be unfair to viewers to reveal the denouement, and one hopes that not too much has been given away in the synopsis.  It is time to move on to the DVD.

Filmmakers Sean Branney and Andrew Leman chose wisely to shoot this film as a period 1920s, black-and-white, silent, 47-minute feature.  The acting is superb; certainly more than one usually expects in a $50,000 production.  The filmmakers used a grab bag of techniques, some old and some new, which they call ‘Mythoscope’.  These include foreground miniatures, models, green screen, CGI, stop-motion animation, forced perspective, and full-size sets.  The lighting was moody, and the costumes were well done.

The film is not without its problems though, not the least of which is that it was obviously shot on digital video.  In many scenes it really does have a film-like quality.  Others look as if they were taped for a soap opera.  The reality of filmmaking is that one must work within the limitations imposed by such bothersome things as budgets.  The Call of Cthulhu would have benefited from being shot on 16mm film, to retain the vintage look the producers were after – but at the expense of thousands more dollars and the difficulties of working in film as opposed to video.  The lighting seemed geared more toward film than to the digital medium, and I found myself imaging how it would look were it shot on film.  Kudos to the Director of Photography for not shying away from shadows.  Take a look at any film from decades past, and you’ll see that harsh shadows exist.  Ah, the days when the story was the important thing!  The lighting really adds to the period look.

The sets were impressive, and some recalled the style of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  This is especially evident in the early dream sequences, which use full-size sets and forced-perspective foreground miniatures.  Again, there are a few problems.  In one scene there are obvious fluorescent lights, which were not prevalent in the period the film depicts.  In some scenes, the sets seemed a little too ‘set-like’ – too ‘clean’, as if they were constructed specifically for a movie.  On the Alert bridge set, the storm-tossed lamp was almost comical.  But bear in mind the sets of the ‘20s.  Some of them weren’t too realistic either.  It’s the story that matters.  In The Call of Cthulhu we have a great story, which is well acted and well-shot, and there is little to fault in most of the sets.

The effects in The Call of Cthulhu occasionally suffer from budgetary limitations.  A couple of them look like they would fit right in with the ‘70s series Land of the Lost.  Fortunately, these scenes are outnumbered by the effects that did work.  Modern audiences expect realism.  Such was not the case until the last few decades.  ‘Back in the day’, audiences accepted models that were obviously models standing in for the real thing.  In this respect The Call of Cthulhu captures the Zeitgeist of those early films.  Of course the ship is a model!  That’s how movies are made!  One very nice scene occurs when Angell attempts to visit Wilcox at the house where he lives.  The house in question is the Fleur de Lis studio in Providence, Rhode Island, which Lovecraft specifically described in his book.  The house still exists today, and it looks exactly as it did when Lovecraft wrote about it.  The filmmakers used this house and composed an image of an original structure that used to exist at the end of the block, original period photographs of Rhode Island in the 1920s, photographs of Model T cars, and footage of model cars to create a convincing image for Angell’s walk along the street.

The DVD extras include a nicely-done trailer, a featurette on the making of The Call of Cthulhu, photographs from the set, production stills, and deleted scenes.  The ‘making of’ featurette, as more than 28 minutes, is well worth watching.  The DVD/poster design is wonderfully evocative of the style of the time.

The Call of Cthulhu is a wonderful film.  Its few shortcomings are more than made up for by the story, the acting, and the visual presentation.  Lovecraft fans will not be disappointed.”
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