[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3tuiND_xk&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Spliced together by Propnomicon from existing footage (I recognised the Sky Captain bits), but it’s certainly rather effective.

Opium has a new (24th July 2010) interview with the Director of the movie The Whisperer in Darkness. This is the successor to the acclaimed The H.P. Lovecraft Society adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. The latest post on the film’s production blog suggests that director Sean Branney and his team have now finished finalising the edit. The film is in full HD, done in B&W in the style of the early Universal horror movies such as the outstanding Curse of the Cat People. Here’s the April 2010 trailer (view the full post to see it in the correct proportions)…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd5gWGfnK5M&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Interesting news from the Vancouver Film School. There’s an…

“unprecedented cross-disciplinary open-source project that’s tapping the expertise of students and alumni from programs across VFS. […] It’s called The Interactive Lovecraft […] creating a cutting-edge transmedia interactive magazine experience for the tablet marketplace, and laying the foundations of a model that future students will be able to experience with other public domain work as part of the Entertainment Business Management program. The end result – incorporating text, video, and games – will include adaptations of five seminal Lovecraft stories: The Call of Cthulhu, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, The Rats in the Walls, and The Music of Erich Zann.”

There’s a video “making of” after the jump… Continue reading →

I’m no fan of modern gory horror movies — but it’s disappointing to hear that the proposed Guillermo del Toro feature-film version of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountain of Madness” has been canned. Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth etc) has instead officially announced that he’s signed up with Disney to write, produce and direct a movie version of their Haunted Mansion theme-park attraction. Which sounds like mindless Saturday-morning popcorn kiddie fodder, although I guess that in his hands it may achieve the heights of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. As to “Mountain of Madness” it seems the studios executives simply wimped out on in the end, despite Toro’s promise of adding buckets of teen-friendly gore…

“it’s very difficult for the studios to take the step of an R-rated, tent-pole movie, with a tough ending and no love story.”

This post is “old news” — but over the last year or so I’ve been returning to Lovecraft and literary speculative fiction after twenty years, and am consequently finding a lot of new goodies. While I thought the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft was rather good, I was rather disappointed with the feature-length film documentary The Eldritch Influence: the life, vision and phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft (2004 on DVD). So it’s good to now learn of another new feature-length documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Oct 2009 on DVD). It seems to have been very well reviewed and has won several awards — although awards these days are increasingly untrustworthy, skewed by politically correctness or a ‘me and my mates’ approach. Unfortunately the DVD is currently only available on a Region 1 (USA) DVD, and those of us in the UK will need a region-free player.

There are reviews at: Dread Central | Cinema Suicide | Scott Kenemore | Fatally Yours.