Pickman’s Muse

30 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in Films & trailers

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Grim Reviews has a long and very positive review of the new indie movie Pickman’s Muse (2010), apparently a blending of “Pickman’s Model” and “The Haunter of the Dark”. The film did the rounds of the U.S. film festivals in 2009 in 85 minute form. The DVD has been available on Amazon.com for a few weeks now, but has yet to make it onto Amazon.co.uk. For the DVD it seems to have been trimmed and tightened to 75 minutes.

“Pickman’s blood curdling paintings are left to the imagination. The same goes for the spectral representatives of Starry Wisdom, who manifest as shadows in glass and swirl through the night. Adapting Lovecraft is unique in that many of his well described horrors can, theoretically, be brought to life on the screen. However, the long track record of disappointing gore and soggy monsters in Lovecraftian film making does not always mean directors should deploy the Providence author’s creatures directly. The maker of Pickman’s Muse realizes this, and he succeeds in casting a spell upon the viewer’s imagination, where images and sounds suggest terrors far scarier than actually pulling the curtain back all the way would.”

“Pickman’s Muse is a darkly beautiful journey, rendering its Lovecraftian elements in the vice grip of pure atmosphere. In a time when major directors are looking at giving Lovecraft’s work a multi-million dollar treatment that will surely include overt action and shocks, Robert Cappelleto shows Lovecraftian cinema may be best in the artistic fog of unknowable phantoms.”

Sounds very promising. Unfortunately the film’s being promoted with an incredibly ugly MySpace page, rather than a proper website. One would have thought the producers could have got a local web design house to make a decent site for free, in exchange for a prominent promo-badge on the front page. Ditto for the film’s poster. But the film was apparently made for a slightly unbelievable $5,000, and I guess they’re trying to save money wherever possible.

The trailer is available on YouTube…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC65IofE1sw&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Mountains of Madness script review

30 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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Dejan Ognjanovic at Temple of the Ghoul has his hands on the script for del Toro’s forthcoming movie adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, written by Guillermo Del Toro and Matthew Robbins. The first-act script-structure was ‘revealed’ by Latino Review in 2007 (although that could have been a hoax — certainly no-one reputable seems to have followed up on it). I’d imagine there are also several radically different versions of the script now floating around, as often happens for major Hollywood movies — some of these possibly being old and/or prototype scripts that were rejected and that won’t be filmed? Anyway, this is the gist of what Dejan writes:—

“It’s not as bleak as Lovecraft’s novel […]. story takes place in 1939, at the very beginning of World War 2 […]. Those who expect a certain meaning and symbolism […] cosmic horror – loads of atmosphere, suspense, build-up… Well, not much of that, sadly […] This script takes Lovecraft’s concept of Shoggoths – large blobs of intelligent protoplasm which can assume any shape (including human) – and runs with it to lengths that Lovecraft never bothered with [and] the bigger picture they belong to is paid just a brief lip service, in a couple of lines of dialogue you might just miss while checking your text messages. […] The Old Ones have very little to do [and at] the very end there is (yet another) appearance of Cthulhu itself! […] very little subtlety preserved […] More action, action and action than in the entire Lovecraft’s opus. [… There’s relatively little stress on atmosphere. […] Very little space for poetry and weird, alien beauty of the landscape […] Don’t expect a long and complex retelling of the history of the Old Ones […] The section from the novel when the expedition goes deep, deep, insanely deep into the bowels of the Mountains of Madness is entirely gone. […] The submerged city in the deep caverns, too. None of that here. And very little exploring of the city above, as well. It seems like they discover the bas-reliefs with the Old Ones’ history in the first building they come across, and that’s it.”

How very disappointing. I really hope that what sounds like a dumbed-down rehash of “Alien vs. Predator meets The Thing” isn’t the script they’re going to shoot. Yet, if it is, why did del Toro encounter such resistance from the Hollywood execs to filming it? It sounds like just the sort of thing that the mouth-breathing idiots in cinema audiences will lap up. Although perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate how dumb movie studio executives can be.

I suspect that Ognjanovic has an old script — since, at the 2010 Comic-Con in Summer 2010, del Toro went into detail about his work on the script with Matthew Robbins — he’s on record as saying…

“We are rewriting slightly the screenplay we’ve had for 12 years,” he told MTV News. “Matthew and I believe that a screenplay like that you have to tackle again every so often. We tackled it last about two years ago, [when] Matt and I felt like we needed to rewrite some stuff. Matt is my greatest writing partner because we keep updating anything we haven’t shot, we keep saying, ‘Let’s do another rewrite.’ So we’re going to do another rewrite in the next couple months.’ [because] “There [are] movies that have come out that have done things that are similar to some of the stuff we were trying,” he further explained.

Philip K. Dick and Lovecraft – podcast

29 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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A new 55 minute audio recording of Erik Davis (author of the excellent TechGnosis) on “Dreaming, Writing, Philip K. Dick, and Lovecraft”, at the 2010 Philip K. Dick Festival. Incidentally, Davis has a new book of collected essays out in October 2010: Nomad Codes: adventures in modern esoterica…

“Essay subjects include: H.P. Lovecraft”

Although possibly this is the “Cthulhu is Not Cute”, which is already online for free.

The Pickwick Club disaster as inspiration for “Red Hook” and “He”

28 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries

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Lovecraft’s New York stories “The Horror at Red Hook” (written 1st-2nd August 1925) and “He” (written 11th Aug 1925) both culminate in calamitous and severe building collapse. Similarly, “In the Vault” (18th Sept 1925) features a man trapped in a building. Could these elements of collapse and trapping have been inspired by the Pickwick Club collapse disaster, in Boston (New England) in July 1925? The collapse killed 44 people.

Lovecraft’s own building had also been shaken by a minor earthquake in late February 1925, though it was structurally unharmed. This would have primed him to worry about possible building collapse.

From the book The Wicked Waltz and other scandalous dances, by Mark Knowles (2009)…

Also interesting it that, at that time, there was a public association being made between dance halls (a seedy dance hall features prominently in “Red Hook”) and Satan (ditto)…

“[The book] Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (2008) explores the overwhelming popularity of social dancing and its close relationship to America’s rapidly changing society in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the fiercely contested debate about the morality of social dancing in New York City, led by such moral reformers and religious leaders as Rev. John Roach Straton. Guided by the firm belief that dancing was a leading cause of immorality, Straton and his followers succeeded in enacting municipal regulations on social dancing and moral conduct within the more than 750 public dance halls in New York City.”

Doctor Who and Lovecraft

28 Saturday Aug 2010

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Today the Doctor Who blog Tea with Morbius reviews the novel The Pit by Neil Penswick (Virgin New Adventure, 1993). I’m a Doctor Who fan, so it’s interesting to hear of Lovecraftian cross-overs. Indeed, as Morbius points out, there are some similarities in the type and modus operandi of the monsters — even without overt crossovers. The novel is apparently widely held to be one of the worst Doctor Who novels ever written, but Tea with Morbius discerns an additional reason why the fans might dislike it. It’s far too Lovecraftian, apparently…

“The whole reason why I rediscovered Doctor Who was that I realised how similar the two can be. The New Adventures effectively incorporated Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones into the Whoniverse in All-Consuming Fire. But this book, written before then, is much more Lovecraftian in style. Not only does it feature ancient, extra-dimensional monsters described as ‘Old Ones’ who are worshipped by secret cults, but it has that overwhelming sense of cosmic hopelessness. The Doctor, normally invincible and indomitable, is reduced to utter impotence. It totally deviates from the pattern of Doctor Who. If every New Adventure novel was like this, we could not take it, but this one gets it right.”

Night Gaunts

27 Friday Aug 2010

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Available online for free: Night Gaunts (2002) by Brett Rutherford. This is a rather fine feature-film length stage play, on the life of H.P. Lovecraft. I’d love to see the play produced as a radio play. So far as I’m aware, BBC radio has never done any Lovecraft drama — despite the public-domain status of nearly all the works.

10 stories set in Red Hook, NY

27 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Lovecraft’s long New York story “The Horror at Red Hook” was written at the start of August 1925. Although its quality is usually disparaged by Lovecraft scholars, noted critic Harold Bloom called the story: “one of his most delicious tales” (Twentieth-century American Literature, 1986). I tend to agree, and find something very interesting in how Lovecraft projects dual semi-autobiographical heroes in Malone and Suydam (yes, I consider Suydam a hero — but that’s for a proper essay).

But what of the stories and novels that came after it, also set in the notorious Red Hook? Here’s my quick survey of other stories set in Red Hook:—

1. Frank Palescandolo’s pulp novel Rumble on the Docks (1953) is set in Red Hook. The book must have risen above the average, since it was filmed in 1956.

2. The well-known film On The Waterfront (1954) was Elia Kazan’s study of gangster/union rule on the docks, and of the longshoreman (Marlon Brando) who fights back against corruption.

3. Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge (1955/1956) was a domestic tragedy of love, violence, and illegal immigration, set in Red Hook. Apparently the script arose as an offshoot from On The Waterfront.

4. Hubert Selby’s notorious novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957) is a famously bleak collection of six linked stories set in the violent neighbourhoods of Red Hook/Brooklyn. It was filmed in 1990.

5. “Book One: The Gang” is the first half of the book Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison, an autobiographical account in which the famous science fiction author recounts how in 1957 he joined one of the gangs in Red Hook for research purposes. It was later made into a TV movie for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1964).

6. Rick Dakan’s The Call of Cthulhu game book in the After Lovecraft series The Horror At Red Hook: The Cold Case of Robert Suydam brings back Lilith to Red Hook, along with bewitched little girls.

7. The collection The Lovecraft Papers (1996) by P. H. Cannon includes the novella “Pulptime: Being a singular adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.”, originally issued as a separate book (Weirdbook Press, 1984). An ageing Sherlock Holmes recruits Lovecraft and the Kalem Klub to help solve a mystery in Red Hook in the 1920s.

8. Alan Moore’s The Courtyard (Avatar Press, 2003) was a two-issue comic book, containing a Lovecraftian tale set in the Red Hook of the present day. Which doesn’t mean that it’s any nicer as a neighbourhood. In the 1990s LIFE magazine labelled Red Hook one of the worst neighbourhoods in the USA, and… “the crack capital of America”. Avatar Press also published Alan Moore’s The Courtyard Companion (2004), which contains the original short story by Alan Moore, and an essay by Antony Johnson. The story had originally appeared in The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft (Creation Books, 1995).

9. Alan Moore followed up The Courtyard with the more substantial Lovecraftian comic-book series Neonomicon (2010, ongoing), which has modern-day FBI agents investigating a series of gory cult killings in Red Hook.

10. My own book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats (2010) includes two prequels to “The Horror at Red Hook”, one of which is set in Red Hook and one of which follows Robert Suydam on his mysterious eight-year sojourn in Europe.

Dagon (UK zine)

27 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Carl Ford on the history of the British Lovecaft ‘zine Dagon….

“The early issues of Dagon were knocked out on an old Corona typewriter as stick and paste jobs with editing courtesy of Tippex. I’d write most of the material, mainly gaming scenarios and filler that included articles on the Mythos and Lovecraft’s circle. By issue 11 I had started to attract a small cult following and word got around. At the time, Dagon was the only British ‘zine devoted to the subject, and contributors from the Lovecraftian stable soon agreed to supply me with material. Authors such as Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, and Brian Lumley began to contribute fiction, and prominent Lovecraftian scholars that included Peter Cannon, Robert M. Price and S.T. Joshi, followed suit. I was also fortunate to acquire the illustrative services of Dave Carson, Allen Koszowski, and Gahan Wilson for the despicable artwork. This collective of big names helped Dagon to garner several British Fantasy Society awards for Best Small Press, and I was fortunate to pick up an award for Most Promising Newcomer (formerly the Icarus Award) for editing/publishing.”