2005, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, 47 minutes, not rated

A reader leant me this video, apparently sensing more than I knew about my own retro-proclivities. Until viewing this silent film, recently done in 1920s style, I had forgotten how much I used to enjoy silent movies as a child. In the early 1970s you could still see silent horror movies on late night TV. After viewing The Call of Cthulha, it strikes me that horror works as well as a silent film as it does as a ‘talkie’.

I have read this story and am of the opinion that the movie adaptation is faithful. The best character by far is Castro, the bayou cultist. The story itself revolved around the horrific dreams and actual experiences and research of various protagonists that parade through the story like doomed ciphers marching to oblivion.

In the 1920s horror, fantasy and science-fiction writers—as well as intellectuals in general—were obsessed with eugenics, dreams [as racial blood memories], the transmigration of souls, and other infant sciences that would later gain more credibility, such as geology and archeology. This film adaptation has replicated the sense of lurking elder dread experienced by readers of the original pulp story. Nothing could better convey the essence of the story, of Lovecraft’s own genre, or the fact that the silent film format interspersed with text as it is, remains uniquely suited for capturing the atmospherics of such a tale as the following quote from the story which is replicated toward the end of the film, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.”

In the timeless world of H.P. Lovecraft those characters who suffer most dearly are those who are suffered by cruel Fate to achieve the correlation of the contents of their mind.

I enjoyed this film enough to look for other silent movies in the genre, a story telling format I recall enjoying as a child, but only after viewing this insightful retrofilm.