I want to recommend to you, dear reader, a hidden gem among 21st century films. It’s less than an hour long, and it’s a quick, easy affair.
2005’s The Call of Cthulhu is as faithful an adaptation of the iconic Lovecraft story as I’ve ever seen. It’s a black and white, silent film with an orchestral score. A throwback to the time when Lovecraft wrote the story and the stop-motion animation technique first wowed audiences with a great ape named King Kong.
Even if the only good thing about this movie was the payoff, where we get to see a Claymation Cthulhu wander out of the sunken city of R’lyeh to chase down curious sailors who bit off more than they could chew, it would be worth the watch; but as an homage to the films of that time, and as a Lovecraft adaptation, it stands out.
As I watched Cthulhu’s shadow crawl across the stunted landscape of the sunken city, I felt that same thrill I did as a little boy, watching Ray Harryhausen’s work. An especially fond memory arises when I think of the Kraken from The Clash of the Titans. I still think to this day that Harryhausen’s take is far better than the remakes with their CGI leviathan.
The craftmanship, in and of itself, of men like Phil Tippet (see Mike’s review of Tippet’s Mad God here) and Harryhausen lies as distinctly in their unique imagination as it does in the art itself. Here we must suppose that artists with such a long and storied career are themselves the work of art, and the stories they helped tell were just archetypes using these great artists as mediums for repeated transmission.
Who is the sculptor? Who is the clay?
And this brings me back to that terrifying, insanity-inducing Old One, Cthulhu, and the Lovecraftian mythos on a larger scale.
I think we must admit that some of Lovecraft’s vision was a product of his own stunted childhood and his intense xenophobia, which definitely bordered on and spilled over into racism.
Fear of the other and the unknown rears its ugly head throughout his works, and the Cosmic Horror of the Ancient Gods Who Existed Before Man is by far the most profound and enduring archetype that Lovecraft perpetuated. In this way, his fiction offers a counterpoint to those letters and essays which make clear his fear of the outsider.
In real life, as people still do today, he projected a bravado before those things he feared, securing in his mind a belief in the superiority of his culture, whatever he thought that was, as a ward against what he could not understand from a distance.
In his fiction, what he could not understand emerged as a primal force that wasn’t just more powerful than H.P. Lovecraft, but which was more powerful than the whole of humanity, and impossible to ward off.
This is the mind, split, where it cannot accept that what it really fears is the inevitable: we lose our lives to the eternal life; our safety and comfort are illusions in which we often immerse ourselves, unwittingly at another’s expense; our sanity is but a worldview constructed by a meat machine to make life more manageable to its particular needs; our “culture” is never “progressive” but just a blip on the radar in the arbitrary rise and fall of time and empire, a territorial pissing contest between beasts who call themselves by Proper Names.
What really progresses is the understanding of given individuals in the greater milieu. We are each our own R’lyeh, with our own Cthulhu, though, in the end, if not before then, we will learn that, though there is real evil in the world, it is our hands that do it, not the reaching tentacles of some fantastic monster. The fantastic monster is just the play of shadows on the wall, distracting us from looking into our own hearts for an answer we don’t want to hear.
(For an alternate mythological spin on this same theme, from the perspective of the individual as sacrificial lamb, my essay on Dio’s Holy Diver, which you can find here, might be of interest.)
Lovecraft’s fiction is sometimes bad, but some of it is among the best ever written, especially in the genre. His political and personal views were ignorant but understandable considering his generally cloistered life, and the times.
It may even be that through the mythos he created, others have transcended his ignorance as they attempt to make peace with the terror of the unknown.
We have countless examples of Lovecraft Mythos-inspired art that reaches beyond its creator to dispel his prejudices. Sometimes to overcome fear of the unknown we must plunge ourselves into it, come hell, high water, Cthulhu, Dagon, or Nyarlathotep.
As I watched a black and white Claymation Cthulhu emerge from a silent, mythical city, I pondered what audiences in the 1930s would have made of it. If a giant ape got their knickers in a bundle, this guy would likely have had them running from the theater.
It was brief but intense, poetic in a tasteful way. Stop-motion is time-consuming, so it tends to set the limit of its own action, as do the poetic forms. I know the confines within which I must work when I write a limerick or a sonnet or haiku. So too must the stop-motion animator know the limit, learn to do more with less.
The Call of Cthulhu is currently on Tubi, free to watch. A film commissioned by The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, it won high critical acclaim and awards, though I must wonder if perhaps Cthulhu exerted some influence from his slumber beneath the sunken city of R’lyeh and the timeless, tumultuous sea…
