Mundanes
It's a sliding scale
I'd better warn you now: if you don't care for H.P. Lovecraft, you might as well just scroll to the last couple of paragraphs for the kicker.
I was at the H.P. Lovecraft film festival with my sister a few weeks ago. I've only known about the festival a couple of years, so this was my second time attending. This year my sister and I braved the wilds of Portland alone, no friends or parents or anyone, so it was a crazy weekend adventure. Woo-hoo!
This is incredibly pathetic once you realize we're 20 and 17, but then again, this is Oregon. People in California and New York probably go on tri-state speed-fueled car trips and/or killing sprees at the drop of a hat as soon as they turn 16. 'Round here we sit around and contemplate physician-assisted suicide while attendants pump our gas for us. I'm led to believe things are similar in New Jersey, except without the physician-assisted part.
Anyway, so we skipped various college and high school classes, piled into the DeathBug 2000 and hit the freeway. Then we hit construction. Then we got terribly, terribly lost and drove in circles and spirals for a while through the fair city of Portland. I drive competently and my sister is an excellent navigatrix, but somehow we weren't making a functional whole.
"Turn right here."
"Right here or just turn, right here?"
"Well, it's right turn only, and we've passed it. Let's try again next block, okay?"
I started imagining that people on the sidewalks were laughing at us as we passed for the third and fourth times. They were certainly looking at us - my car is rainbow colored with silver stars all over it and stands out a bit. Not a good choice in color schemes for the socially awkward, I've noticed.
Eventually, we found the theater and found a place to park. We were tired and hungry and a little cranky, having budgeted inadequate time for food acquisition. Luckily, it was one of those lovely run-down art theaters with a weird menu. We dined on popcorn with real butter and sparkling apple juice.
The first night of the Lovecraft film festival was of mixed quality. There were a few foreign-language shorts, one of which wasn't subtitled and one which was subtitled by either computer or Miguel. The former was okay, especially since I'd had the foresight to bring along a French speaker. That and read every single thing H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote. We managed to piece it together.
The second foreign film wasn't just awful; it was a hideous, unspeakable, dæmoniac hell-film which I cannot and must not recall. The action clearly took place in Italy, but everyone was trying their very hardest to be American. They set it at the time of the Civil War, but everyone was in WWII fatigues and there were radios. There were dream sequences and hallucinations and then everyone realized they were dead and then it was all a dream again.
The subtitles were what brought it to the level of transcendent badness. They looked like they had been prepared by someone who'd had a year of English classes and a dictionary with large portions missing. At one point, as the soldiers were beginning to investigate the obligatory mysterious cave, their gruff-but-caring sergeant advised them:
"Do not expose yourself, if you do carry buttock out of there!"
As one of the many identical Italian soldier guys covered in blood said, "I don't can believe it!" Someone truly did put a hat on some dialogue.
But even though the sets wobbled and a good deal of the actors had that related-to-the-director look, the films all had their hearts in the right place, trying to do the Old Gent proud.
Last year all the films seemed to be adapting "From Beyond," probably because it's easy to turn on a purple light and a humming noise and float some rubber monster fish in on fishing line. This year it was "The Statement of Randolph Carter," the story whose action all takes place inside a tomb while our narrator, told by his friend that he's too sensitive to come inside, sits outside and listens on a field telephone.
And who ever said Lovecraft was hard to adapt for film?
One note, though: if a Lovecraftian main character ever tells you that you shouldn't go look at the unspeakable terror because you have "frail nerves," you should probably work on drinking whiskey and punching things. That's like a Raymond Chandler protagonist telling you that you drink too much whiskey and punch too much stuff.
We spent each night that weekend in the theater. The theater, being a bohemian sort of place, also hosted Saturday showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. Saturday night we all stumbled out of the building after watching about six hours of hard to find, amateur, independent short film adaptations of a long dead, obscure horror writer's little-read canon. There were popcorn crumbs on our Hello Cthulhu and Darkest of the Hillside Thickets t-shirts, butter stains on our RPG supplements, fan-published comics and wargames based on Lovecraftian innuendo.
The exit spilled out straight into a crowd of RHPS fans, waiting in line to get in. They were giggly in their too-tight lingerie and once-a-week-quality Joan Crawford makeup, impatient for the movie they'd already seen hundreds of times to begin. As we blinked, adjusting to the crisp, fresh air, one of them hugged his girlfriend and warned in a stage whisper,
"Shh! Mundanes!"
Bastards.
Lovecraft liked kitties.
I was at the H.P. Lovecraft film festival with my sister a few weeks ago. I've only known about the festival a couple of years, so this was my second time attending. This year my sister and I braved the wilds of Portland alone, no friends or parents or anyone, so it was a crazy weekend adventure. Woo-hoo!
This is incredibly pathetic once you realize we're 20 and 17, but then again, this is Oregon. People in California and New York probably go on tri-state speed-fueled car trips and/or killing sprees at the drop of a hat as soon as they turn 16. 'Round here we sit around and contemplate physician-assisted suicide while attendants pump our gas for us. I'm led to believe things are similar in New Jersey, except without the physician-assisted part.
Anyway, so we skipped various college and high school classes, piled into the DeathBug 2000 and hit the freeway. Then we hit construction. Then we got terribly, terribly lost and drove in circles and spirals for a while through the fair city of Portland. I drive competently and my sister is an excellent navigatrix, but somehow we weren't making a functional whole.
"Turn right here."
"Right here or just turn, right here?"
"Well, it's right turn only, and we've passed it. Let's try again next block, okay?"
I started imagining that people on the sidewalks were laughing at us as we passed for the third and fourth times. They were certainly looking at us - my car is rainbow colored with silver stars all over it and stands out a bit. Not a good choice in color schemes for the socially awkward, I've noticed.
Eventually, we found the theater and found a place to park. We were tired and hungry and a little cranky, having budgeted inadequate time for food acquisition. Luckily, it was one of those lovely run-down art theaters with a weird menu. We dined on popcorn with real butter and sparkling apple juice.
The first night of the Lovecraft film festival was of mixed quality. There were a few foreign-language shorts, one of which wasn't subtitled and one which was subtitled by either computer or Miguel. The former was okay, especially since I'd had the foresight to bring along a French speaker. That and read every single thing H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote. We managed to piece it together.
The second foreign film wasn't just awful; it was a hideous, unspeakable, dæmoniac hell-film which I cannot and must not recall. The action clearly took place in Italy, but everyone was trying their very hardest to be American. They set it at the time of the Civil War, but everyone was in WWII fatigues and there were radios. There were dream sequences and hallucinations and then everyone realized they were dead and then it was all a dream again.
The subtitles were what brought it to the level of transcendent badness. They looked like they had been prepared by someone who'd had a year of English classes and a dictionary with large portions missing. At one point, as the soldiers were beginning to investigate the obligatory mysterious cave, their gruff-but-caring sergeant advised them:
"Do not expose yourself, if you do carry buttock out of there!"
As one of the many identical Italian soldier guys covered in blood said, "I don't can believe it!" Someone truly did put a hat on some dialogue.
But even though the sets wobbled and a good deal of the actors had that related-to-the-director look, the films all had their hearts in the right place, trying to do the Old Gent proud.
Last year all the films seemed to be adapting "From Beyond," probably because it's easy to turn on a purple light and a humming noise and float some rubber monster fish in on fishing line. This year it was "The Statement of Randolph Carter," the story whose action all takes place inside a tomb while our narrator, told by his friend that he's too sensitive to come inside, sits outside and listens on a field telephone.
And who ever said Lovecraft was hard to adapt for film?
One note, though: if a Lovecraftian main character ever tells you that you shouldn't go look at the unspeakable terror because you have "frail nerves," you should probably work on drinking whiskey and punching things. That's like a Raymond Chandler protagonist telling you that you drink too much whiskey and punch too much stuff.
We spent each night that weekend in the theater. The theater, being a bohemian sort of place, also hosted Saturday showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. Saturday night we all stumbled out of the building after watching about six hours of hard to find, amateur, independent short film adaptations of a long dead, obscure horror writer's little-read canon. There were popcorn crumbs on our Hello Cthulhu and Darkest of the Hillside Thickets t-shirts, butter stains on our RPG supplements, fan-published comics and wargames based on Lovecraftian innuendo.
The exit spilled out straight into a crowd of RHPS fans, waiting in line to get in. They were giggly in their too-tight lingerie and once-a-week-quality Joan Crawford makeup, impatient for the movie they'd already seen hundreds of times to begin. As we blinked, adjusting to the crisp, fresh air, one of them hugged his girlfriend and warned in a stage whisper,
"Shh! Mundanes!"
Bastards.
Lovecraft liked kitties.