| The Call of Cthulhu | |
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| Directed by | Andrew Leman |
| Produced by | Sean Branney Andrew Leman |
| Written by | Sean Branney |
| Music by | Troy Sterling Nies Ben Holbrook Nicholas Pavkovic Chad Fifer |
| Editing by | David Robertson |
| Distributed by | H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society |
| Release date(s) | October 1, 2005 |
| Running time | 47 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Call of Cthulhu is a 2005 silent film adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft short story of the same name, produced by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and distributed by the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. It is the first film adaptation of the famous Lovecraft story, and uses Mythoscope, a blend of vintage and modern filming techniques intended to produce the look of a 1920s-era film.
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The film adheres very closely to Lovecraft's story, but there are a few changes. The sailors aboard the Emma first encounter the Alert abandoned at sea, rather than crewed by Cthulhu cultists as in the original story. Additionally, the film depicts the narrator present at the time of his great-uncle's death, who dies peacefully in his sleep, rather than being summoned upon the mysterious death of his great-uncle, who was presumably killed by Cthulhu cultists in the original short story. The narrator (Matt Foyer) notes as well that Inspector Legrasse, who had directed the raid on cultists in backwoods Louisiana, had died before the narrator's investigation began.
In the original story, the narrator does not seem to end in a lunatic asylum or experience any mysterious nightmares himself.
Early on in production, Branney and Leman decided to film it as a black-and-white silent movie. While the official site claims this was done to show what the film would have looked like had it been made in 1926, when the story was first published, on the DVD commentary the producers admit that shooting in black and white provided many other benefits. When using black-and-white cinematography, a filmmaker does not need to pay particular attention to the materials and decoration of sets, as the colors will not appear in the final product.
The Call of Cthulhu has been selected to appear at numerous film festivals,[1] including the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival and North America's largest, the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, where it sold out both screenings thanks in part to a glowing review from The Stranger, a local paper.
Despite the long-standing conventional wisdom that this story was inherently "unfilmable",[2] the film garnered a mostly positive reception from genre reviewers. Paul di Filippo of Science Fiction Weekly went so far as to call it "the best HPL adaptation to date," labeling the decision to adapt it as a silent film "a brilliant conceit."[3]