The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft

[pablo]

Ron Howard Might Direct The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft « FirstShowing.net

Yet another indie graphic novel is headed to the big screen. Image Comics' The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft, created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, is being developed for Ron Howard to direct at Universal. The fictionalized tale borrows elements from Lovecraft's life, such as his own bouts with writer's block, and transforms his darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world. Universal picked this up because its take on classic horror fits in well with their monster movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man.
Mac Carter, who worked on the comic series and also directs commercials, will write the script and serve as an executive producer. As far as I can recall, this could be Ron Howard's first comic book movie if he does take the job. If you don't know who H.P. Lovecraft is (then what is wrong with you?), he is considered one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century, responsible for such works as The Call of Cthulhu, Dreams of Terror and Death, and At the Mountains of Madness. If you're interested in this, the graphic novel hits shelves on April 8th. For more information on the comic, head over to: lovecraftcomic.com.

 

[ravenus]

Re: he Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft

Bracing for a mountain of crap.

 

[GOLLUM]

Re: he Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft

HMM...I must admit this does seem more than a little dubious.

 

[AE35Unit]

The question is,Is bad Lovecraft better than no Lovecraft? It might just introduce new fans who have never heard of him. Or if its too bad might put them off.

 

[j d worthington]

We're talking Hollywood. What do you think the chances are on this one?

I must admit that I'm extremely cautious when it comes to something which uses a genuine historical figure as a major fictional character, unless the piece takes into account the actual facts concerning said figure. All the more so when that person is of such notoriety as HPL, and there are already so many myths surrounding him to begin with. I'd much rather a clearing away of the clouds and a more realistic handling of the man first; as far as I can see, this is only going to foster the bs idea that Lovecraft was indeed a believer in the things in which he wrote, that he did have occult connections (such as the persistent legend that he was tied, through his wife Sonia, to Aleister Crowley; something which has been debunked time and again, and yet continues to resurface like the proverbial bad penny), or even that he was this nerdy pulp writer (he was not; with very few exceptions, he did not write for the pulps, he wrote what interested him; but the pulps were the only market for the type of stories he wished to tell, at the time); and so on.

In other words: they're going to have to go a looooooooooong way to convince me to give this one the time to even peruse a review, let alone see the film.

You want to see Lovecraft -- at least, an approach to the real Lovecraft -- on film? Watch Out of Mind: The Stories of H. P. Lovecraft; now, that is a Lovecraftian film (despite a very small budget and some consequent wobbles) well worth seeing:

http://www.sfsite.com/09a/om135.htm

 

[Lobolover]

Lovecraft is a classic horror character, like Frankenstein........

Oh, my nervous system!

And yes, unless this is given some actual thought, it will be very very bad .I do admit that the idea of him being presented as an disbeliever in the stuff he wrote, only to get smacked over the snout with it could be entertaining, I can just not see enough work being put on that aspect of the movie . I bet three yankee dollars there will be almost no story at all and all will focus on the "special effects" .Granted I have not read the original source, this is hollywood, so chances are anything good the original story had is going to be replaced with bad, which will be slit open just to squeeze in more badness . And I am talking possible Garbage Pail Kids The Movie badness here , and that was bad enough to rip the fabric of space and time .

 

[Ningauble]

If they are going to make a horror movie out of it, then they have already succeeded -- the mere rumour is making me VERY afraid!!

 

[pablo]

Well at the very least the samples of the graphic novel over at lovecraftcomic.com look very good. It'll be in stores on April 8th, so if it piques your interest at all you may want to get it. (There is even a trailer.)

 

[Randolph]

I want this to get made, but only out of selfishness. It might take a Hollywood crapfest like this for del Toro to get the greenlight on Madness, which I would kill to see.

 

[j d worthington]

Well at the very least the samples of the graphic novel over at lovecraftcomic.com look very good. It'll be in stores on April 8th, so if it piques your interest at all you may want to get it. (There is even a trailer.)

I can understand the enthusiasm, but for my part, it looks like anything but a good beginning to a film about Lovecraft. It seems more a "shoot-'em-up" adventure tale with elements from the Mythos (and a few elements from HPL's life -- most likely terribly distorted, as has been the case in nearly all instances so far, with very few exceptions) more in the nature of a Howard tale than anything Lovecraft would have produced (or been a part of).

I could be wrong; but the sample pages I saw, plus the blurb, does not give me any hope for anything other than that; in other words, a complete miss when it comes to anything even approaching a genuine Lovecraftian atmosphere.

I want this to get made, but only out of selfishness. It might take a Hollywood crapfest like this for del Toro to get the greenlight on Madness, which I would kill to see.

I think, though, that this may be mistaken impression. Hollywood being Hollywood, it is much more likely to mean that del Toro's film keeps being mucked with because they'll want it to be more of the same; and if he doesn't bow to that... I doubt something like this would help, but fear it's more likely to hinder in that respect....

This is, however, yet another of those cases when I would just love to be proven wrong....

 

[nigourath]

i am downloading this "out of mind-stories of hpl" right now from rapidshare.it appears to be a tv-adaptation of which i never knew anything about-thanks to this site not any more.

 

[j d worthington]

i am downloading this "out of mind-stories of hpl" right now from rapidshare.it appears to be a tv-adaptation of which i never knew anything about-thanks to this site not any more.

It's an unusual film, in that it isn't an adaptation of a particular story per se, but blends in elements from "The Statement of Randolph Carter" along with things directly from Lovecraft's letters and an original story of its own into a near-seamless whole, capturing the feel of Lovecraft quite well by blurring the boundaries and making the viewer uncertain which is reality -- or if they all are.... And Christopher Heyerdahl's performance as HPL is, to put it simply, magnificent! Art Kitching's take on (a modern day) Randolph Carter is also very finely drawn. Peter Farbridge's performance as Blake is well done, though I do feel he overdoes it a bit as Harley Warren -- but then, he plays a Warren who is decidedly unhinged, so that's a debatable point. The other performances are likewise of high quality, and in general this remains perhaps the best Lovecraft-inspired film I've seen to date... and with some of the smaller, independent, and amateur efforts I've seen (which frequently manage to capture the man's work much, much better than the professionals usually do), that's saying something.

I'd also strongly suggest Brian Moore's version of Cool Air -- departs from the tale in some respects, and is less of a horror tale than a weird fantasy, but it also is very well done, and Jack Donner's performance as Doctor Muñoz is a beautiful and touching rendition; and also Rough Magik, the pilot for a tv series which was never picked up -- again, not a direct adaptation of anything from Lovecraft, but definitely inspired by his work and using his themes and several of his motifs to wonderful effect. All three of these (and several of the shorts on these discs) are things I'd put very high on a list for lovers of Lovecraft on film....

 

[pablo]

A little while ago there were a lot of Lovecraft films that were released in a 5-DVD series:

1: The H.P. Lovecraft Collection, Vol. 1: Cool Air : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

2: The H.P. Lovecraft Collection, Vol. 2: Dreams of Cthulhu : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

3: The H.P. Lovecraft Collection, Vol. 3: Out of Mind : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

4: The H.P. Lovecraft Collection, Vol. 4: Pickman's Model : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

5: The H.P. Lovecraft Collection, Vol. 5: Strange Aeons : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

 

[j d worthington]

That's the set I was talking about, Pablo (though I have the earlier edition of the first three, so I'm missing the two "Experiment" films, which I would very much like to have....)

Don't agree with all the comments there (I'd rate Out of Mind considerably higher, and found the scene with Lovecraft deciding on the pronunciation of "Cthulhu" a very nice touch... it's exactly the sort of thing he would do, from all accounts....), but nonetheless a fairly balanced view....

 

[MontyCircus]

Ron Howard

Oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooo...how could they even consider this HACK!!!...that has 2 Oscars for creating the best picture of the year...with the directors guild twice naming him the director of the year and nominating him another two times...

I mean anyone but him!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!

Geez people......re-laaax...

Panicking about the perhaps horrible results of an unmade movie based on an unread story...what the hell's going on?

I thought Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind were great. Didn't care for Da Vinci Code, but the subject matter didn't appeal to me anyway...

I don't see the point in freaking out because Hollywood is going to pump some money into a Lovecraftian movie. Isn't that what you guys sit around waiting for news of? It seems like all of the "What are some good Lovecraftian movies" threads are full of suggestions ranging from low-budget thirty year-old films to shoe-string budget silent fan films to ones starring Tori Spelling.

Pretty slim pick'ins.

And let's be real. A "faithful" adaptation of Lovecraft would be pretty damn boring on the screen. It seemed like the consensus in that Watchmen thread was that stories converted to another medium should be altered to fit it (although, in other places I have heard die-hard Watchmen fans bitching about the teenie-tiney changes made in the film...sheesh...can't please everybody). Anyway, faithfully converting Lovecraft stories to screen...would make about as much sense as faithful Edgar Allen Poe stories. Kind of dated by now. But...Edgar Allen Poe INSPIRED tales would be pretty cool. There's a new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out that you've all heard of no doubt. I'm sure it won't be a faithful adaptation of any of the existing stories. No, it'll be something new. Is anyone crying sacrilege? If you find any such people, please slap them for me.

So go for it Mr. Howard. And make it 3-D. Show me the tentacles baby

 

[j d worthington]

M-P: The thing is, we've had that sort of thing already, and quite a lot of it, ranging from the good, to the bad, to the indifferent, to the simply godawful. Why simply add another piece of "Lovecraftian" cinema that really isn't, when you get down to it, Lovecraftian? And this one is touting having taken HPL's life as a basis for at least part of the story. Great... except it's also taking complete liberties (from the description given in various places) which makes it nothing more than pure fantasy... yet still it makes that biographical basis one of its big selling points, and that's a big part of what bugs me. It's going to perpetuate bs pseudomyths about what this person was truly like, and I've had quite enough of that, thank you. It's time to have a more thoughtful presentation of the person H. P. Lovecraft, if you're going to present him as a character in your story.

And there's no reason why a faithful (not slavish) adaptation of Lovecraft need be boring. Yes, it's a different medium, but a truly good adaptation can be made without completely screwing over either the spirit or the letter of HPL's work -- let alone the man himself. After all, we have seen some good, thoughtful, and subtle films in the horror/weird fantasy genre, which did rather well (del Toro's work strongly comes to mind here, not to mention numerous Asian films), so there's no reason the same can't be done with Lovecraft. It's about time we started seeing some genuine nuanced handlings of him, at least, considering he's the one who created the material they're so touting to begin with....

 

[j d worthington]

Sorry for the double post, but I had to dash earlier, or I'd have been late to work. At any rate, my point is that, from the description and the sample pages, this simply looks like the same tired old tropes, storylines, images, and ideas that we've seen a thousand times over in the weird fantasy/horror field; and frankly, I don't think we really need a new installment of The Hardy Boys in Conan Meets Cthulhu....

On the other hand, one can quite easily do an intelligent, insightful, sensitive, and informed film with HPL by blending his real life with his dreams, fragments of his work and letters, and so on -- and make it a damned entertaining film, to boot. It just wouldn't be on the infantile level we've seen all-too-often when it comes to this sort of material.

Just for the heck of it, here's an example or two:

We open on a child wandering through a field late at night. He is obviously frightened, lost, and confused, but at the moment there is no apparent threat -- yet the sky is ominously dark and there is an air of something hovering (this could be attained by simple use of lighting, filters, and color-shift of the film stock).

Suddenly, we hear the sound of webbed wings beating, and the child is snatched up into the air, borne along by figures we can only dimly see. His screams go unheard, his struggles are rewarded by pinchings and ticklings by the beings, which snatch away his breath.

Eventually, he is carried out away from all known lands, and over a gigantic range of mountains with incredibly sharp, pointed, needle-like peaks. We have periodic close-ups of the child's terrified face, medium-shots of his struggles, and long-range shots of the figures and their burden and the higher parts of the mountains. Finally, the moon breaks through, and we see the things have no face. Just as the child draws breath for yet another scream, they let go, and he plunges toward the peaks of those mountains. As he nears them, we flash-cut to the child awaking in bed, bathed in perspiration, his heart racing, but safe in his own room.

Or is he? In the distance, we hear a faint fluttering as of webbed wings....

Now, this is based on a recurring nightmare of HPL's about his night-gaunts, figures which haunted his dreams from the time of his grandmother's death when he was six onward (though less and less frequently as he grew older). As a result, they appeared in his fiction and poetry as well, though by that time, he had apparently gained a certain amount of affection for them, so they finally (in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath) come to be allies of his fictional counterpart, Randolph Carter, in his quest for the castle of the gods of Earth's dreamland on Unknown Kadath.

From that opening sequence, we could follow HPL's life, blending some of his experiences with the nightmares and dreams that were influenced by them, and even capturing moments of his fiction which were evolved from them. One could make a quite accurate (if compressed) biographical film on one level, while nonetheless blending it with the imaginative side of his personality -- how he blended genuine experience with his love of the strange, fantastic, and eerie, not to mention of antiquity and abstract truth.

(As an alternate possibility, we could cut from the dream to the adult Lovecraft awaking in much the same state, and follow his development of such things into the tales which earned him the reputation he has today.)

There are plenty of things one can take from his letters, fragments, poetry, tales, etc., and blend in with the genuine events of his life, to create an enthralling story which, while remaining true to Lovecraft's life and personality, nonetheless evokes genuine eeriness, a "sense of adventurous expectancy" (to use one of his favorite phrases), awe, and wonder. And one can take either the approach of setting up the dichotomy (a common theme in his work) between his real life and his dream-life -- which is most often given the air of (to use Donald Burleson's wonderful phrase) "oneiric objectivism", that is, a state of reality as a different plane of existence; or exploring the nightmarish worlds he created from his experiences (think, for instance, of the chilling effect of having a depiction of his walk with friends along the East Side in New York, and the sight of the crowds suddenly (seen through his eyes) taking on the fantastic, horrific, and menacing shapes and adumbrations that they do in one of the most infamous passages of his letters, where the inhabitants become something horrific, much like the alienage of the inhabitants of Innsmouth (one could make good use of CG here). And one could even, later in the film, draw upon that connection when it comes to dealing with his evolving that particular story as well.

Another bit that could be used: his visit to Vermont, blending the real experience with the nightmarish vision he developed from it; say, having him (during a walk through the woods) hear the voices of the fungi from Yuggoth -- the dream/fantasy state being suggested by a subtle shift in color and lighting with the film (rather than, say, the hackneyed use of extreme filters or processing).

Or there's the account he gives of an extremely detailed dream he had, which he woke from, only to eventually realize that he was once again in his childhood home and looking at a view which no longer existed; at which point he woke up, only to eventually realize very little (though some) had chaned; at which point he woke up, to go about normal activities, only to realize he was still dreaming, at which point he woke up... and so on, until he finally really did wake up... but with that unease that one has that perhaps they have not woken up yet, but are still trapped in a dream within a dream within a dream....

Depending on whether you take the whole of his life, or simply a fragment of it, the film could develop the idea mentioned above, including Lovecraft's materialistic mechanistic approach to life being constantly pitted against the possibility that these realms he dreams of do have some sort of reality apart from their creator, and even (just as a suggestion) reinforce that by ending with the marker for his grave while a voice over delivers certain lines from Clark Ashton Smith's poetic tribute to him; lines which suggest that, in leaving this life he has indeed traveled to and become a part of that world of dreams of which he wrote so vividly. Alternately, one could quote lines from his own final Fungi sonnet ("Continuities"), which provide a key for understanding the man, his work, and his dreams.

The point is, that there are any number of approaches to a film dealing with Lovecraft which could indeed use the fantastic, horrific, and dreamlike elements of his work and life, and do so both entertainingly and intelligently, and still remain an honest depiction of what the man was really like. You could even include those tentacles M-P mentions in his post (though frankly I think Stuart Gordon took that about as far as one can take it without becoming completely ludicrous, in Dagon).

All it takes to do such is what any writer is supposed to do when dealing with an historicl figure or subject:

1.) RESEARCH THE DAMNED SUBJECT SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!!!

and

2.) combine that with intelligent use of imagination.....

 

[Lobolover]

1.) RESEARCH THE DAMNED SUBJECT SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!!!

An aproach all to rare nowadays, I have to say . At least, touside of independant film making .

 

[AE35Unit]

Geez people......re-laaax...

Panicking about the perhaps horrible results of an unmade movie based on an unread story...what the hell's going on?

I thought Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind were great. Didn't care for Da Vinci Code, but the subject matter didn't appeal to me anyway...

I don't see the point in freaking out because Hollywood is going to pump some money into a Lovecraftian movie. Isn't that what you guys sit around waiting for news of?

after all, you dont have to watch it!

 

[j d worthington]

after all, you dont have to watch it!

No, but neither do I have to sit back and watch Hollywood screw over HPL yet again without lodging a loud complaint -- and, as I've said, from the description and sample pages, this is exactly what would be going on here.

They want to do another "forbidden (usually Asian) cult menace swallows writer and immense action sequence ensues" story using Lovecraftian elements -- fine. But drop the use of Lovecraft himself unless you bleeding know what you're talking about with dealing with the person.

You can put Lovecraft (as a character) into any sort of fantastic situation, yes. For fictional purposes, that's fine... as long as you treat him as H. P. Lovecraft, not a comic-book version of someone's distorted myth of what HPL was like. As I said, it's the responsibility of any writer, when dealing with a genuine historical person, to research that person before using them as a character. Othewise, they're simply not doing their job as a writer. Period. In that, it's no different than seriously presenting, say, Napoleon as having helped conquer the American West.....