Rue Morgue

by James Grainger

It's hard to believe that dropping the name "Cthulhu" in a conversation once carried as much cultural cache as ordering a cheeseburger in grammatically correct Klingon - a gambit guaranteed to earn you a high-five from those few fan boys in the know and an uncomprehending stare from just "-'·-about everyone else. These days, as Frank H. Woodward, the writer and director of a new full-length documentary on H.P. Lovecraft points out, every self respecting hipster can pick the tentacled Cthulhu from a police lineup of pan-dimensional monsters, and more than a few can name his reclusive creator, now recognized as one of the towering figures in 20th-century horror and fantasy literature.

"I've seen Cthulhu popping up more and more in pop culture," Woodward says, "with everything from Cthulhu plush toys to iPod holders to his obvious inspiration for the Davey Jones character in Pirates of the Caribbean."

Cthulhu and his slithering pantheon of Old Ones take centre stage in Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, a two-year labour of love and voyage of literary discovery for Woodward and his creative partners at Wyrd, a production company that specializes in short films in the horror, fantasy and sci-fi genres.

Woodward's crew originally looked into Lovecraft's life story as the subject for a short documentary they hoped to sell to Anchor Bay for one of the company's special edition Stuart Gordon releases. When the deal didn't materialize, the director decided to expand what he had into a full-length documentary.

"I had already amassed a mountain of research and started approaching a lot of people who ended up being in the film," Woodward says. "So when my production partner James Myers said to me, 'Well, let's go interview them and do it ourselves,’ I thought, why not? We had already discovered that not only are Lovecraft's fans passionate about him, the community is much larger than most people would think."

That list of more-than-willing participants quickly grew to include such heavy hitters as John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman and Stuart Gordon, whose wild cinematic interpretations of Lovecraft's work helped launch the Lovecraft revival back in the 1980s. All appear on camera sharing their enthusiasm for Lovecraft's fiction while offering their own takes on the reclusive author's short, troubled life and bizarre upbringing by a mentally ill mother who lost her husband to syphilis when Lovecraft was a boy.

The more lurid chapters of the author's biography, along with his xenophobic beliefs about the horrors of immigration and "race mixing," have often dominated his public image, making him, even with all the recent critical adulation, one of the most misunderstood artists of the 20th century. Woodward hopes that his film, which balances these sad details with research on Lovecraft's wide circle of friends and correspondences, his marriage to a Jewish woman and his reluctant enthusiasm for travelling beyond his beloved home city of Providence, will help set the record straight.

"Lovecraft has suffered from generalizations over the years," Woodward admits, "but to really understand a person and their art you have look beyond the few paragraphs you find about them on the back of their books. Lovecraft had his own journey through his life and work, a journey that unfortunately got cut off just as things were getting interesting."

Woodward's interview subjects also speculate on Lovecraft's growing hold on the imagination of fans and artists around the world more than 70 years after he passed away from stomach cancer at the age of 47.

"If you really want to get heavy about it, "Woodward says, "we are coming out of an age when we believed that science was going to have all the answers for us. There's a return to spirituality to find the unanswered questions about the universe; and unanswered questions were what Lovecraft specialized in writing about. He tells us that there is no Judeo-Christian god, but maybe there is something else in the outside universe. The fact that the 'something else' is not very nice makes sense to people."

Woodward and his partners at Wyrd are confident they will find a distributor by the beginning of the new year and are currently touring the festival circuit, having already won Best Documentary at the 2008 Comic-Con. Fan response has been passionate, but Woodward expected nothing less from those legions of Lovecraft devotees.

"There is passion out there for many other horror and fantasy writers," he says, "but people want to become Lovecraft scholars once they've been hooked by his work. There aren’t many writers who hook people in that way.”

Dread Central

www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/lovecraft-fear-unknown-2008

by Johnny Butane

It’s pretty amazing, when you stop and think about it, how greatly the work of a strange and lonely man from Providence, RI has influenced so much of our genre. Especially in the last decade or so, the reach of H.P. Lovecraft’s sway on horror has expanded to nearly every facet imaginable, and yet there’s still a multitude of fans that know very little about the man himself.

Enter Frank Woodward and his Wyrd Productions, who set out to make the definitive documentary about the life of the Son of Providence, with thoughts and examinations of his canon offered up by some of the most respected names in horror and fantasy. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown is that documentary, and it does its job admirably.

Lovecraft was a very lonely child, sheltered by his over protective, under affectionate mother. He spent much of his youth alone, unable to really make friends due to a lack of real social skills. He never really went to school, it not being mandatory back in his day, so he had a lot of time to foster his imagination.

What Woodward and crew do right, first and foremost, is not just gloss over this important time in Lovecraft’s development in order to get to “the good stuff”, as it were. They also make sure those on-camera discussing this time of the author’s life have intelligent, insightful contributions to make to the discussion; they’re not just putting Neil Gaiman on screen, for example, to give him more face time, but rather because what’s he has to say is relevant and moves the doc along.

Too often I’ve seen documentaries that seem lacking in coherent structure, jarringly leaping from one point of the subject’s life to another, but Fear of the Unknown moves along smoothly and naturally. This is helped immensely by the narration of Robin Atkin Downes, who does both standard narration and the voice of Lovecraft when portions of his prolific correspondences with peers are quoted. Downes is really the perfect choice for a documentary like this, his voice just moody enough to set the tone of Lovecraft’s life precisely.

As Lovecraft grew up he eventually found and married, moved from Providence to New York, and found steady work submitting his tales of the weird and unnatural to magazines like Weird Tales. Now, though the documentary spends plenty of time on his pre-Cthulhu years, it really hits a whole new level when Lovecraft writes his first tale featuring the Old Ones, in terms of both narration and contribution by the interviewees. Everyone’s got their own thoughts on the Cthulhu mythos and its meanings, of course, and none of them are shy about giving their thoughts.

Though there’s really not a weak one among them, I have to say the insights and conjectures put forth by Guillermo Del Toro are certainly some of the most interesting, but then the man has an amazing mind and incredible imagination so I’m not surprised. I hate to single out really any one particular interview subject because as I say they’re all good, but he’s the one who stood out the most for me.

Even the somewhat taboo subject of Lovecraft’s racism is handled well, something I wasn’t sure how they’d address if they did at all. But it’s tackled head-on by most of the interviewees, who all make it clear that they find it hard to fault someone’s views who grew up in a time so far removed from out own with a life that most of us can’t understand. It doesn’t make his viewpoints right or any less frustrating to hear, but it does make them a bit easier to digest.

On the whole Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown is a solid documentary that’s sure to appeal to everyone from casual Lovecraft readers to the most hardcore of his fans; there’s something here for everyone.

Horror.Com

www.horror.com/php/article-2138-1.html

by Staci Layne Wilson

It certainly wasn't unknown to me when I signed on to watch the feature-length documentary film, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, that I don't like H.P. Lovecraft, and that his stuff doesn't scare me. However, what I do know now is a lot more about the artist and his work, and for that I am grateful. This accomplished, meticulously-researched and well-rounded cine-bio does an admirable job of explaining the motives behind the man.

Lovecraft, a tremendously influential writer of science fiction and horror fantasy, had his heyday back in the 1920s and 30s… or a heyday such as it was. As is the case with most audacious authors, he really didn't enjoy his due success until years after his untimely death at the age of 47.

Lovecraft is known for his spacey demons and sea-based, tentacled gods who may or may not have created us, the universe as we know it, and an unspeakable underworld. He is the father of the Cthulhu mythos (yes — the documentarians do explore the question of just how that's pronounced) and the mainstay of many a Weird Tales magazine. Lovecraft has cast a tremendous and welcome shadow over current cinematic tastemakers such as Guillermo del Toro and Stuart Gordon (both of whom are interviewed), and fan-faves of fantastical fiction such as Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and Ramsey Campbell (who also speak out on the subject).

I figured Lovecraft had to be a pretty messed-up character (though just the opposite is true of the majority of horror-writers), but wow — his personal foibles make Edgar Allen Poe look like Hugh Hefner. A xenophobic virgin till well into his adulthood, Lovecraft not only had serious mommy issues, but he was also a sickly, self-doubting yet attention-seeking racist. A man of contradictions on top of inconsistency, to be sure.

Using public-domain imagery, stock-footage, and brand-new interviews, director/producer/writer Frank H. Woodward of Wyrd Productions does an admirable job of keeping the proceedings lively in spite of very sparse source material. A trippy score by Mars, and authoritative intonation by narrator Robin Atkin Downes also help keep things moving along.

For the non-Lovecraft devotee, the exhaustive doc may be too expository. But for the uninitiated who'd like to learn more, or for fans who want their Lovecraft love validated, I can't recommend Fear of the Unknown highly enough as the definitive exploration of this imaginative and complex individual.

Moncinema

http://moncinema.cyberpresse.ca

by Sonia Sarfati

En cette journée d'Halloween, le Cinéma du Parc, en collaboration avec le festival Fantasia, projette le documentaire Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown de Frank H. Woodward.

Entretien avec celui qui, pendant deux ans, a disséqué sur sa table... de montage ce «monstre» de la littérature fantastique et d'épouvante moderne qu'a été H.P. Lovecraft.

Il y a du H.P. Lovecraft dans les univers de Hellboy, d'Evil Dead, d'Alien. Dans le Arkham Asylum vu dans Batman. Entre les lignes des romans de Neil Gaiman, de Peter Straub, de Caitlin R. Kiernan. Dans les images de John Carpenter. Dans les notes et les mots de Metallica et de Iron Maiden.

Né à Providence (Rhode Island) en 1890, où il est mort en 1937, le créateur du mythe de Cthulhu (pas la peine d'essayer de le prononcer: «Ce nom n'est pas fait pour les cordes vocales humaines», note avec humour Caitlin R. Kiernan) et de nombre de nouvelles fantastiques a influencé et influence encore nombre d'artistes contemporains oeuvrant dans les domaines de l'épouvante, de la science-fiction, de la fantasy... même s'il a lui-même vécu presque reclus.

C'est à lui que Frank H. Woodward a consacré deux ans de sa vie, pour ainsi accoucher de Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown - qui, après avoir remporté le prix du meilleur film documentaire l'été dernier à Comic-Con, est présenté en première internationale au Cinéma du Parc. Une bonne manière d'amorcer la soirée d'Halloween, que de fouiller dans la tête, l'imaginaire, les entrailles de cet être perturbé, agoraphobe et à ce point xénophobe que certains extraits de son journal et de sa correspondance concernant les immigrants, mis en parallèle avec la description qu'il fait des monstres de ses textes... donnent le frisson par leur «parenté».

Bref, un cas. «Et un produit de son époque», souligne le réalisateur joint au téléphone à sa résidence de Los Angeles. «Certaines choses se disaient en ces années et semblaient normales, alors qu'elles sont impensables aujourd'hui. Et Lovecraft n'est pas le seul à pouvoir être montré du doigt pour ce genre de propos. Relisez Ian Fleming: ses «James Bond» sont incroyablement racistes et sexistes. Regardez la série Mad Men, qui ne nous fait retourner «que» dans les années 60, et là aussi, vous n'en reviendrez pas des propos tenus.»

D'accord. Mais disons que Lovecraft pousse loin le bouchon. Les passages de son journal, lus par Robin Atkin Downes (Byron, le télépathe renégat de la cinquième saison de Babylon 5), donnent froid dans le dos. Plus encore que les extraits des oeuvres de l'homme de lettres, auxquels l'acteur prête aussi sa voix.

On ressort donc du documentaire avec l'impression d'avoir été présenté à un génie monstrueux ou à un monstre génial. À un être aussi malsain que fascinant. À un homme dont l'imagination tentaculaire s'est enroulé à celle de bien de ceux qui font maintenant le fantastique, de la science-fiction et de l'épouvante: «Lovecraft a une telle importance pour les John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub et autres que tous immédiatement accepté de m'accorder des entrevues à son sujet», fait Frank H. Woodward.

Pour les rencontrer, le réalisateur a sillonné les États-Unis, d'une maison de Portland (Oregon) à un cimetière d'Atlanta, d'un bureau de San Francisco à un studio de Los Angeles, avec un détour imposé mais ô combien apprécié par Providence. Se livrant avec ses interlocuteurs à des entrevues de fond dont il a conservé les moments les plus pertinents pour son long métrage.

«Je voulais faire la démonstration de l'importance de l'oeuvre de H.P. Lovecraft, prouver qu'un documentaire sur lui est aussi pertinent qu'un autre sur... Winston Churchill, par exemple. Et, enfin, montrer qu'il est possible d'avoir des discussions intelligentes et intellectuelles à propos de la littérature de genre, qui est beaucoup plus riche et profonde que ce que l'on imagine.»

«On» étant ceux qui n'en consomment pas mais ne se gênent pas pour la critiquer - et n'ont certainement pas de party costumé, ce soir.

The Montreal Mirror

www.montrealmirror.com/2008/103008/film6.html

Mark Slutsky

H.P. Lovecraft is one of those writers, like Philip K. Dick, whose impact on pop culture only became discernible after his death. Like Dick, Lovecraft was largely unknown outside genre audiences in his short lifetime, but his creativity was so original, so strange and personal and unlike anything else before it—and such a strong influence on everything after—that the state of horror (or science fiction, in Dick’s case) today would be unimaginable without his contribution.

Lovecraft imagined a world that was, in many ways, unimaginable. His stories cross eons and dimensions, feature freaky non-Euclidean geometry and inconceivable alien architecture and tell of gods and god-like creatures so ancient and evil as to be almost incomprehensible to us mortals. His is a universe where humanity is largely a passive actor, utterly and paralyzingly powerless when confronted with horrible forbidden knowledge.

Today the influence of his far-out cosmic horror can be seen everywhere, from the movies of Guillermo del Toro to video games like Dead Space to stuffed dolls of ancient god Cthulhu, a Lovecraft creation, that craft-minded fans seem to enjoy making. Appropriately enough for Halloween, the Cinéma du Parc will be opening a new documentary, H.P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown this week, a feature-length exploration of the man and his mythos.

Featuring interviews with del Toro and others, including John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub, Fear of the Unknown does a good job outlining the life of the uncommonly timid and xenophobic man who Luc Sante dubbed the “Heroic Nerd.” It’s methodical in its delineation of Lovecraft’s universe, charting its development (and his) chronologically throughout his life.

Fear of the Unknown may rely a bit too heavily on the talking-head documentary format, though it does spice things up visually by including lots of shots of Lovecraft-inspired art. And its subjects do have interesting things to say, especially if you’re a fan—if you’re not, this is a fine introduction to the life of a truly strange, yet somehow loveable author whose ideas are still informing fiction, comics and cinema some seven decades after his death.