Del Toro: Lovecraft Yes, Godzilla No

In an article on HitFix, Guillermo del Toro squashes rumors that he will be involved in the upcoming re-launch of Godzilla. That might be bad news for the fans of the giant Japanese monster, but good news for those of us who have wanted the Hellboy director to tackle his dream project for years.
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At The Mountains of Madness

More news from joblo.com. First it looks like Guillermo del Toro long delayed dream project, At the Mountains of Madness, adapted from the story by Lovecraft, is getting close to getting off the ground. Secondly, it looks like Hellboy will be joining Miskatonic University’s ill-fated expedition, as Ron Perlman will be cast if available. As a fan of both Lovecraft and Ron Perlman, this is more good news.
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Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

I think anyone who has enjoyed the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft would also enjoy this even-handed documentary on his life. Born to a father soon to die in madness of syphilis and an over-protective yet emotionally distant mother, Lovecraft’s brand of horror set the template we still follow today. He famously rejected the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, et al of traditional weird fiction for his own cosmography, the greatest of which has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a figurative sandbox authors still play in today. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of his writing was the use of antagonists who are often not truly evil, but indifferent to human fate.

The film doesn’t flinch from the less-attractive aspects of his personality, the xenophobia and racism common to his time that he unfortunately didn’t escape. (I had forgotten the name he gave to the cat in “The Rats in the Walls” and somewhat wish it was still forgotten) It also examines the personality quirks that caused him to be the harshest critic of his own work, and limited both his output and his ability to enjoy his role as one of the fathers of modern weird fiction.

The film makers assembled an all-star team of interviewees for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, with Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon and many others going before the camera to talk about Lovecraft and his place in history. Interwoven into the narrative are also brief examinations of some of his most popular stories.

Highly recommended.
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The 14 Best Horror Short Stories of All Time!

As always, these are actually my favorite short stories of all time rather than the greatest. You don’t climb to the top of the heap of bloggers by observing truth in advertising.

If you are a regular blog reader (and if you are, thank you) you know I like lists, and if you aren’t, look at the sidebar and you’ll see. For some time, I’ve been planning a list of short stories to accompany the other poorly-received lists, but it was too daunting a task, as there are too many to choose from and the list varies from moment to moment. It’s also too important, as short stories have formed the true backbone of the horror genre. Recently friends began bugging me to produce one, so I figured “What do I have to lose?” So here it is.

The ground rules first. These are my own opinions, and you are free (and encouraged) to disagree, and to do so in the comments. Please feel free to give vent to any vitriol you may feel, although once again, “dipshit” has become a way too overused epithet. To keep the list somewhat manageable, and to keep my head from exploding, I limited the stories to one per author, so it wouldn’t be a list of the best Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft stories, or every short piece T.E.D. Klein has written. I also made arbitrary judgments on novellas. Instead of using word length measurements, if a novella “felt” like a short novel rather than a long short story, it was disqualified. Therefore, no appearance by “The Mist”, one of my favorites.

Why 14 stories instead of 10? This was as far down as I could cull it, so I hedged my bets and cheated.

1. “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft. In my mind, this is one of the few stories that continues to give me chills. I re-read it every year in October.
2. “Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner. I’ve spoken of my admiration for Wagner before, and this is probably his best.
3. “Who Goes There?” by Don A Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.). The basis for the movies The Thing From Another World and The Thing, I read it at a young age, and its central theme of paranoia about the true identity of those around you continues to resonate.
4. “Night They Missed the Horror Show” by Joe Lansdale. Lansdale has written a number of great short stories, but this tale of two young rednecks who should have watched The Night of the Living Dead is his best.
5. “Nightcrawlers” by Robert R. Mccammon. “Something Passed By” was a close second, but I love this story of a man truly haunted by the war in Vietnam, and the unlucky diner patrons who get to share that with him. “Charlie’s in the light!”
6. “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was the great master of sea-swept horror, and this is probably his best short story.
7. “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber. Leiber is probably best remembered as a science fiction author, but he wrote in a number of genres, and his forays into horror are second to none. This story of an artist’s model who is a psychic vampire is my favorite.
8. “The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King. King has written a lot of great stories, and most people would pick one of his early works as his best, But this story of a man doomed by the purchase of an ever-changing painting sticks with me. I’ll always wonder what was in the paintings that were burned.
9. “The Ash-Tree” by M.R. James. A classic story from a nearly forgotten writer.
10. ‘The White People” by Arthur Machen. The dark sage of Wales framed this story as the diary of a young girl. Probably one of the most influential horror stories ever written.
11. “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. The world around us as the source of menace. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorites.
12. “The Yellow Sign”, by Robert W. Chambers. The centerpiece of Chambers’ great collection of short stories The King in Yellow shows how horror can come from that which is not explained. (The sign itself is never described, and it’s effects are only loosely explained.)
13. “Black Man with a Horn” by T.E.D. Klein. Any of the stories from the far-less-than-prolific Klein that were published in Dark Gods (a must-read) or the story that became his novel The Ceremonies, “The Events at Poroth’s Farm” would qualify, but this is marginally my favorite of them. Beware the Tcho-Tcho.
14. "Pigeons From Hell" by Robert E. Howard. The creator of Conan wrote some fine horror stories, and this is generally seen as his best.


If you haven’t read any of these, and you are a fan of horror, I suggest you seek them out. Then come back and tell me how wrong I am.
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H. P. Lovecraft and...Ron Howard ?!

In the strange bedfellows category, TV’s beloved Opie (Ron Howard) is strongly contemplating directing a movie adaptation of the comic book The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. The comic, which I haven’t read but sounds interesting, apparently places Lovecraft into the world he created in his writing. This movie is good news for us Lovecraft fans….but Ron Howard? Doesn’t seem like a good fit. I’ve been somewhat meh on Howard’s films in the past, finding them for the most part workmanlike but flat, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In other Lovecraft news, Guillermo del Toro’s long talked-about dream of adapting Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness for the big screen is still a possibility. Del Toro plans to do it, but only after he does Hellboy 3 (yay!) and a two-movie adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (ugh!). I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see Mountains, but it sounds good.
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The Amulet

The modern versions of two genres I love, the private detective story and the horror tale, trace many of their standard tropes back to a common birthplace, the pulp fiction outlets of the 1930s. While H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Seabury Quinn were providing the template for fright fare to come in Weird Tales, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet and others were creating the hard-boiled detective in Black Mask. It seems very natural, therefore, that there would be attempts to merge the two. One of the latest, and one of the best, is William Meikle’s recently launched Midnight Eye series. The Amulet is the first in this series.

Derek Adams is a private eye in Glasgow, Scotland (Meikle is a Scotsman transplanted to Canada) with all the hallmarks of a classic private eye. He’s somewhat sick of the world, has a love-hate relationship with the city in which he lives, a penchant for one-liners, and a certain code of honor that doesn’t allows coincide with the law. One day, a beautiful dame comes into his office. She wants Derek to track down a lost family heirloom. A routine case, except this heirloom, the titular amulet, has mystic powers to reach beyond our reality, and the stars are coming into alignment to allow someone with the amulet and the will and knowledge to use it to open a gateway and allow the Old Ones to return to earth. This would be good for the Old Ones, not so good for the rest of us.

Meikle has done a good job with something any writer attempting a classic PI story must do: make the city in which it is set a vital character. Glasgow lives, in all its beauty and ugliness, in this book. The writer flows well, and the story is kept concise and lean. It is easy to read in one or two sittings. His PI character fits well into the pantheon of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, while the eldritch elements of the plot would do Lovecraft proud. I ordered the second book in the series, The Sirens, when I was about halfway through this one, and I certainly hope Mr. Meikle continues with the adventures of Derek Adams.

Thoroughly and wholeheartedly recommended.
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New Hope for Public Schools

If you have children, want children, or sacrifice children to the Elder Gods, you’ll get a kick out of this article entitled “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum”. I think I’ve finally found a politician I can fully support.
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The Call Of Cthulhu

Few authors are as revered to horror fans as H. P. Lovecraft. Although his stories were not overly popular during his lifetime, his influence has carried down through the years, and his accomplishment in liberating the genre from the traditional tropes of horror literature weighs heavy on all writers working today. He is certainly the most name-checked among authors today (Stephen King is his only real competition). His stories are required reading.

But he has not fared so well when it comes to translating his stories to the screen. Imdb lists 75 adaptations of his work, and with few exceptions, they are dreck. Although there are gems like Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator sprinkled in, the average quality is closer to abominations like H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tomb.

Part of the blame lies with the stories themselves, I think. The typical protagonist of a Lovecraft opus was a passive narrator, who observes what is going on (often with great confusion) and rarely interacts with events. We want our movie heroes to be more aggressive, and to watch Mel Gibson grab his sword and go forth to battle the evil Jews, or whatever he’s against. If Lovecraft’s POV characters see something too scary, they often faint. So for this reason, and because most movies tend to be terrible, anyway, Lovecraft adaptations have been something to be feared more than Cthulhu himself.

A group of Lovecraft enthusiasts have decided to take matters in their own hands. The HP Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) raised a small amount of money, and decided to film Lovecraft’s seminal work, The Call of Cthulhu. The biggest problem was in the budget constraints. The story calls for several elaborate dream-sequences, and a gigantic special effects piece where great Cthulhu rises from R’lyeh and attacks a ship. Clearly they couldn’t afford this.

The budget shortfall was dealt with in an ingenious fashion. The movie was filmed as it would have been when the story was published in 1928 – which meant a silent film (except for score) in black & white, with crude practical effects. I hope the idea of a Black & White silent flick hasn’t turned you off to The Call of Cthulhu, because this is the best Lovecraft adaptation I have ever seen.

The movie, which clocks in at just under 47 minutes, is faithful to the original story, and its convoluted narrative structure, a flashback within a flashback with a flashback. The stark, impressionistic lighting and artificial aging of the film adds eeriness to the production. The dream sequences owe a lot to the silent classic The Cabinet of Caligari, and the stop motion animation of the Cthulhu scene, rather than detracting from the story, adds a sense of otherworldliness. The actors do a good job, and the direction is bold. They have overcome the limitations of their budget through creativity.

I urge everyone to order The Call of Cthulhu from the HPLHS by clicking here. The package is well worth the dough, and the HPLHS is planning to have their second production, The Whisperer In Darkness, ready next year. I can’t wait.