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TENTACLII :: H.P. Lovecraft blog

~ A blog on the famous author H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) and his works

TENTACLII :: H.P. Lovecraft blog

Category Archives: Films & trailers

Die Farbe on Blu-Ray

22 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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Die Farbe (“The Color Out of Space”), apparently one of the best film adaptations of Lovecraft, has just been released on a limited edition Blu-Ray of 1,000 copies by BrinkVision.

“Critics have called this H.P. Lovecraft adaption one of the most faithful Lovecraft films ever made. It has screened at over 50 film festivals worldwide, winning awards and receiving praise from critics and Lovecraft fans alike.”

Behind-the-scenes featurette.
Effects and concepts featurette.
Lost scene.
15 language subtitles.
Faux newspaper cover insert.
…and more.

TheColourOutofSpaceBluRay

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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I’m pleased to say I’ve now seen the 6.5 hour TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, treating it as a giant movie, and without reading the novel first. I can thoroughly recommend this excellent BBC adaptation.

jonathanstrangeandmrnorell

There is much here to interest and entertain Lovecraft fans, both visually and intellectually. Although I see no direct or very obvious influence from Lovecraft. Instead Strange & Norrell taps into and recombines the Gothic novel (in the freshest way) with English fairy stories. It then lightly dabs on some inverted English ‘King Arthur lies sleeping’ myth, sprinkles a few touches of Middlemarch, and dumps in a bushel of magicians. It’s a successful mix, and thankfully manages to portray the occult without even a whit or a sniff of the inverted Christian pantomime exemplified by the tired old Crowley-ite / Dennis Wheatley tradition. The TV adaptation of Strange & Norrell is also refreshingly very light on gratuitous gore (other than a few war scenes), on plot-stopping bed-hopping romance, and on the sort of tedious 15-minute monologues on aberrant psychology that pad out Game of Thrones.

The closest possibility of a Lovecraft influence seems to be The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which has many parallels with Strange & Norrell; practical magicians; reanimation; the long search for the reason for a character’s madness, and a few other close parallels I won’t reveal for fear of spoiling the plot of Strange & Norrell. Other apparent similarities are probably simply due to Lovecraft being a devout Anglophile — which means that both works tapped into the same English tradition of early modern magic (see my “What could Lovecraft and his circle have known of Doctor John Dee?” in Historical Context 3).

One might also idly point to “The Outsider” and the conception of monster-at-the-ball. But I’ve pointed out elsewhere that Lovecraft and Poe had a macabre historical inspiration and were anyway likely also resting on earlier fairy tales. The slight architectural similarity between “The Outsider” and Strange & Norrell could equally well arise from the first two books of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, or real-life Gothic architecture in general. Or, in its magical connections and location, even certain aspects of Hogwarts.

There is of course a very strong similarity to the use of mirrors in Lovecraft & Whitehead’s “The Trap” (see my “Mirrored : reflections on Lovecraft’s reflections” in Historical Context 3), and even to the particular contents of the HPL/Whitehead mirror. But the lineage of the basic underlying mirror-world idea can be traced back to Alice and then to chapter 13 of Phantastes by George MacDonald and possibly beyond.

Incidentally, those interested in the English fairy tale tradition (yes, we do have one) after viewing Strange & Norrell, should see Joseph Jacobs’s 1890s collections English Fairy Tales (audio) and More English Fairy Tales (audio).

2015 in movies

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers

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A quick look-see at the 2015 movies roster, and a quick slotting into their likeliest categories:

Bound to be pretty good: Star Wars: Episode VII; Avengers: Age of Ultron; Spectre (James Bond, sort-of futuristic); London Has Fallen (British sequel to the excellent-if-only-seen-once Olympus Has Fallen).

Ambitious: Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski space opera); The Martian (Earth tries to rescue a failed human landing on Mars); Tomorrowland (optimism for a failed future).

Entertaining-but-forgettable: Ant-Man (Marvel superhero); Lobo (DC superhero); The Last Witch Hunter (Vin Diesel as an immortal witch-hunter in New York).

Big dumb reboots (yawn…): Terminator; Jurassic Park; Mad Max; Predator; WarGames; The Man from U.N.C.L.E; The Fantastic Four (again!?); The Jungle Book (…why?).

Believe it when I see it:
The Legend of Conan (Schwarzenegger!); 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Fox and Disney both, it seems)

Little star of hope:
The Little Prince (animated).

Nothing worth mentioning in horror or supernatural (other than Vin Diesel), and fantasy seems to have retreated into kiddie animation or big family-friendly Cinderella / Peter Pan remakes. The historical epic / bio-pic space seems to have been totally ceded by Hollywood to the TV mini-series directors.

Lovecraft and Interstellar

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

Perhaps I’m just over-sensitised to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas, but it seems to me that the excellent new sci-fi blockbuster film Interstellar has some interesting elements drawn from Lovecraft’s fiction. I was expecting epic civilisation-building space opera on the Foundation scale, yet the film is anything but that. It’s much more down-to-earth, more of a deft melding of Sagan’s Contact and Clarke’s 2001 series. Click on to read spoilers… Continue reading →

Berkeley Square on TV

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers, Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

The Turner Classic Movies channel is airing the movie Berkeley Square (1933) in November in America (Sunday 23rd of November at 8:15am ET). Currently only available on grainy VHS tape or as a VHS rip, my guess would be that this Turner showing could be the restored 35mm print version which was first screened at the 2011 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

At home — & on my own initiative — I saw Berkeley Square again … Talman & Long, who saw the play, say that the cinema version is slightly inferior. As you say, there are things about the transferred identities of the two Peters which tend to arouse questions [Lovecraft discusses plot points and historical accuracy for a page] But with all its defects this thing gave me an uncanny wallop. When I revisited it I saw it through twice — & I shall probably go again on its next return. It is the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods & pseudo-memories that I have ever seen — for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age & an insane jazz age into the same reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780 the age of the white steeples & fanlighted doorways of the ancient hill, & of the long-s’d books of the old dark attic trunk-room at 454 Angell St. (Selected Letters IV, pp.362-364)

“I shall try to arrange to have you hear the record I got…”

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers

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A Kickstarter to make the full version of the feature documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown available again. It’s gone out-of-print, and the discs sells for silly prices used due to…

the nearly 70 minutes of extra interviews only found on those old discs.

The Wyrd guys are sure to get funded, but I think they missed a trick in not offering an affordable $7 donation level — to get just the extra 70 minutes in audio .mp3 format.

fear1500_

Houdini bio-pic

07 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers

≈ 5 Comments

Major new four-hour U.S. Houdini bio-pic, airing on British TV tonight. It would be interesting if Lovecraft & Eddy were to make an appearance as his anti-spiritualist assistants. Apparently there is a substantial treatment of Houdini’s dogged attempts to combat the evil of spiritualism — a morbid and deceiving cult which preys on and feeds off those in mourning for a loved one. So I guess there’s a chance for a Lovecraft character…

The magician’s late crusade to expose psychics and mediums, which alienated him from his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (David Calder), a devout spiritualist, slows the biopic to a crawl.

Sadly the advance reviews from America are dire (“unwatchable”, “pure biopic cheese”, “leaden script”, “boilerplate”, “biopic clichés, awkwardly strung together”), so be warned. Download, and then skip through, seems to be the likely best option for saving yourself a few hours of tedium.

houdin

Lovecraftian Themes in Doctor Who

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by David Haden in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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The Tea with Morbius blog’s Guide to Lovecraftian Themes in Doctor Who.

doctor-who-silence

ThreeDoctors2

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seadevil

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