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The Appropriate Tune: "The Call of Ktulu", by Metallica
Much like a one-hit wonder band will resent having to play that one song at every show concert they have, one wonders if H.P. Lovecraft’s mouldy ass were still alive if he would feel the same way about good ol’ Klooloo. Lovecraft had a large body of work after all, poems, short stories, none of which brought him any sort of critical and commercial appeal during his lifetime, and yet nowadays his entire being is now irrevocably caught up in some big green guy with an octopus for a head. Pretty wild for a monster whose sole appearance in the original canon was made up of one short story and a couple name drops in others, a throwaway character Lovecraft came up with as he churned out his weirdo potboilers. You never can tell what about your art people are going to latch onto, but as long as they latch onto it at all I suppose.
Cthulhu has appeared in comic books, video games, tabletop games, cartoons, anime, and even a song by Metallica, yet everyone’s favorite deathless octo-priest has been largely absent in the world of cinema. There was a film released in 2007 called Cthulhu, directed by Dan Gildark, and yet it seems to have been based on Lovecraft’s story the Shadow over Innsmouth, which doesn’t mention him at all as far as I can recall. For an actual Ktulu movie, not a movie where’s he referenced or name dropped but an actual (and as far as I know the only) film adaptation of the 1928 short story it seems the only game in town is The Call of Cthulhu, an indie film directed by Andrew Leman, written by Sean Banney and released in 2005. How an indie film managed to get on the ground floor of this before any of the major studios is beyond me, probably some intercompany dick measuring contest that I have no interest in, but it did and now here we are. Also, I didn’t feel like sitting through a big movie and this was only 46 minutes long, so let’s get started then.
If you’ve never actually read The Call of Cthulhu, which I assume is inversely proportional to the amount of people who’ve heard of Cthulhu, there’s not much to it. A man, we are not given his name, reveals to another man in conversation that he is dying, and that he wants the notes and paper’s he brought with him burned upon his passing. This collection of news articles, journals, and testimonials had been compiled by his recently deceased great uncle, following a meeting with Henry Wilcox, a young artist who had been plagued with bizarre, terrifying dreams. As the great-uncle, and by extension the man, and by greater extension the audience soon discover that this incident with Wilcox is only the tip of the iceberg. Horrific events seem to be cropping up all over the world, disasters, mass murders, human sacrifices by cults, and the two common elements to them all is a bestial idol and an equally hideous name: Cthulhu. In the sunken city of R'lyeh he sleeps, waiting for the day that he will wake and engulf humanity in a maelstrom of death and madness. Or has that day already arrived?
The main draw of The Call of Cthulhu is arguably the art direction, not only adapting the story but presenting it as a black & white silent era film, with those now all-too-familiar touches of German Expressionism. I’ve made mention of my fascination with silent films several times on this blog, most notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but beyond my personal interest it’s an aesthetic that captures the feel of Lovecraft’s stories more than any other. After all, so much of the content of his work is rooted in that era, World War I, the popularity of scientific studies like Egyptology and paleontology and the rapid progress in technology, that even though Lovecraft himself didn’t care for the cinema (if being a colossal bigot didn’t tip you off that this guy wasn’t a laugh-riot) the dour, dreamlike atmosphere that we associate with silent films today is the exact same as that encapsulated by Nyarlathotep or The Color Out of Space. It is more ‘real’ because it feels ‘unreal’, in a manner of speaking.
It is there, however, that we find my biggest issues with The Call of Cthulhu. In the excellent book Hitchcock/Truffaut director Alfred Htichcock lamented to some degree the introduction of sound in cinema because it irrevocably altered the nature of filmmaking. Not just in how we watch films, but in the way films themselves are constructed -- the way scenes are directed, the way narratives are written, whether they have a character talk or not, the spectre of sound still lingers somewhere in the corner of their mind. Such is the case with Call of Cthulhu, which clothes itself in the garb of a silent era film but is still steeped in modernity. Certain camera techniques, the abundance of cuts to dialogue boxes, things which a movie audience nowadays might not know or care about but become increasingly apparent. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was trying to tell a story, The Call of Cthulhu is trying to be Dr. Caligari on a budget, basically. Whether that was the intent of the filmmakers I can’t say, but that’s the impression I get.
Of course the $25,000 question is: What did they do about Cthulhu? Is he in fact a squid, or rather a kid? Well, I’d say it’s so-so. I liked the build-up to his appearance, the island is both unsettling and grandiose on a scale the movie hadn't really been up to that point, and the score devolving into ambient and almost whispered screams was a nice touch, but when he finally got on screen…? It was a novel way to do it, I’ll give them credit for that, but it’s also not scary. The line that always comes up when it comes to adapting Lovecraft is how are you supposed to depict a creature on screen that in the text is indescribable and drives you insane by looking at it, and the answer is that you don’t/can’t really, you just make something that an audience can believe would freak them out if they saw it in real life. Carpenter’s The Thing did it, the Silent Hill series of games did it, and there are ways that Call of Cthulhu could have done it that would have been far simpler and far less silly than what they ended up doing. It undercuts any tension that might have been built up and shatters the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because ‘anyone who is afraid of this thing must be a dipshit!’ Which might seem overly harsh, given the amont of movie monsters that look dumb as hell, but remember that we aren’t exactly swimming in Lovecraft movies. The Call of Cthulhu is the movie adaptation of the story at the moment, and as the pioneer I think there are certain expectations that come with that. Universal’s Dracula wasn’t 1:1 with the book, but when Bela Lugosi showed up you could feel it. You felt it when the Color showed up in The Color Out of Space in last year’s Marathon. Not so with Cthulhu, and when the name of the movie is The Call of Cthulhu, you’ve got a problem.
With thoughts of the bustling cityscape of Metropolis or the orgiastic black sabbath in Haxan, I’m probably judging a little indie film with a gimmick a bit harshly. Because the source material is intriguing and said gimmick has such potential that the fact it misses the bar compared to what could have been hits so much harder than it might have otherwise. It doesn’t get the recommendation from me, but as I said it’s only 46 minutes, so if you do it’s not a huge investment. Much like real estate down in R’lyeh, I’d imagine.
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