Whisperer reviews

A quick round-up of a few of the recent reviews I’ve spotted for the excellent feature-length adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”:

Horror Yearbook

British Fantasy Society

TerrorScribe

VideoJunkie

The Black Goat project

New short Lovecraftian movie, The Black Goat…

A feature-film version is being mooted by the makers…

“We’re in development and have a rather major distributor working with us.”

Haunter of the Dark wins 2011 Machinima Expo

A Lovecraft machinima movie has won the Grand Prize in the 2011 Machinima Expo (machinima is amateur 3D animation storytelling, rendered in real-time with a videogame engine). Phil Browne’s adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark was made with the real-time animation software iClone. Here’s the film with the director’s commentary…

And here’s the original…

Cthulhu (2007) reviewed

Wildside Cinema has a new review of Cthulhu (2007). I must say I’ve never heard of the movie, but it sounds like a very free queer adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”…

“That the movie is exquisitely photographed helps immensely, some of the camera angles and setups look like paintings in an art gallery.”

Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

The complete Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello…

del Toro talks Mimic, releases Director’s Cut

del Toro talks about returning to Mimic (feature-film of Lovecraftian monsters in the New York underground system) after 15 years…

“Almost 15 years on, and del Toro has returned to the film he once regarded as something of a failure [due to interference by the film studio's suits]. Digging around in Miramax’s film archives, del Toro salvaged the original footage, and returned with a re-edited cut of Mimic that trims out the second unit material he so disliked, and reinstated the atmospheric or character-based moments that irked studio heads back in the 90s. Out on Blu-ray on 31st October, the Mimic Director’s Cut is about as close as we’ll ever get to the film del Toro had rattling around in his head, before all those creative differences began…”

The DVD of the new cut includes lots of commentary, several ‘making-of’ items including “Reclaiming Mimic”, deleted scenes, and the original storyboard animatics.

My essay on the history of New York subway monsters can be found here (PDF link).

One of the great Lovecraftian stories set in the NYC underground, “Far Below”, is to be reissued in the forthcoming Joshi-edited anthology Spawn of the Green Abyss (Centipede Press, sometime far into 2012). The story can also be found in the completely-unavailable Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Vol. 1, and also in the 2003 Wildside reprint of the 1974 book Far Below and Other Horrors from the Pulps.

Lovecraft’s Visions at the Seattle Art Gallery

Coming soon in Seattle, USA — a mini Lovecraft film festival. Lovecraft’s Visions runs at the Seattle Art Museum, 7th October – 9th October 2011…

“Lovecraft’s Visions will also include panel discussions on Lovecraft’s life, work and legacy, drawing upon the expertise of several noted scholars and writers.”

“There will be an Art Show curated by David Verba.”

Programme here.

Whisperer in Darkness – latest trailers

The Whisperer in Darkness trailers…

L.A. Times on the Lovecraft Film Festival

The L.A. Times covers the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

Still: “The Whisperer in Darkness” by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. TRAILERS.

The Vault to be prepped for a movie pitch

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Johnny Depp had bought the film rights to The Vault…

the underwater sci-fi story centers on a group of divers who, off the coast of Nova Scotia, uncover a sarcophagus with unusual remains and inadvertently unleash an ancient evil.

Said evil apparently has links to the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and the Easter Island statues, etc. Nostrodamus gets a name check, rather than the Necronomicon. But in general it sounds fab and rather Lovecraftian and reminds me of Lovecraft’s story “The Temple” (1920). Apparently it’s out now as an ongoing comic-book series…

A great looking and believable [comic] series, it creates a real sense of danger and is the kind of adventure we rarely see in today’s spandex-epic driven market. — Broken Frontier.

The concluding third comic-book installment is due in October 2011 (don’t read the promo blurb for #3, if you don’t want a huge plot spoiler landed on you by the marketing idiots). Let’s hope the Hollywood machine doesn’t twist a movie version into just another forgetable Alien vs. Predator, or some dumb non-cosmic “it’s the Devil!” stuff.