Wilmarth is pleasantly dubious, but as evidence mounts up and people start to go missing, he begins to wonder if there might be truth in those folk stories after all and when he visits Akeley, he is confronted first-hand with the proof of these beings' existence, and the rather hideous explanation for what they're up to. It helps the film out considerably that it's already one of the story's in Lovecraft's body of work best-suited for cinematic treatment: Miskatonic University folklore professor Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) begins corresponding with Vermont farmer Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch) about the strange phenomena that followed a recent series of floods: strange crab-like beings that correspond to the mythological beings noted in that area since before the first white settlers. Not being a satisfying throwback is a very different thing from not being satisfying at all, and the good news about Whisperer is that it still manages to be, if not an absolute top-tier Lovecraft movie, undeniably in the front ranks (this isn't a very serious achievement: Lovecraft films tend to be disappointments if not outright failures that whole "horror that cannot be imagined by humans or depicted in normal space-time" thing). It doesn't really look like a found-footage piece from the '30s, in other words, but a film made in the present day only in black-and-white, and with unusually diffuse lighting (the film proudly describes itself as being "shot in Mythoscope" during the opening credits, which are the most period-authentic bit of the entire film), sharing Cthulhu's chief flaw of being obviously shot on video, and marrying that to decent but not-all-there sound recording. It's taken a few years, but they've come out with a follow-up, The Whisperer in Darkness, which reunites most of the same people, though in different permutations (the last film was written by Sean Branney and directed by Andrew Leman, this one is directed by Branney, and co-written by both men) instead of copying the idioms of silent film, this one seeks to replicate a mid- to late-'30s horror picture, which it does with somewhat indifferent results: while cinematographer (and editor, but that doesn't matter in this context) David Robertson gets the lighting right, he and Branney aren't otherwise as strict with camera angles and the like as Robertson and Leman were in making Ctulhu. ![]() ![]() ![]() This film, done in the style of a late-'20s silent movie (that is to say it tries to imitate a version of itself made when the story ws new), is one of the most faithful and visually creative films based on a Lovecraft story, an impressive feat indeed given that "The Call of Cthulhu" is one of the author's pieces least concerned with telling a cinematically viable story, and that's by the standards of man whose work very frequently climaxes in a sequence where the narrator is reduced to assuring us that the unspeakable, indescribable things he is seeing are horrifying indeed, not least because they could not exist in Euclidean space. Lovecraft Historical Society is at heart a wildly ambitious fan club whose mission is to celebrate the work of the horror author through the creation of multi-media projects: music, games, curios, and two feature films, beginning with 2005's The Call of Cthulhu. World premiere: 12 March, 2011, Athens Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival
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