Imaginative and new ideas in cinema are hard to find, and writers and directors are always looking back for ideas to bring to the modern screen. It’s interesting though when a project not only looks back for ideas, but also looks back for their choice of movie style, and that’s just what they’ve done.
The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society are making their own movie based called The Call of Cthulu, a Lovecraftian tale filmed as a silent movie! Before you go any further, check out the trailer.
Building sets by hand and borrowing locations from friends, it seems they are close to completion however it doesn’t sound as though it has been an easy journey. Some of this sounds like an A-Team script!
A key part of low-budget filmmaking is to get your friends to let you shoot at their locations.
Our amazing costumer, Laura Brody actually managed to cut fabric from the hem of an actor’s pants and fashion it into a completely suitable hat, all in the back seat of a car at the beach.
Our streak of excellent luck in not getting arrested continued as we moved to another busy beach location for another shot. The police, street mimes and fishermen left us alone and we were able to get our footage and run.
It’s hard to build a swamp from scratch, but with some help from our friends, lots of fabric, yarn and paper mache, we managed to assemble a swamp complete with ten massive trees.
We were all set to shoot when we got word that the mechanic who was prepping the car for us left it in gear and it crashed into a tree. It’s being fixed….
We finished painting the set as the cast was getting into makeup (notice no one grabs the ship rail; it’s paint is still wet).
For a week we toiled like maniacs using 1x2s, luan (thin plywood), cardboard, plexiglass, vintage scientific equipment, accurate nautical charts, a severed finger and several hundred wooden nubs to create The Alert’s wheelhouse.
It all sounds like fantastic fun, although complete hard work, I would recommend reading the article at their official pages, it is quite interesting.
Also, if you can translate for another language, especially a more obscure one, visit the link above and see if you can help them out. They are frantically trying for translations on the DVD!
I’m really curious to see how this project turns out, and to see what the extras are on the DVD, you can imagine some of the cut scenes!
Looking at the trailer and knowing a bit about Lovecraft and his tales, I am really interested to see how this turns out. It does carry a certain style and quality to it which could well make for an appealing movie. Let’s not forget that the people involved are true fans of Lovecraft, and this might make for quite an authentic translation to the screen. Fingers crossed for them.
