Horrorfest 2011: The Call of Cthulhu

Playing the film festival circuit starting in 2005, THE CALL OF CTHULHU is the newest film of Horrorfest 2011. But, guess what? It's still silent, and it's still black and white.

This low budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's well-regarded short story of the same name has an ambitious premise -- what if it was made to look like it was produced in 1926, when the story was originally published? To this end, director Andrew Leman went to interesting and ambitious lengths to reproduce not only the look of the films of the era, but also the style of acting and story-telling that is so unique to the silent era.

Is Leman successful in his attempt? Yes, to an extent. There are moments in which the film plays uncannily like a lost artifact of a bygone era. There are also moments where I felt like I was watching a film shot on video with a couple low-rent visual effects added in the editing process to make it look like it was shot on film, which is exactly what I was watching. The film is most effective in the surreal or fantastic scenes involving expressionistic sets, specifically the many dream sequences and the climactic visit to an uncharted island.

These scenes force the filmmakers to use their imaginations and ingenuity to create weird landscapes that have a timeless quality, like the expressionist films that inspired this one. The other scenes, set in drawing rooms and houses, rely a little too heavily on the idea if you just set the color to "black and white" and throw on some fake film scratches, you don't really have to dress up the set much because it'll cover up anything modern that sneaks in (like fluorescent lights on the ceiling). This is the downside of an otherwise inspired idea. On one hand, it's smart to use the style of a silent film to cover up your budget limitations. On the other, you don't want to rely on that idea as a crutch.

The production value might have gotten a simple boost from an attempt to shoot on actual film, which could have been physically artificially aged and rendered the movie's look perhaps a little closer to what the filmmakers wanted. However, I imagine the use of actual film was cost prohibitive and therefore would have undermined the whole point of the production in the first place.

The actual story involves the son (Matt Foyer) of a dying professor (Ralph Lucas) who inherits the notes, newspaper clippings and journals of his father's lifelong investigation into a mysterious cult. As the son looks over the research, it first looks like a series of unrelated weird disasters and tragic incidents taking place across the globe but eventually comes into focus as an interconnected series of events all tracing back to the mysterious name, Cthulhu. Unrelated cultures and individuals over a span of decades and in a variety of settings have heard Cthulhu's "call" in their dreams, and soon Foyer's character is as obsessed with the investigation as his father was and is bent on getting to the bottom of all this.

While the story-within-a-story concept is far from unheard of, here it gets so convoluted that it is sometimes unintentionally comical -- the son will start reading an account of a meeting his father went to where one guy started telling one story, another guy interrupted, a guy within the story starts telling a story, and so on. Soon we're several layers deep into a bunch of different peoples' stories and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

The climactic final scenes involving a group of sailors' encounter with the beast Cthulhu on a deserted island during a torrential sea storm are the most effective scenes of the movie and act as a fitting finale for the slow build of the rest of the story. In a sequence reminiscent of the original KING KONG, the filmmakers use an endless bag of tricks to squeeze as much production value out of this movie as possible. The Cthulhu monster is presented using stop motion photography (I think).

To be honest, I've never fully understood the fascination with "The Cthulhu mythos." This might be because I've never actually read any Lovecraft. But it seems to me there isn't much to the myth -- basically, as I understand it, there's a monster out there, and it's gonna get us. Am I missing something? Apparently this is yet another of those stories that is considered "unfilmable" but it seems like the only unfilmable stories I ever read about are ones that have been filmed to varying degrees of success, so maybe it's time to stop using that term. I'm also a little mystified as to how this movie got so well regarded among horror fans and movie nerds -- it's listed among the top rated horror films on IMDB right alongside bonafide classics that have stood the test of time, but it never even had a theatrical release beyond a couple festivals.

In the end, THE CALL OF CTHULHU stands as an example of what a group of low budget filmmakers can accomplish when they have a little ambition and imagination and don't just rely on teenagers getting slashed. As a horror classic, I don't think it stands up. As an alternative to exploitation filmmaking, I hope it starts a trend and inspires a generation of low budget filmmakers.