Spooky Movies: Call of Cthulhu

If you’re at all a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, the pulp horror story writer whose work has influenced everyone from Roger Corman to Guillermo del Toro, you know that films made from his works are pretty hit and miss—emphasis on the miss. (Whose bright idea was it to put Sandra Dee in The Dunwich Horror?) Anyway, Call of Cthulhu, a tiny-budget indy released in 2005, is an exception to the rule. Many Lovecraft adaptations have gone for the gore and the gross-out, but the makers of this version of Cthulhu obviously understood Lovecraft, who was famous for taking readers right up to the edge of something horrible and then not describing it, allowing readers to fill in the gaps from their own imagination and creating an effect that was far more terrifying than graphic descriptions of violence and blood. The filmmakers incorporated a lot of language from the short story and made use of set and filming techniques from the timeframe in which it was written (1928) to recreate the feel of the original. In keeping with that, the film is silent. The acting is a bit uneven, but overall this is a faithful and well-done rendition of the story and the era and a testament to what can be done with a small budget and a lot of creativity.