If H.P. Lovecraft had taken his youthful crusade against astrology one step further, and monster-ified the Zodiac in his stories…

With the news that Amazon is to effectively become a movie studio and release 10 or more movies a year, here are the Lovecraft movies I’d like to see…

1. A faithful “The Shadow over Innsmouth” feature film done in 1940s film noir style and setting.

2. A beautiful closely-observed steampunk/psychedelic/bromance art-house film of “Hypnos”, with just voiceovers.

3. A big psychological thriller of “The Temple”. The movie The Boat, basically, but First World War and done as a horror/fantasy movie. Maybe intertwined with an ancient Greece flashback back-story about the beautiful boy (borrow from “Iranon” and “The Tree”?), for occasional respite from the grim submarine interior.

4. “The Rats in the Walls” filmed and monster-designed by del Toro, from storyboards by Tim Burton and a script by Neil Gaiman.

5. “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Strange High House in the Mist” spliced together and filmed as a laconic Tarkovsky’s Stalker-meets-Visconti-meets-A Field in England-meets-Picnic At Hanging Rock landscape art-house movie, in which first the young thieves and later the professor struggle to journey across the overgrown lanes and bare headlands toward the strange high house, having started in a sunny Death in Venice-like Edwardian New England seaside resort.

6. “The Lurking Fear” but set in the wild 17th century Catskill Mountains, as a dark fantasy origin tale for a Solomon Kane -like figure, perhaps made even more spicy with borrowings of scenes from R.E. Howard.

7. “The Horror at Red Hook” spliced with “Pickman’s Model”, in a vivid 1920s New York setting.

8. “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” as a faithful animated feature adaptation.

9. A dreamy shadowy “The Haunter of the Dark” spliced with “The Evil Clergyman” (mysterious figures are the psychic residue of the Starry Wisdom) and (for less predictability) the ‘angles’ elements from “The Dreams in the Witch House” (angles were being researched and probed by the Starry Wisdom?). Might have an “Erich Zann” sub-plot or opening section?

10. Lovecraft’s life story, a bio-pic.

io9 has a new ‘not safe for work’ article in “The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga”, a breathless scamper through Lovecraft’s reception and use in Japanese manga comics. Though supposedly about manga the article is unable to resist slithering in a mention of a genre of interactive, erm… “romance system tentacle battle” games and the existence of “porn anime” animated movies with titles such as Mystery of the Necronomicon. Generally the reader gets the impression that Lovecraft in Japan looks like this…

Yes, apparently Nyarko W is one of the top Lovecraft inspired series. Which, in terms of sheer chutzpah in using Lovecraft’s name and characters, rather overshadows the West’s recent wave of feeble ‘Kickstarter cash-ins’.

Though the article does have a more interesting mention of…

Innsmouth wo ô Kage [Insmus wo Oou Kage, 1992], Chiaki Konaka’s 1990s TV adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” transplanted to the foggy byways of rural Japan”

Sounds good, but looking at it on the YouTube link (above) it just seems very ‘TV movie flat’, cheesy, and distinctly lacking in mist and shadow. Maybe I skipped past too much.

Not that much to get excited about, then in terms of the possibility of a Japanese equivalent of a Berni Wrightson or a Mike Ploog penning Lovecraft adaptations in comics. But should readers want a little more authoritative detail on Lovecraft in Japanese manga, maybe in order to dig up a comic worth licensing for an English translation, the io9 article helpfully notes…

In an article in the Japanese Mythos horror anthology Night Voices, Night Journeys (published in English in 2005 by Kurodahan Press), Yoshihiro Yonezawa and Satoshi Hoshino provide an exhaustive 50-page history of manga which really refer to Lovecraft.”

There’s something rather Lovecraftian about this beautifully filmed short movie of a forest. Not least the bioluminescence, little-seen these days but remarked on by Lovecraft a number of times in his fiction (“dancing death-fires”, “tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon”, “swarm of corpse-fed fireflies”, “the faint glow of the vegetation”, etc). We don’t tend to see it these days because of light-pollution, electric torches and reflective jackets, and possibly because our eyes are not those of a rural old-timer who’d spent thirty years learning how to navigate a farm in the pitch dark so as to save the cost of lamp oil.

In this case it’s digitally-projected, but gives us a taste of what it might be like if we could see the bioluminescence happening in the web of forest ecology. Details at Bioluminescent Forest (requires Flash).

Doc Con XVII will be a Doc Savage fan convention in Glendale, Arizona. Apparently set for 17th-19th October 2015.

No news since last summer, it appears, about Sony’s mooted Doc Savage movie. And, given the Sony hack, there may not be for some time. The job might be done better by a lavish 1930s costumed TV mini series, showing 6 x two-parters of the very best 181 original Doc books (1933-1949). And ideally with no modernising tweaks. A quick scoot around the Web suggests The Man of Bronze and The Polar Treasure are two likely candidates… but it seems there’s no handy list to be had with a title like: “The Six Very Best Doc Savage Novels, for those who really don’t want to slog through all 181 titles”.

Though a handy slog-free taster of Doc can be had from the quarterly Doc Savage magazine (1975-1977), oversize b&w ‘mature’ comics with extra-long stories. I remember being very fond of these, pieced together as a collection of used copies picked up from comic shops. They are collected in a huge hardback reprint Doc Savage Archives Volume 1: The Curtis Magazine Era which is apparently set for release 3rd February 2015 (according to Amazon USA, Amazon UK says 20th January).

Oh, and about that time when H.P. Lovecraft let Dent use his settings and monsters? Doc Savage: Madness from the Sea, perhaps…

IlluXCon, a fantastic art convention, 21st–25th October 2015 in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Should you be huddling in Huddersfield, England, this coming Friday…

Friday, January 9, brings something quite different to the Square Chapel audience – an atmospheric evening of horror and fantasy presented by Michael Sabbaton. His one-man show, The Temple, is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s undersea tale of possession and madness and tells the tale of what happens when a strange ivory, carved head comes into the possession of a submarine commander… The show starts at 8pm.”

If Lovecraft had been filmed in the 1960s… the “Arkham Angst” poster-collage series by weißweißweiß in Germany.

3dmotive has a new paid video tutorial course. Sculpting Cthulhu using the popular Zbrush 3d digital sculpting software…

Being widely hailed as one of the PC games of the year (warning: there’s a spoiler in the description at the end of that link), the videogame The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (26th Sept 2014) had until now escaped my attention. A weird murder-mystery adventure story, it appears to have sensibly avoided the use of the “Lovecraft, Lovecraft!! LOVECRAFT!!” marketing buzzword, and instead left that for reviewers to decide. The makers say rather that it is… “Inspired by the weird fiction stories and other tales of macabre of the early 20th century”. Be warned that the game is a short one, four-to-six hours apparently, though game geeks often don’t realise how fast they can buzz through games. Those less familiar with PC gaming and its numerous fiddly conventions may take a good few hours longer than that to play. Especially those flummoxed by a non-combat first-person detective puzzler story-game, which is said to offer little hand-holding in terms of game mechanics. As compensation for the relatively short length, it’s a walk-anywhere 3d ‘open world’ in a Vermont / New England -like autumnal landscape named Red Creek Valley…

“while not strictly a Lovecraft game [it] is one of the best examples of these themes for a long time” — Bleeding Cool.

“Somewhere in-between H.P. Lovecraft and Gone Home” — IGN.

“There’s a wonderful Lovecraftian pay-off for your toiling in the darkness [in one section of the game]” — Eurogamer.

[As with Lovecraft…] “most of that horror is derived from an eerie sense of dread created through [the slow revealing of] the presence of the alien and the weird in an otherwise familiar environment.” — PopMatters.