Thanks to Lovecraft

This month saw the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential authors the majority of us have never heard of.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote dozens of short tales over his short 47 years of life, mostly for publication as a jobbing writer. He was in many ways a terrified Victorian reactionary living in a rapidly changing, modernising and homogenising early 20th century and his rampant imagination took not only his surface fears but also his darkest, deepest anxieties about life and the cosmos and plaited them into tales of ancient traditions, slumbering terrors and nihilistic visions of our place in the universe.

I first discovered Lovecraft via a couple of routes, the first being a tattered old paperback copy of The House on the Borderlands by the brilliant but doomed British author William Hope Hodgson. My Gradfather and uncles were rapacious readers of all things pulp and The House on the Borderlands was one of hundreds of paperbacks that were passed onto me during my formative years. I was inducted in this way to a bizarre and colourful club that included Arthur Machen, Frank Herbert, Robert E Howard, Alfred Bester, Michael Moorcock and many others. Of course there was always the rough to go along with the smooth in the shape of E.C. Tubb's seemingly infinite Dumarest saga, the lasciviously awful Gor books by John Norman and what is to this day my favourite shit book ever, Dannus and the Dark Straights of Reglathium. Of all of these hundreds of tomes that I devoured as a child the biggest impact came via the works of Michael Moorcock and that one book by Hope Hodgson. The Sphere paperback had a striking cover, a muscled, pig-headed creature looming over a dark, gothic manse. The same painting would be used many years later on an early issue of White Dwarf magazine, by which time my old sphere paperback had long since been chewed up by a needle-toothed puppy.*

There was a quote on the back by Lovecraft, describing the book as 'a classic of the first water’. That was the first time I’d ever seen his name, and to this day I don't really know what Lovecraft meant by that, other than he rated it highly (as do I), but I would later learn after reading Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction (from whence the quote originated) that the 1908 novel, and Hodgson's other weird fiction works, were an enormous influence on the then young american writer.

My second exposure to the Lovecraft name came when a friend and I, both aged 13, visited the Cecil cinema in Hull on our weekly monday cheap movie night. It cost just a pound and we had the choice of three (count them) screens. This night in particular our eyes flicked over the three posters on show and we instantly settled upon From Beyond. To my 13 year old  brain it was a lurid, nauseating and utterly stunning revelation and it was adapted from a story by H.P. Lovecraft.

I became obsessed with finding out who this Lovecraft fellow was so I requested that my school library obtain some. They did so and, much to their dismay, the books that arrived were the British Grafton omnibuses with the wonderfully bloody and grotesque Tim White covers*. They promptly vanished from the library, deemed unsuitable for our young minds, but not before my tiny brain had been exposed to At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. To this day they are my favourite Lovecraft stories. I subsequently saved my pocket money and bought all three omnibuses and buried my head in what transpired to be a rather turgid body of work, littered with lumpen tropes and forgettable, over-wrought accounts of strange encounters. Shining in amongst the workaday jobbing works however lay a number of mind-expandingly brilliant stories that were evidently of a more personal nature to the troubled writer, and in them he reached me more than almost any other author I had ever read up until that point in my life.

It was around this point that, having played Dungeons & Dragons for a few years, my tastes in role-playing games moved towards more contemporary settings including Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG. I still own and treasure my second edition box set and have very fond memories of playing (and taking my first ever mushrooms) in my friend Geof's loft. Geof was all about atmosphere and his sole intention when running Cthulhu games was to scare the shit out of us, and he did so on numerous occasions before turning his attention to games of Twilight 2000 in which we would argue and bicker endlessly over how many guns one man could realistically carry, and whether chinese soldiers would have that many gold teeth. It may or more not surprise you that we were short on girlfriends in those days.

I went on to play modifications of Call of Cthulhu extensively in my later teens and early twenties and sought out all other Lovecraft movie adaptations I could get my hands on, even the truly terrible ones. Since the halcyon days of straight-to-video horror films waned the Lovecraft adaptation has become a rarer beast but they do still emerge from time to time, and they are still mostly terrible. The notable recent exception is the black and white, silent movie of The Call of Cthulhu made on a modest budget by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Although not a horror film by today's gore-drenched standards this lovingly crafted homage to the man successfully captures the angst-ridden tone of his best works and presents the story in a fashion that he himself would have recognised had he been an avid cinema-goer. The same people have recently released their take, this time a black and white talkie, on The Whisperer in Darkness.

Over recent years Lovecraft has come in from the literary cold, even having Penguin publish editions of his work. Today collections of his works (numerous and duplicative) dominate my bookcases, the most recent being the first ever to revert to his original manuscripts as source material rather than reprint the August Derleth amended Arkham House versions that have been the standard for over fifty years.

Lovecraft role-playing is, despite a decline in the fortunes of publisher and lincence-holder Chaosium, stronger than ever with numerous takes on the Mythos finding their way into print and pdf form for avid gamers everywhere. Kenneth Hite's tremendous Trail of Cthulhu rekindled my passion for all things Lovecraft but in all honesty I never went for, as a player of games or as a reader, the Mythos’s fear factor. I do however adore the cosmic scope and dreamy qualities of his work, and that is what my imagination is infused with thanks to William Hope Hodgson unwittingly and posthumously introducing me to H.P. Lovecraft.

*Fortunately my wonderful partner would, more than twenty years later, gift me a pristine copy of that very edition for christmas purely based upon a drunken, teary description form several months previous. I dread to think what she paid for it.

**For many years in the UK the Tim White covered Grafton ominibuses were the only Lovecraft in print (as they still are to this day) so too numerous fans such as myself they are burned into our memories as the defintive Lovecraft images, despite them having relatively little relation to the contents.

From the archives: Alone in the Dark

Another oldie, from around 2006 this time. Uwe Boll was just beginning to make serious inroads to my crap-film-loving brain. I later wrote a feature on the good Doctor for the Quietus (linked on the right somewhere), but for now let's look back to...

Alone in the Dark
Back in the eighties when the home video market took off in a big way (a phenomenon I'm old enough to remember... aah Inseminoid ) there were a handful of producers and directors who excelled in making movies specifically for that market. The biggest name in straight-to-video scifi/horror/action was Charles Band (now well known for his Full Moon company). Charles Band films were low budget and cheesy but full of character and often very funny. There is obviously a market for the Band brand as he has directed twenty-six and produced an astonishing two hundred and thirty-two films for the home video, DVD and cable market! Band is the positive face of uncinematic low budget scifi horror popcorn movies. He gave the world the Trancers and Puppetmaster series' and introduced Tim Thomerson to the world as a leading man (genius). He also hired Albert Pyun a couple of times. Albert was like the prototype Paul W. Anderson, there was no genre or style he could not rape wholesale to knock out his cheap, derivative (but entertaining) flicks, and he's still out there (@AlbertPyunFilms), somehow getting money to do his thing (although it appears that some of his fund raising methods may be dubious, he allegedly owes the government of Guam huge amounts of cash which they stumped up to fund his opus 'Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon').

I propose that the logical progression was for the major studios to realise that not only do they not have to produce anything original, in addition they too can plunder the existing library and hire a pro to cobble together money making garbage, but this time with a substantial budget and the promotional steamroller to MAKE us go see it. Enter Paul W.S. Anderson, Hack Extraordinnaire and director of video game and comic book adaptations. How the hell that even happened is anyone's guess as his first film, 'Shopping', was dire. It's ironic that major Hollywood player and cardboard cut-out Jude Law also owes his big break to 'Shopping'. In Anderson's favour his Hollywood films are watchably bad, and there are some things he does rather well. He has a good ability to integrate special effects into his work and everything does look slick, it just lacks character. Event Horizon is a great example. As Anderson farmed out the directing jobs for the Resident Evil sequels and AvP, and has entered remake territory with 'Deathrace 3000' then a gap in the video game adaptation market has yawned wide-open and, just in the nick of time, been filled by the sizeable personality of Uwe Boll!

Uwe Boll is an enigma. In the space of three years he became the internet fan's most hated and reviled character, and he hadn't even begun to roll. He owns his own production company and so has sole creative control over his projects yet manages to convince HUGE companies to entrust him with the reputation of their multi-million dollar franchises. How does he do it? I personally believe he is the modern day J Edgar Hoover and has embarrassing files on every major video game company executive in the world. He probably wears dresses too.

'House Of The Dead' was his first sojourn into the realm of video game adaptations, yes it was woeful but I enjoyed it on exactly the same level that I enjoyed Charles Band or Albert Pyun films when I was 14. I had no experience of the game on which it was based so had no axe to grind on that score. I'm a huge zombie movie fan but as I can happily watch any Italian stinkfest involving zombies I didn't mind it's bizarre approach to the zombie horror genre. I can handle a bit more Boll I thought to myself. So one day I watched 'Alone In The Dark', and here is what I found.

It begins with a crawl (like the text at the beginning of each Star Wars film to give us a bit of background), a fairly common tool in scifi and horror but this is no ordinary crawl. It goes on for HALF THE MOVIE, and has to be the longest, most excrutiatingly badly written piece of exposition ever to precede a movie. Just in case you don't like crawls, hate reading or are just plain illiterate fear not, Boll provided us with an anonymous eastern European sounding narrator so there is no escape from the mediocrity. In a nutshell it says that an ancient race called the Abkani created a gate to somewhere (probably dark) and before they could close it 'some evil' came through and they disappeared. Meanwhile an archaeologist blah blah, a shadowy government bureau blah blah, etc. According to the director he added the crawl because preview audiences didn't know what the hell his film was all about! Thanks for clearing that up for us Uwe.

Anyway Edward Carnby is a paranormal investigator. He looks the part anyway.
Long coat?
Check!
Skimpy low necked vest?
Erm.. Check!
Ability to karate kick impervious-to-bullets bad guys through windows?
Ugh... hang on a minute. I've never played the Alone In The Dark video games but had heard that they were adventure games of Gothic horror inspired by H. P. Lovecraft! In fact the mini-documentary on the disc features the writers and director name-checking Lovecraft numerous times. But then again Boll does say something along the lines of 'Lovecraft in a contemporary setting', so if contemporary means pointless kung fu fights and bullet-time then they've absolutely done everything right.
Right?
Wrong!
A thousand times wrong! I've banged my drum about gratuitous slow motion before but have to confess that, like seventies Hong Kong cinema with their hilarious irrelevant zooms, Boll has elevated irrelevant slow motion to the level of an art form. An irrelevant art form but an art form nonetheless.

Carnby: 'Will someone tell me what's going on here?'
Bureau woman: 'We're picking up massive readings!'
pause
Carnby: 'That's not what I asked! I asked what the hell is going on here?'

On several occasions during the film I knew exactly how Carnby felt. Incidentally Carnby is played by Christian Slater, by no means the worst piece of casting in 'Alone In The Dark'.
After all Stephen Dorff plays a tough, uncompromising and quite frankly unpleasant government bureau action man called 'Burke' and, most hilariously of all, Tara Reid (of American Pie) plays an archaeologist called 'Aline'. I say hilariously because it seemed to me that every time she had to say 'cataloguing' or 'catalogued', or any sentence with more than seven words, her dialogue appeared dubbed on, as though Uwe had said 'Don't worry Fraulein, we'll get it in post!' Ironic when you consider that Tara could do so much better in actual catalogues. She would look mighty fine on the cover of the autumn/winter edition of Grattan.

Boy on plane: 'My mommy says that there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark.'
Carnby: 'Your mother's wrong, kid. Being afraid of the dark is what keeps most of us alive.'

Chill out Carnby you uptight freak! He was just making conversation. Carnby is like the movie, he has absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever, and for a movie that even rips off 'The Relic' at one point it really needs to get one fast. Ultimately, despite the source material and the claimed (but conspicuously absent) Lovecraftian inspiration 'Alone In The Dark' isn't a horror movie, it's a low quality action adventure. Carnby doesn't investigate the paranormal, he blows away CGI monsters with, and I quote, 'photon accelerated luminescent resin coated bullets'.
The days of Pyun and Anderson are gone, there is a new hack in town, and with another FIVE video game adaptations coming our way from Boll Filmproduction and Boll KG (Bloodrayne is completed and reviewed elsewhere) it appears Herr Boll's sojourn is looking more than permanent.
I cannot recommend this film to anyone except people like me, the curious and the insane, and it defies my ability to give it a rating. Watch it or don't.

Join me again soon for a review of Postal which, I'm convinced, will be the best film to come out of the US since Mario Bros. Curiously enough I've been hearing a lot of retrospective love for the Mario Bros film. I may have to grab a copy.

Ah Pook the Destroyer - The Silver Key

Album review:

Ah Pook the Destroyer - The Silver Key

I happened upon this well crafted and rewarding Lovecraftian concept album after hearing a glowing review on a Call of Cthulhu/RPG themed podcast. Naturally I took this praise with a healthy dose of salt as RPG podcasts are not necessarily the most reliable form of musical criticism but in this case the geeks were spot on.
Ah Pook the Destroyer is essentially an adaptation of Lovecraft's final (if memory serves) Randolph Carter story, the tale of a man seeking to restore something lost to him as he grew older and more 'scientific' in focus. I won't spoil the story but it is definitely one of Lovecraft's more poignant and possibly personal stories, and as such is perfectly suited to such an evocative and mellow suite of music as is presented here.
The mixture of narration and soft vocals intertwine lovingly with the progressive rock stylings of the principal musicians to create an experience that bears little comparison with most modern 'prog rock' and it has little in common with the traditional giants of the genre like Yes, Rush or even the more contemporary holders of the mantle Muse. The Silver Key, if anything, sounds like an hypnotic blend of elements ranging from early Moody Blues epic Days of Future Passed, the choicest cuts of The Alan Parsons Project and King Crimson, and the magnificent soundtrack album to The Virgin Suicides by the super-versatile and restless french experimenters Air. It is necessary to point out after these comparisons that the album is not a self-absorbed, pretentious exercise in self-indulgence but a cohesive collection of tracks that feature not only evocative soundscapes but catchy hooks, great musicianship and well-balanced production.
For lovers of Lovecraft this should be an essential buy as it is easily as vital and refreshing as any host of Lovecraft inspired movie/comic-book/audio play adaptations and for fans of progressive rock Ah Pook the Destroyer has something genuinely rewarding to offer.

If you fit the above criteria then for the paltry price you owe it to yourself to check it out here.