James Wan’s Call of Cthulhu - Howie goes to Hollywood

[Sinner's Sandwich]

but with speculation about how the Cthulhu Mythos could be the next Marvel cash cow, and its popularity growing more now than ever, perhaps it will do okay.

That can't be avoided. All it takes is just one successful movie to break the dam.

They will find a way to shoehorn in some bullshit 'racism bad' angle to apologise for H.P. calling his cat Niggerman.

He had no say in it. His family got the cat when he was a child.

 

[Overly Serious]

but with speculation about how the Cthulhu Mythos could be the next Marvel cash cow

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of Hollywood to connect all its movies. We live on placid islands of stories in the midst of many genres, and it was not meant that we should bridge these islands. The writers, each straining in their own direction, have hitherto coordinated little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated characters will open up such terrifying vistas of marketing, and of our frightful helplessness to oppose them, that we shall either go broke from the heirs of the MCU; or flee from the entire concept of the shared universe into the peace and safety of low-budget indie films forever.”

They will find a way to shoehorn in some bullshit 'racism bad' angle to apologise for H.P. calling his cat Niggerman.

Point of fact. Lovecraft's father named the cat.

n the Mouth of Madness is another good pseudo-Lovecraft adaptation from John Carpenter. It is even more directly influenced by Lovecraft than The Thing.

Indeed it is. But I would go further and say that Carpenter's Prince of Darkness is an even more Lovecraftian movie. At a surface level the Christian symbolism and characters might seem contrary to the Mythos but that very same religion is depicted as superficial and incomplete and the theme of facing something unknown and potentially unknowable is even stronger here. The theme of ItMoM is madness (of course!) and that's very Lovecraftian. But Prince of Darkness has more of the cosmic. I'd say perhaps that Lovecraft's protagonists going mad is a response to the cosmic horror more than the centre of the story itself so to me this is the (slightly) more true to Lovecraft film.

I actually own and adore both of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society's adaptations of The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. They are both something of a love letter to his work but whilst the first is great fun and well worth watching as a silent movie amateur production, the latter is - despite minimal budget and some quite bare sets - verging on a proper movie. The cast obviously care about the movie, barring some minor and very sensible amendments to turn it into a film it's true to the story and certainly true to the themes, the black and white style suits it well and if the effects are a little Ray Harry Hausen they're no less fun for that. It's honestly a pretty good time and I recommend purchasing it to any Lovecraft fans.

I guess on the subject of adaptations I'll mention a couple that I think others might not have considered as Lovecraft movies but which have some resonance, I think. Hell, I'll start with the least likely - The Watcher in the Woods. This from back when Disney made light horror films like The Blackhole. Whilst obviously much more kid friendly it has elements of the unknowable, the cosmic and inhuman minds and other worlds. Spring by Justin Benson is a low-budget horror with tendencies towards being Art (I mean that in the pejorative sense) but I mention because it has some themes of pre-civilisation cultures and unknown vistas of knowledge. I might just be showing off how obscure a movie I'm aware of though! Do we count The Mothman Prophecies? It sort of works given the alienness of it all. Is the Mothman a Meego? I never thought of that before but it would be weirdly suitable. I think The Wickerman (original of course) is discounted only because it doesn't actually have supernatural elements. The weirdness of a cult and being out of place fits well, though.

Anyway, we can but hope that if this goes ahead it will be true to Lovecraft. We will probably never see Guilermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness which might have been our best ever hope to get a real big budget Lovecraft adaptation by someone who really cares about it. For which we can blame Peter Jackson who I will probably punch in the mouth because of it if I ever meet him.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

Anyway, we can but hope that if this goes ahead it will be true to Lovecraft. We will probably never see Guilermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness which might have been our best ever hope to get a real big budget Lovecraft adaptation by someone who really cares about it

I certainly think it was one of the only opportunities for a big budget movie that’ll be shown to theaters instead of a miniseries on a Streaming platform. Wan’s Call of Cthulhu will perhaps be the only other opportunity we get.

 

[Rungle]

I am a firm believer that you cannot adapt Lovecraft's works successfully into a movie.
How can you make something that Lovecraft claims is ''Indescribable'' into something that HAS to be described to produce it on screen?
Color out of space's movie adaptation was dogshit, because they made this color that nobody has ever experienced before, that would make you insane, into fucking purple.
The word Indescribable works good on page because even if you try to imagine it, You will always be wrong and unaware of its true nature.
Lovecraftian Gods on screen are always hard to convey, because the very medium they are presented as contradicts itself.
The best thing you can really adapt is Lovecraft's Sci-fi stories, like Re-animator, as it does not depend on the indescribable, but something you vaguely understand turned into the most horrific thing possible.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

He had no say in it. His family got the cat when he was a child

Doesn’t matter. As a matter of fact, Lovecraft repudiating much of his racist beliefs later on in his life doesn’t matter either. He is ultimately the face of racist 20th century writers and now every single thing associated with Lovecraft has to give exclaimers about what a racist man he was, or else you’ll get jumped on by mobs of angry nerds.

Color out of space's movie adaptation was dogshit, because they made this color that nobody has ever experienced before, that would make you insane, into fucking purple

A big part of the reason for that movie’s awfulness was the director and the casting of Nic Cage as the main. Part of it wanted to be unsettling and the other part of it wanted to be a surreal comedy with plenty of Cage-esque quirkiness in order to get butts into seats. The filmography was really beautiful, though. Such a shame the tone of the movie was inconsistent.

The best thing you can really adapt is Lovecraft's Sci-fi stories, like Re-animator

Re-Animator doesn’t need another adaptation. Stuart Gordon’s film is a cult classic for a reason.

 

[Overly Serious]

Maybe with advancing AI technology costs will get low enough that some brilliant and slightly unhinged visionary will be able to adapt Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories. For his other stories... Mostly what you need is a director who is a master of suspense. That's really the crux of stories like The Dunwich Horror or The Call of Cthulhu or The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

If you got some really good character actors and a decent costumer, you could make a phenomenal Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Apparently there have been two adaptations of it though I've seen neither. I'll have to try and unearth them out. There was also, I have just learned, an opera based on it produced by the late Ken Campbell. A mad British actor who I met once - utterly batshit and a great entertainer.


He once wrote a ten hour play that adapted Robert Anton Wilson and Collin Shea's Illuminatus trilogy. Apparently it had the audience moved around the theatre on rollers to witness different parts of the story that were taking place simultaneously. I would pay good money to have witnessed that.

Anyway, trying to dig out Charles Dexter Ward the musical now. The universe just got a little brighter.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

I am a firm believer that you cannot adapt Lovecraft's works successfully into a movie.
How can you make something that Lovecraft claims is ''Indescribable'' into something that HAS to be described to produce it on screen?
Color out of space's movie adaptation was dogshit, because they made this color that nobody has ever experienced before, that would make you insane, into fucking purple.
The word Indescribable works good on page because even if you try to imagine it, You will always be wrong and unaware of its true nature.
Lovecraftian Gods on screen are always hard to convey, because the very medium they are presented as contradicts itself.
The best thing you can really adapt is Lovecraft's Sci-fi stories, like Re-animator, as it does not depend on the indescribable, but something you vaguely understand turned into the most horrific thing possible.

You can and you cannot...

You can be subtle about the creatures, show only mangled cadavers and the sorts, show the creatures as shapeless aberrations... You can totally capture the dread and indifference of the lovecraftian mythos on film...

And also you cannot. The average normie cannot comprehend lovecraftian horror. They will go into the movie expecting a monster flick with Cthulhu. Normies and critics will tear it apart. Why can't I see the monter clearly? I paid $12 to see a cgi monster. Man this movie doesn't even have the budget to show us the monster. What do you mean, the universe is indifferent and the protagonist doesn't confront the monster? This movie is ass. I wanna see Cthulhu hack up some horny preteens and get killed in the end.

And this is what the movie will be. Call of Cthulhu (trademarked Warner Bros, not C'thulhu) will be an average monster flick.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

I actually own and adore both of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society's adaptations of The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. They are both something of a love letter to his work but whilst the first is great fun and well worth watching as a silent movie amateur production, the latter is - despite minimal budget and some quite bare sets - verging on a proper movie

I cannot recommend the HPLHS for Lovecraft adaptations enough. Their Dark Adventure Radio Theater series is absolutely kino.

Like Womble said, I think the best Lovecraft movies have been the ones inspired by him rather than directly adapting his work. In the Mouth of Madness, The Lighthouse, The Void, are examples

Gonna add Annihilation to that list as well.

 

[Overly Serious]

I cannot recommend the HPLHS for Lovecraft adaptations enough. Their Dark Adventure Radio Theater series is absolutely kino.

I love listening to those. They really do produce some excellent material, both theatrical and practical. I know I sperged on it earlier but if you can get hold of the Blu-ray of their Whisperer in Darkness, it's a fantastic time to just set up a little gaslight or candle in a dark room and watch it either by yourself or with someone who shares a passion for Lovecraft.

https://www.hplhs.org/mptwid.php

What I wouldn't give to run some kind of Lovecraft triathlon movie night at a theatre. Would be the best.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

So I’ve been doing some more digging on the Call of Cthulhu video game being developed alongside this film. Apparently it’s being funded by a Chinese-American fund Stars-Hana, a conglomeration of LA-based Stars Collective and China-based Hana Investments & Starlight Media.

Call of Cthulhu apparently is the only video game adaptation they’re planning

Peter Lou’s company also financially backed films such as Crazy Rich Asians and Wan’s Malignant. However, Stars-Hana only has one project so far under their belt, with ambitious projects to “cross media fund to invest in comics, films, games, collectibles, consumer goods, artificial intelligence and metaverse technology.”

So, what’s the project they’ve completed, you might ask? The fucking Garfield movie lmao.

I also located the Stars Collective website. They have a handful of well-known directors on there listed as “mentors” such as Robert Minkoff and Sam Raimi, but there isn’t much elaboration on what this means.

I did find this at the bottom of the homepage.

Hoo boy.

I found a little more info about them on an investment website.

All I can say is…welcome to the state of modern entertainment.

 

[Doctor of Autism]

Even the recent extremely shitty Color Out of Space adaptation with Nic Cage had some random nig be the big hero in the end (who also gets the white girl if I'm not mistaken, lol).

No he failed at saving anyone at all in that movie and I think the ending implied he was traumatized while the color still spread.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

The average normie cannot comprehend lovecraftian horror.

So like the people in HPL's books.

 

[millais]

HPLHS went full woke virtue signaling over the George Floyd stuff and never went back to normal.

You will notice that their more recent Dark Adventure Radio Theater productions consistently have strong, wise negro and women characters added in, even where they are out of place not just to the original stories, but even to the period. And they are a lot more on the nose with inserting scenes and depictions lampooning period racial prejudices.

They used to have this really interesting weekly podcast where they would read in full and provide scholarly commentary on selected letters from Lovecraft's voluminous personal correspondence, which was really great because a lot of those letters and essays are not easily accessible for free. But after Floyd, they spent like half of every podcast talking about how uncomfortable Lovecraft's prejudices make them feel in the current political climate.

I think the low point was when they hired an Inuit cultural consultant for a Dark Adventure production in order to get the native language and culture right for part of the story involving Eskimos, but the consultant told them it was impossible to do an authentic and respectful portrayal of the Inuit culture so they cucked out and just cut the whole Eskimo subplot.

But all their pre-Floyd stuff still holds up, including the 2 movies and all the old DART productions and podcast episodes.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

But after Floyd, they spent like half of every podcast talking about how uncomfortable Lovecraft's prejudices make them feel in the current political climate.

But not before? Hypocrites.

 

[millais]

But not before? Hypocrites.

Before Floyd, they would do a kind of brief "cover your ass" virtue signal call out of Lovecraft's racism when it was topical to the letter in question since to their credit they would read out and seriously discuss some of Lovecraft's particularly based and redpilled takes, but at that stage "racism bad" was not the main focus of the podcast. You could tell that Lovecraft's prejudices didn't sit well with their personal political alignment, but they would make it a point not to shy away from analyzing Lovecraft's based commentary and personal letters in order to better understand him as a writer and a person with very human flaws and shortcomings.

But Floyd broke them. I still remember that their very first podcast after Floyd was just a five minute announcement that they were putting the show on indefinite hiatus since they were so distraught over the Floyd incident and it was wrong to be taking away attention from this movement that they felt strong solidarity with.

I can't remember if it was before or after Floyd, but at some point they also started refusing to say "nigger" when reading aloud from Lovecraft's letters because it made them uncomfortable. Before that they used to take the kind of anti-censorship and historical context approach that reasonable people have to the use of "nigger" in Tom Sawyer.

 

[crowabunga]

If you got some really good character actors and a decent costumer, you could make a phenomenal Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

But all their pre-Floyd stuff still holds up, including the 2 movies

I own HPLS's adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness, and I wish that their script - unaltered, you damned monkey's paw- could be produced by a proper studio with some good character actors, particularly to portray Wilmarth and "Akeley", because HPLS's adaptation is charming but appalling.

While their lead actor is acceptable, others were insufferable in spite of their apparent investment. I was particularly frustrated because I could tell they wanted a good impersonation of Vincent Price in one role, but instead of a performance even approximating Price's gentlemanly-charm-cloaking-perverse-villainy they instead got amateurish exaggeration of "a suspicious character."

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

HPLHS went full woke virtue signaling over the George Floyd stuff and never went back to normal.

You will notice that their more recent Dark Adventure Radio Theater productions consistently have strong, wise negro and women characters added in, even where they are out of place not just to the original stories, but even to the period. And they are a lot more on the nose with inserting scenes and depictions lampooning period racial prejudices.

They used to have this really interesting weekly podcast where they would read in full and provide scholarly commentary on selected letters from Lovecraft's voluminous personal correspondence, which was really great because a lot of those letters and essays are not easily accessible for free. But after Floyd, they spent like half of every podcast talking about how uncomfortable Lovecraft's prejudices make them feel in the current political climate.

I mean this is on their website.

I stopped listening to Voluminous around 2021. I expected Branney and Lehman to drop the subject after the protests but no they just buckled down harder.

 

[Safir]

I am a firm believer that you cannot adapt Lovecraft's works successfully into a movie.
How can you make something that Lovecraft claims is ''Indescribable'' into something that HAS to be described to produce it on screen?

I haven't disagreed with anything harder.

The written word is the hardest medium to feature something "indescribable"; it's much easier on video+audio than in writing. Good horror writers like Lovecraft and CAS do a lot of prep work describing mundane but creepy things before they spring an indescribable on you. It doesn't mean literally indescribable, it means the narrator is at a loss for words, and maybe not so much at a complete loss for all words as simply unable to relay the horror. As in, the writer can't help but give up here and hope the prep work pays off.

But with video+audio (or even static puctires), you can have some freaky shit happening on the screen that looks sufficiently unsetting and is hard to put into words. Jump cut, use slightly distorting lenses, spooky sounds and silence, color effects, shadows that fall wrong, stuff that is reminiscent of worms or surprise fleshy bits.

Many, many artists, directors, game programmers, and internet content creators managed to create horrifying shit. Good examples include HR Giger, Junji Ito, the gook comics Infectee, Prey and Planetary Human, Toby Fox (probably unintentionally), Attack on Titan, various weeb and weeb-inspired RPGMaker horror games, some scenes in La-Mulana. There's a Junji Ito comic in which a woman has extra mouths in her mouth. Yo dawg, I put a mouth in your mouth so you can chew while you chew. Are you scared? I'm not. But the picture was freaky.
Or just show the protagonist's horrified/melting face.

Compare Veggie Tales and Annoying Orange: characters in both are technically "a fruit with eyes". But how are you going to relay in words the grossness of gross tranny shit? "A gross fruit with eyes". No, it ain't working. I'm not scared.

Another pair of examples:
Here's a red dragon from Dungeons & Dragons third edition. (the actual picture is actually from the fourth edition but the design carried over)
Here's a World Eater from The Messenger. (youtube)
Both creatures are extremely bad news to a normie protagonist, both are equally easy/difficult to describe if you avoid the word "dragon", and yet the worm is vastly more disgusting. Can you put it into words why? Make me shit a brick (because the game did -- I expected a boss battle, of course, but I didn't expect that).

That said:

1. I don't believe pedowood can produce a scary Cthulhu movie, they don't have the talent.
2. I don't believe a scary/faithful Cthulhu movie is in pedowood's interest or can jumpstart a cash cow "franchise". To make money, they should be making action-adventure movies with Miskatonic U professors as protagonists, and freaky monsters.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

Why don't these dumb cucks sacrifice their hobbies for their jogger overlords then? They love inhaling jogger cock so they should only talk about jogger media from now on like the obedient white slaves they want to be.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

Why don't these dumb cucks sacrifice their hobbies for their jogger overlords then? They love inhaling jogger cock so they should only talk about jogger media from now on like the obedient white slaves they want to be.

I think at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the cast in the Call of Cthulhu movie will be appointed and selected by a committee to be as diverse and equitable as possible.

I don’t understand why you want to “own” an author who’s been dead for close to 90 years, or apologize for his beliefs. It feels so backhanded and insulting to promote his work only to label him a ‘racist bigot’ and tear into his ouvre.