Indescribeable horror on Netflix

As I continue to delve into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, my primary happy impression is that he clearly got better with practice. I hit a vein of quality around "The Call of Cthulhu" onwards.

CoC was interesting enough, although most of it has seeped into the popular culture already to the point that, if you have an interest in Lovecraft, reading it the first time is almost like re-reading it. (It is also possible that I read the story in the CoC RPG rulebook and then forgot, which would explain the sensation.) It's a good example of most of the best and some of the worst of HPL's writing: vivid cosmic forces, lightly sketched humans. Lovecraft often seems to treat characters as a formality; in CoC humans mostly exist to relay information to the reader. On the other hand, he gets over his accustomed aversion to actually describe what, you know, the story is about. Cthulhu actually gets as good a description as we could want, which is why it's possible to crochet tiny ones, if we want to.

I indulged a bad habit while reading it, and kept thinking about how it would work as a movie. Last night I found out that someone else thought the same thing, but better. In 2005 the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a movie of "The Call of Cthulhu." It's on Netflix.

Which I would have thought would be a horrible idea. I think an attempt to adapt the story straight into a movie wouldn't have worked, but the HPLHS borrowed a page from Lovecraft's own geometry book, a drew a line that was straighter than straight--so straight that it cut through space-time. They made the movie as it would have been made if it had been made at the same time as the story: so, in 1928. Which means it's a silent film, which is a brilliant stroke. (I wrote "a brilliant stork" first. It is not that.) For one thing, it gets around the sparseness of HPL's dialogue. It distances. And yes, it makes me feel smart to like it.

They also made the special effects plausible circa 1928. This, too, I found brilliant, ultimately. It doesn't do Lovecraft's monstrosities justice, but neither, really would modern CGI. They might create something believable, something with tentacles, but of course that would be half the battle, and winning one half would be losing the other half. After all, the point is more that you can't register what you're seeing, not the tentacles and so on. Dated effects almost fortify your suspension of disbelief in this day and age.

So, in summary, if you have Netflix, watch The Call of Cthulhu. It's only 45 minutes long.