Issue #2 released today at NecronomiCon-Providence 2015

Two years in the making, the second issue of Cthulhu Commune will be available at NecronomiCon-Providence 2015 this weekend, August 20th- 23rd. It features interviews with authors Pete Rawlik, Jeffrey Thomas, Brian M. Sammons, Alex Houstoun, and Adam Joffrain, and artist Jason McKittrick. It is limited to 125 numbered copies for Lovecraft's 125th birthday and 15 numbered contributor copies. There is a small amount of unnumbered issues that may be available after the convention.

This issue can be found at the Dim Shores table in the convention's vendor hall.

HPL Online: the Panel from NecronomiCon Providence 2013

On August 23, 2013, in the Hotel Providence's Thurber Ballroom, a panel was held at the NecronomiCon that was one of the most relevant for every fan in attendance- HPL Online. Whether you're using Facebook groups to stay in touch with other Lovecraftians, searching blogs for art and interviews, or buying old Arkham Houses on eBay, we've shaped the internet as a tool to met our needs and desires, but what would the Old Gent from Providence have thought of this technology? Where can fans find the latest mythos fiction and get involved, and what's on the horizon? These were some of the questions addressed by this panel, which included The Lovecraft eZine's Mike Davis, Leeman Kessler of the popular Ask Lovecraft videos, and Chad Fifer of the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, and was moderated by Alex Houstoun, the man behind the H.P. Lovecraft Facebook page.

Listen to the audio below for an entertaining and enlightening discussion.

Kickstarting the new year

Rewards from crowd-funded Mythos campaigns supported during 2014 have recently started to arrive at my doorstep, the first being World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories, edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass, and published by Dark Region Press. The book was officially released last August, but Dark Region took the time needed to make the limited hardcover edition something special...

Front cover by Vincent Chong, and Cthulhu cover design by Irina Summer

 A $50 pledge last April, while supporting the whole project come to fruition, bought me this campaign exclusive signed by editors Sammons and Barrass and artist M. Wayne Miller, with an additional two bonus interior illustrations not included in the retail edition of this book, bringing the total to 24 full color illustrations

Signature page and accompanying illustration, with sewn marker ribbon.

It's nice to find the Indiegogo campaign supporters thanked at the end of the book, too- twelve pages of people who cared enough to help make this special book possible!

To discover the contents of this anthology and order a copy- available as eBook, trade paperback, or limited hardcover- visit Dark Region Press.

Also, keep an eye open for Dark Regions' upcoming Indiegogo campaign for a new weird fiction anthology, Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, illustrated by award-winning artist Danielle Serra with stories by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Nancy Kilpatrick, and Lois Gresh. According to the Dark Regions press team, "this Indiegogo campaign will be launching in late January or February of 2015."

Thinking of HPL Seventy-seven Years Later

The words above were penned by NecronomiCon's own brilliant The Joey Zone after he visited Lovecraft's grave this year, seventy-seven years after The Old Gent from Providence passed on into the Beyond. He graciously allowed me to draw a few panels to his words, making it a shared experience not only for me, but for any who reads this. If we can't join him at Swan Point Cemetary this year, we stand with him in kinship.

This isn't only a reflection upon the past, The Joey Zone explains; it embraces the present and reaches towards the future, for Providence's Brown University is currently celebrating its 250 anniversary, and next year is H.P. Lovecraft's 125th birthday, which will be duly celebrated at the recently announced NecronomiCon Providence 2015, which will feature Ramsey Campbell along with other honored guests of distinction. Below, catch a sneak peek at the event's poster in development by The Joey Zone himself.

Unnameable Horrors in Art- the NecronomiCon Panel.

On Saturday morning, August 24, 2013, several of Lovecraftian fandom's most respected artists gathered for a panel at NecronomiCon-Providence to discuss how they effectively portray aspects of horror in illustration and film. The panel consisted of illustrators Robert Knox, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, and Jason Eckhardt, and filmmakers Stuart Gordon, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney. The first part of the conversation was transcribed from existing audio, while the conversation that follows was captured by a method of shorthand. 

Knox: "We can all agree that there are many different ways to depict the indescribable. My approach leans towards absurdity and surrealism. Eyewitness accounts in Lovecraft’s fiction barely describe the horrors seen, which lets your imagination run wild. Most depictions of Cthulhu are based on the statue Lovecraft described in detail, with batlike wings and cephapod head. My take is that the statue is religious art- for the cult is a religion, as blasphemous as it is- and religious art is only an interpretation, it can’t be God. Just as we see in Michaelangelo’s paintings of God and know that can’t be Him, the statue can’t be Cthulhu. Remember what George Burns said in the movie Oh, God! 'If I showed you my real form, you couldn’t handle it.'"

Leman: "Michaelangelo’s depiction of God is flattering to humans. If the eidolon in “The Call of Cthulhu” is religious art, does it flatter us or Cthulhu?"

Eckhardt: "The representation is an effort to make Cthulhu understandable. You need something to focus on while you’re sacrificing humans in the swamps!"

Gordon: "Lovecraft found everything disturbing, which lends itself to weird sex scenes, fish, and a sense of otherness."

Eggleton: "I don’t set out to disturb; I draw monsters just as I liked to as a kid… and sometimes it disturbs people."

Knox: "We’re jaded as artists and are probably tough to disturb. But surefire elements are things people don’t like: creepy and slimy things all over them, like bugs, slugs and worms."

Leman: "People like penguins because they’re anthropomorphic, but this familiarity can also make things weird- something’s that familiar but not quite right…"

Eckhardt: "Like fish people- what’s stranger than them? I’ve seen people with the touch of the Innsmouth look... But as for strangeness, there’s Machen’s idea of taking Heaven by storm, that fish talking and stones singing would drive you mad."

Knox: "Growing up in New England, you know there’s certain towns you don’t go to, and you never admit knowing someone from there, from the town one does not mention in polite company. That idea found in Lovecraft is quintessentially New England. But in depicting horror in art, is there a such thing as going too far?"

Gordon: "No!"

Eckhardt: "Well, if it’s too absurd, you risk the danger of it becoming ludicrous."

Branney: "As artists, we want to create a suspension of disbelief, so it’s got to be a believable absurdity."

Leman: "We just did The Color Out of Space, and in that story- with it’s otherworldly color- you run up against the limits of human perception- you can’t depict a color that can’t be perceived."

Knox: "What is the single most important factor of portraying the unnameable?"

Leman: "Leaving something up to the human imagination."

Eggleton: "That can be hard, because as an artist I want to be in your face with the monster!"

Koszowski: (To Eggleton) "Lumley told me that you made him, your covers made those books of his."

Gordon: "In movies, the thing left to the imagination is most disturbing. For instance, in the movie Seven, they show you pieces to the puzzle when portraying ‘lust,’ not the whole picture. You’re left to construct the scene yourself and it becomes more terrible than it ever could’ve been on the screen."

Norman Rockwell's "Murder in Mississippi"

Branney: "There’s a balance between the implicit and the explicit, and between the two is the sweet spot. The blank spots will linger in your imagination as your mind chews on it for a long time."

Eckhardt: "The use of shadows can be particularly effective. In the Norman Rockwell Museum, there’s an enormous canvas of three workers in headlights and the shadows of the men that murdered them. The violence is suggested, and it’s all the more powerful and terrifying."

Knox: "In my own work, I want to capture a sense of absurdity. If the viewer can’t ask, 'what the hell is this?' it’s a failure. Trying to depict the incomprehensible isn’t easy; I’ve spent my career on that. For my painting 'The King in Yellow,' I originally wanted it all yellow, but I had to darken it to become disturbing. What about the ways sight and sound are used in film?"

"The King in Yellow" by Robert Knox

Gordon: "Sound effects very much get your imagination going. Have you seen the film Seconds by John Frankenheimer? The scene where they drill into a guy’s head is all sound effects; as you can imagine it, your head becomes the one being drilled! The film becomes dreamlike as the guy’s mind is destroyed."

Branney: "We did 'The Call of Cthulhu' as both a silent film and a radio adaptation, which makes for an interesting contrast. Image is powerful and sound is powerful, but when they’re divorced from each other, the audience needs to imagine what’s missing."

Leman: "Even the city’s name in that story is meant to be unpronounceable!"

Knox: "My thought should’ve been that every character pronounces the city and monster differently."

Gordon: "From Beyond had been rejected due to a brain being sucked through eye sockets, but it was the sound that provoked that response, because you don’t actually see it happen. We had to take it out to get an R rating, then we got to put it back in for the bluray release. The most famous and effective use of sound and image is Psycho- you never see the knife and body at the same time- you make the connection by sound, which was actually made by stabbing a melon… and the blood was chocolate syrup. I believe Psycho was intentionally filmed in black and white to leave more to the imagination."

Branney: "In our The Whisperer in Darkness, we used a chicken leg being ripped apart every time Akeley moved- you can hear the skin and tendons pop. Organic sounds, like breaking melons and tearing meat, seem to push buttons."

Leman: "Also part of sound is the film’s soundtrack, which is absolutely indispensible- music has the ability to appeal directly to the emotion, bypassing the rational part of the brain."

Gordon: "Going back to Psycho, Bernard Hermann’s score could even make peanut butter and jelly scary! I can’t imagine the bathroom scene without the soundtrack."

Branney: "You can only accomplish so much with visuals; the emotional life of any movie is being laid down by the music, particularly in our genre."

Gordon: "Do you artists listen to music while painting?"

Koszowski: "I listen to soundtracks."

Eckhardt: "I do, but the music doesn’t necessarily have to coincide with the feeling of the work."

Knox: "Lately I’ve been listening to Red Sox games while drawing. As for music, it could be punk one day, a soundtrack the next. But silence doesn’t work at all."

Koszowski: "I do my drawings dot by dot, and without music, I couldn’t do it."

Knox: "This idea of an unnnameable horror- it could be an inanimate object. Lovecraft gives us non-Euclidean geometry- geometry that follows no logical patterned rows of blocks; however accurately drawn, they cannot or should not exist. I get a sense of this distortion in Medieval paintings. M.C. Escher is a great example, too, but most of us would go, “I can’t do that!” Lee Brown Coye had the habit of including tied bundles of sticks in his paintings. When he’d made a trip to upstate New York, he saw these bundles of sticks thrust in the ground and wondered who’d put them there and for what purpose… He found them disturbing and so he put them in his paintings."

"The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Leman: "They implied some motivation he couldn’t comprehend, which made it frightening."

Knox: "What about inspiration? Who are your favorite artists?"

Koszowski: "Virgil Finlay."

Knox: "For me, it’s Hans Bok, Coye, E.C. Comics, and Surrealism."

Gordon: "Do you know Ivan Albright, who painted 'The Picture of Dorian Gray?' Everything is moldering, decomposing, including inanimate objects. Another favorite of his was 'That Which I Should Have Done I did Not Do.'"

Eggleton: "Arnold Bocklin’s 'The Isle of the Dead' is a disquieting and disturbing painting of a dark figure that brings souls to the island. Bocklin painted several versions and even the daylight version is creepy. There’s one in the Met in New York City. He was a major influence on my work. Also, Tom Wright’s paintings in Night Gallery are a favorite."

Arnold Bocklin's "The Isle of the Dead," third version, 1883

Knox: "Those paintings remind me of Roger Corman’s Poe films."

Leman: "Hieronymus Bosch and his hideous creatures, half human, half fish. My first exposure to Lovecraft was through those Michael Whelan paperbacks with their black and white and red color scheme."

Branney: "I’m a fan of Berni Wrightson’s pen and ink work. His use of light and shadow evokes different time periods, which we try to do in film, too."

Eckhardt: "I’m more a traditionalist, liking Howard Pyle. With his demand for accuracy, you know how that pirate’s coat felt just by looking at his painting. Are you familiar with Barry Moser? He did a staggering rendition of Frankenstein."

Knox: "Wrightson’s style owes a great debt to Graham Ingles. We see artists hundreds of years ago doing works of horror; how did they get away with it?"

Branney: "They were seen as cautionary works- they depicted what would happen to you if you don’t go to church!"

Gordon: "Eh, they seemed to show you’d have more fun in Hell than in Heaven!"

Describing the Indescribable: Depicting Lovecraft's Unnameable Horrors in Art

Whether it's haunting paperback covers or the latest horror film on screen, fans of weird fiction love to see their favorite stories brought to life, but for the artists responsible, there is always the question of how much to show and how far to go. One of the panels during Necronomicon-Providence 2013  wrestled with the problems of depicting the unnameable and unspeakable horrors encountered in Lovecraft's fiction, discussed by a panel of some of fandom's favorite image-makers: book cover artist Bob Eggleton; Stuart Gordon, director of Dagon and Reanimator; Andrew Leman and Sean Branney from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society; and three beloved illustrators from Necronomicon Press, Allen Koszowski, Jason Eckhardt, and Robert Knox, who also graciously moderated the discussion.

Below is a small audio clip of the panel's opening points recorded on Saturday, August 24, 2013, followed by some statements and observations made by the participants after the batteries in my digital recorder failed.

Robert Knox, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, and Stuart Gordon

Bob Eggleton: “What I find interesting about a lot of Lovecraft’s monsters is in what he would not describe- it was so up to interpretation. Cthulhu, for instance- in most images, he’s got two eyes, but in the actual description, I find he’s got six eyes. When you read the stories, it’s all described in terms of shock and terror, so your mind is really filling in the worst details.”

Stuart Gordon: “Lovecraft always has his characters fainting at key moments, then he’d say it’s too horrible to describe, or something like that, but when you make a movie, you’ve got to show something. The question is, how much do you show? You don’t want to show everything- the moment you show the monster, the movie’s over, because as Lovecraft said, “the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown,” and as soon as the unknown becomes known, you can deal with it. You want to show glimpses, sort of like what Lovecraft does in his stories to get your imagination going.”

Andrew Leman: “The common wisdom is that all the monsters in Lovecraft are indescribable, yet we all know what they look like, so somehow they managed to get described. Lovecraft has this great trick of describing something and then saying it’s indescribable; he works both sides of that equation, so you both get the description and you get told it can’t be described. That frees you up to go ahead and fill in the rest of the scary details yourself, and the ones you put in are always going to be more scary to you than anything Lovecraft or any other author could possibly provide for you.”

Sean Branney: “In addition to being indescribable, Lovecraft uses strings of metaphors of things that are describable. Doing At The Mountains of Madness last night, we got “it’s a subway train,” and “it’s a pile of bubbles.” It is a lot of things you know, but they’re not things that typically belong together… like the thing that’s part ant, part decomposed human being, and once you string nine things together, you’ve got a very complicated picture of something that is being described, which is helpful as an artist- you’ve got something to sink your teeth into and then combine them in a manner that scares you."

Allen Koszowski: “What I like about Lovecraft is that when he describes his blasphemous creatures, he leaves just enough description there so I can draw a thing that people will know what I’m drawing, but I can interpret it my own way. I must’ve drawn Cthulhu fifty times, at first, and each time was a little different… but each time the viewer knows that I’m drawing Cthulhu.”

Jason Eckhardt: “I tend to take the more subtle approach with horror- not showing as many of the details, trying to suggest things. I think that’s often more effective- if you can give the right clues and hints to the viewer, they can often fill in things that are far more horrible than I could draw.”

HBO's True Detectives and the Mythos

A hybrid between my recent Medieval studies and The King in Yellow

For the past two months, HBO's new series True Detectives had fans of weird fiction excited and abuzz about references to Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow stories, and while I doubt The King will emerge from Carcosa as the serial murderer in tonight's final episode, there are two things of certainty: this show has piqued viewers interest in reading source material (and provoking people to read is always a good thing) and it has moved artists and writers in the Lovecraftian community to create new works based on The King in Yellow.

Illustrator Mike Bukowski told me that Google searches for "The King in Yellow" have become the second popular avenue to his site Yog-Blogsoth as people look for visual representations, and Cryptocurium's recent offering was the largest artifact they've produced to date.

April's issue of The Lovecraft eZine will be a King in Yellow special issue appropriately guest-edited by Joe Pulver.

HPL Film Festival Micro Fiction Contest

Only two days left to submit entries to the HPL Film Festival Micro Fiction contest! 

According to the official info: "The top ten stories will be published in a chapbook. The winning authors will receive two complimentary copies of the chapbook. The overall winner will be read aloud at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon by one of our celebrity guest authors (TBD) and also have their story published in the Daily Lurker, our 1930s-style newspaper program that also contains interesting articles, comics, film summaries, guest bios, and fiction. The top winner will also receive their very own copy of the Daily Lurker."  

Entries must be received by March 1st, 2014. Submit here.

Inactivity interrupted

Clawing its way from the cold rest of inactivity, Cthulhu Commune emerges into a new night...

My initial step into involvement with the Lovecraftian community carried me into a number of engagements that have, until now, kept me from following through with some of my original aims.

I still have material from Necronomicon-Providence 2013 to unearth and edit that is worth preserving, and new art and commentary to unleash upon the unsuspecting.

For now, let brevity be my strength, so that while I may post little, let it be with greater frequency.

Evolution of a Cover Illustration

The first version of the cover illustration was thematically similar, but differed in tone, style, and size from the final version. With the focus upon the Lovecraftian community gathering in Providence for NecronomiCon 2013, I envisioned a congregation of would-be cultists assembled before a high priest who quoted unholy lines from the Book of the Dead and preached the coming of the dread Cthulhu. Taking the lead from the highly anticipated unveiling of the HPL memorial bust at the Atheneum, I included an enlarged version of Bryan Moore's sculpture of Lovecraft for the back cover, which provided a perfect counterpoint to the mythos element; for me, it was important to not let the love of the stories overshadow the man who wrote them.

Realizing my drawing of the high priest resembled author Wilum Pugmire, I continued with caricatures of other convention guests as a little tribute to the individuals who have given so much to fans of Lovecraft over the years. In the end, I opted for a more serious approach to the illustration, redrawing and resizing it from a quarter page digest to the standard half-page zine. Even though the tone and style changed, the high priest, Cthulhu altar, and Lovecraft statue remained. (I call this the "final illustration" for now, as I'm working on a larger color version I hope to make available as a print in the future.)

Below are two early thumbnail sketches that provided a germ of inspiration:

Necronomicon Press: A Look Back, Part II

S.T. Joshi speaks of his influential Lovecraft Studies published by Necronomicon Press, and Jason Eckhardt and Robert Price discuss the cover art:
 



This third audio clip below covers the expansion of Necronomicon Press and the publication of S.T. Joshi's biography, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life:

These audio clips were recorded during NecronomiCon-Providence 2013, for the "Necronomicon Press: A Look Back" panel that included S.T. Joshi, Jason Eckhardt, and Robert Price, and was moderated by Sam Gafford.

Necronomicon Press: A Look Back, Part I

One of the panels at NecronomiCon-Providence 2013 I was excited to attend was "Necronomicon Press: A Look Back," a discussion between S.T. Joshi, Jason Eckhardt, and Robert Price, moderated by Sam Gafford. Necronomicon Press had been important to my deeper understanding of Lovecraft during my early adulthood when I sought supplemental reading to my growing library of Arkham House titles, and their catalogs regularly offered titles that enlightened (Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction) and entertained (Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Cthulhu Codex), and the art that adorned the covers were hugely influential on me.

Below is a drawing done during the panel, and the first part of an audio recording in which Joshi, Eckhardt and Price discuss their earliest memories of Necronomicon Press.

Sketchbook drawing: Robert Price, S.T. Joshi, and Jason Eckhart; Sam Gafford was obscured by the podium

Q&A with Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli during NecronomiCon-Providence 2013.

After a 33mm screening of Dagon in the RISD auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, during NecronomiCon weekend, director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli fielded questions from the audience. The following is transcribed from an audio recording.

Gordon: That was a scary screening- when the film breaks, it scares the crap out of me! I don’t know how many prints are left of this movie, so I hope it’s okay.

 

Q: How was the film site selected?

Gordon: I went location scouting, and that town is called Combarro, and it really exists and on a sunny day it’s really picturesque… we made it look worse than it really was! It’s a medieval fishing village.

Paoli: They have great oysters, too!

Gordon: They also have a dish called Pulpo Gallego, which is octopus, and when we were working on preproduction, one of the things that occurred to me was trying to come up with a look for the Deep Ones and their half-human offspring, and everything we did kept coming up like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Earlier today we had a panel on Lovecraftian films, and that was one we should’ve talked about because it has a Deep One in it – the creature has a distinctive makeup design that is hard to avoid repeating. It struck me that maybe the way to go with this movie was to go with the idea that the people were turning into some sort of octopus-like creatures, which in a way, ties in with Lovecraft and all his tentacles, so that was the direction we went.

Q: Why was there no domestic theatrical release of Dagon?

Gordon: It was released directly to video/DVD, which really upset me. Lion’s Gate released it in the States, and I think their feeling was that it didn’t have any big names in it, although Francisco Paco Rabal is an incredibly legendary actor in Spain, and the fact that he wanted to do this movie astonished me- it would be like getting Sean Connery to be in your film! It turned out that the reason Paco wanted to do the movie was he was a Lovecraft fan and he liked the script.

Q: Can you talk about some of the creature effects in the film?

Gordon: The company that did the effects, DDT, won the academy award a few years ago for Pan’s Labyrinth, and they’re brilliant. Our budget for this movie was not huge and they were able to do so much for so little. They were incredibly creative. I remember walking in one day and they were xeroxing a real octopus! They had this octopus sitting on the xerox machine to get the textures of its skin. They were amazing. David Marti is the name of the guy who runs the company.

Q: Was it difficult to work under so heavy rainfall?

Gordon: It was. Dennis and I had the idea that the movie should be as wet as possible, and when we were shooting it, it was the middle of winter and we were all freezing our asses off in the rain, and all I could think was, “what were we thinking?” In retrospect, I’m glad that we did, because it really gives the movie an oppressive atmosphere, which was appropriate for the subject. But yes, it was difficult to do all that latex in water.

Paoli: One of the other things that I think creates the atmosphere in the movie is there’s no music other than in the dream sequence and the credits; except for chanting from time to time, there’s no background music in the rest of the film. You only hear what the characters hear, and Stuart and the crew really succeeded in having you feel very much as the characters felt, and that’s what gives the movie the overall effect it has. I know it’s hot in here tonight, but that movie makes me feel cold whenever I see it, so I think it evened out the temperature in here.

Gordon: The music was by Carles Cases, an amazing composer. I also think the sound design is perfect in this film, too- they used a lot of natural sounds: sea creatures, whales, seals, and dolphins, and so forth. The idea I told the producers of people turning into fish, it sounds absurd, but really what Lovecraft was talking about is a sort of reverse evolution- that we all came out of the water originally, and some stayed in the water, like the whales and the dolphins and other marine mammals, so the idea of going backwards, of regressing- he makes us believe it.

Q: What kind of direction did you need to give the extras to have them act in the fishy and jerky way they did?

Gordon: We actually had a troupe of mimes employed to play most of the extras, and they worked for a long time on the body movements. We talked about the different stages of the transformations- the ones who are most human are the ones who are visible, like the guy who runs the hotel and the priest. The idea in the story is that the more fishlike they become, the more they have to be hidden away, so we referred to them as level one, level two, and level three, and the movement guys developed ideas on how each would move.

Q: Have you considered filming a Lovecraft movie in his own city of Providence?

Gordon: The last time that Dennis and I were here together was when we were location scouting to film “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” They took us on a tour of Providence and brought us to the house that Lovecraft grew up in and I noticed there was no plaque on the house, there was nothing to indicate he’d ever lived there. I mentioned that to the film commission guy, and he said, “If you make a film here, we’ll put a plaque on the house.” We didn’t make the movie here and I believe they tore down the house.

Paoli: I thought they did a very good job of staying close to the original script for a location in Spain; originally, of course, I wrote the script for a location in the Northeast, either here or we were looking at a town in Maine, where it would’ve worked perfectly. We did have to make some adaptations to the script, but actually very few. Stuart and Brian (Yuzna), who we worked famously with before, were dedicated to shooting that script, and I actually thought that the fact that there was Spanish spoken in the film- lines originally written in English- made it more alienating and disturbing, in a way, and just as there were level one, level two, and level three movements, there were three levels of language: English, Spanish, and Lovecraftian; you know, “Ia, ia!” I thought that ultimately lent something to the film, as well.

Gordon: The language actually is not Spanish, it’s called Galego. In Spain they speak five different languages. We were funded by the Galician Film Arts Commission, and I got a call one day that they had a couple of problems with the script, and I was going, “Oh, boy, here it goes…” and they said, “in your script you refer to Galego as a dialect, and it’s actually a language; it’s not a dialect.” And I said, “yeah, okay…” and I was waiting for the rest and there were nothing else, that was it! The thing that was interesting was that if we’d shot this film in America, it’s hard to imagine a community today would be so cut off from the world that you could have something like this going on, so the idea of setting it in a remote part of Spain, for us, somehow made it seem more real. Although, I have to say, to the Spaniards, they thought it was ridiculous there could be such a place in their country.

Paoli: There’s a long-standing Welch tradition in Galicia. If you notice, especially early in the film, there’s some Celtic influences in the music- Galicians are the Celts of Spain. They play bagpipes, they wear kilts from time to time… they are Celtic in origin and so partly is their language.

Q: Can you talk a little about how they skinned their victims, since that wasn’t in the original story?

Gordon: No, it’s not in Lovecraft’s story, at all. Lovecraft, being who he is, talks about the horrible things that were done to the people in the village, but doesn’t tell us what those horrible things are. When we were doing research on this- the thing I should tell you and I think some of you probably already know this- is unlike Cthulhu, Dagon is a real god. Dagon is the god of the Philistines and he appears in the Bible several times as the opposition’s god. There were a lot of battles between the god of the Jews and the god of the Philistines, Dagon, and he was, as Lovecraft must have known, a sea god- half human, half fish- and when Christianity came into being- you know they have a fish symbol? One of the reasons they did that was to bring in the Dagon worshippers. The whole thing about eating fish on Fridays- that was part of the Dagon religion! And the hat the Pope wears? It’s the fish head the Dagon priests wore, with the skins of the fish down their backs, like a cape, so if you‘ve ever wondered why the Pope wears such a strange hat, it’s actually a fish head that comes from the Dagon worshippers. We decided to take that idea and flip it; instead of skinning fish and wearing them, they’re skinning humans and wearing them.

Paoli: And then, of course, the idea is they shed their skin when they go into the sea for eternity- they shed their human skin. I thought of it as anthropological- it’s a tribal thing. Sometimes when you’re doing an adaptation, you have to find things that are faithful to the ideas of the story that reach back to the roots, as we did reaching back to the imagery of the mythology; to find not perfectly-faithful, but faithful-in-idea concepts that will feed the story, and we thought this worked. Plus, it’s horrible!

Q: What’s your favorite movie of yours?

Gordon: What’s mine? You know, it’s like saying which is your favorite child, because you love them all for different reasons, but I have to say that Dennis and I have collaborated together on all of the Lovecraft films and it’s hard for me to imagine doing Lovecraft with anyone else besides my old pal Dennis here. We have a Lovecraft script we’ve been trying to make for twenty years. When Billy Wilder was asked what his favorite film was, he would always say, “my next one,” so I guess my favorite film would then be The Thing on the Doorstep, yet to be made.

Q: Any plans on as to when that would be made?

Paoli: No… do you know anybody? I’m kind of partial to From Beyond, too. If you look at Dagon and Reanimator, they are really full-tilt start-to-finish stories, they have structure and they tell a mythologically-sized tale. From Beyond was the craziest movie we could make for the budget we had; it was no-holds-barred. From Beyond is a very short story- we had gotten through the short story by the credits, so we just went on from there had had some fun. While the story is short, the idea is gigantic, that there are other dimensions out there that we impinge upon, and if we open that door, this can happen; the story simply opens the door we walk through.

Gordon: Also, the thing about Lovecraft, he never believed in the supernatural; if anything, he would’ve considered himself a science fiction writer because there’s always a scientific basis for everything in his stories. From Beyond is one of those stories where the idea is that the five senses are limited, that there’s so much more going on than we can perceive; it’s a brilliant concept. When Lovecraft first started writing, his stories were very short, and "From Beyond" is one of his earliest ones- it’s only, like, seven pages long. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," which is one of his last stories, is a novella at sixty or seventy pages, and I think it’s one of his most accomplished stories.

East Coast and West Coast conventions

Con poster by Jason Thompson

After the first issue of Cthulhu Commune's release at NecronomiCon-Providence 2013, arrangements have been made to make this zine about the Lovecraftian community available to audiences that may not have been able to make the pilgrimage to Rhode Island last month.

With great excitement, I'm pleased to have Cthulhu Commune #1 available at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Los Angeles this weekend, September 27-29, 2013. My thanks to convention organizer Aaron Vanek for accepting the copies; I hope they find the readers it was created for!

My friend and zine Production Guru, Rickman, will also have copies of Cthulhu Commune #1 during his appearance at Monster Mania XXVI in Hunt Valley, Maryland, this weekend. A talented writer and comic book artist, Rick is promoting his all-ages Meet the Monsters book series and will have prints and original art of unspeakable horrors for sale, so please take the time to look at his work when you seek out your issue of Cthulhu Commune.

There is more material from NecronomiCon to present here within the next few days, after which I'll share plans for Cthulhu Commune's second issue. Stay in touch on Facebook or email us for more information at cthulhucommune@gmail.com.

The Providence Athenaeum

Arriving in Providence early afforded me time to explore the city before the convention monopolized my time and attention, and I set out on a brief walking tour with my sketchbook to capture some key sites of Lovecraftian interest.

The drawing above is of the Providence Athenaeum, the oldest member-supported library in the United States and the site of Edgar Allan Poe's courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman. As I sketched the library standing on the city courthouse's steps across the street, a sheriff came out, locking up for the day. Instead of chasing me off the steps, he shared with me some local history and invited me back the following day for a tour of the courthouse. He told me that College Hill was riddled with tunnels from Colonial days when the wealthy Brown family secretly imported slaves. I'd read about the fabled tunnels and the ghost stories around them, but he insisted on their existence, for how else to explain the numerous residential complaints and police reports he'd taken over the years of sounds and criminal mischief in the area? (I wonder if the legend of tunnels in the neighborhood fired Lovecraft's imagination and influenced his writing- there are many stories of his that involve tunnels and subterranean cities.)

A postcard of the Athenaeum, 1906

 In front of the Athenaeum is a water fountain that Rory Raven mentioned in his book Haunted Providence: Strange Tales from the Smallest State. Apparently, there are some who say that to drink from this fountain "condemns the drinker to be forever trapped, unable to leave the city," and I thought, what an excuse that would be to stay in Providence! Though I'm not sure my wife would be convinced of the curse... Upon closer examination, I was disappointed to find the water fountain dry and in apparent disuse.

A Picnic with Wilum Pugmire, part II

Hours before the NecronomiCon began on Thursday, August 22, 2013, a group of Kickstarter supporters walked with Wilum Pugmire, the convention's Poet Laureate, to St. John's Churchyard for some poetry and refreshments. As Mr. Pugmire read material prepared for the occasion, I sketched the church grounds  and considered the poems read.

Below is an audio recording of Wilum reading August Derleth's poem, "Providence: Two Men Meet at Midnight," during our churchyard picnic.

                                     

"Derleth wrote that in 1948," Pugmire explained afterwards. "The poem speaks to me, that’s why I wanted to read it, because as Lovecraftians gathered here for this amazing convention, I feel that all around us still stands a kind of hollowed ground. As a Lovecraftian artist and an obsessed Lovecraftian fanboy, the very air seems enchanted, and it’s because I read Lovecraft non-stop; I’m always returning to his work. These places and things here take on a kind of mythic reality. I’m so familiar with Lovecraft’s Providence, Lovecraft’s New England, even the towns he invented- they all feel like a part of my psyche. To actually be here in this churchyard, to know that Poe walked through here, that Lovecraft and Barlowe sat on those slabs and wrote their acrostics to Poe… it blows my mind! Yet here we are!"

Lovecraft once sat in this very graveyard to write an acrostic poem dedicated to Edgar Alllan Poe, and in that tradition, Pugmire led the group in composing our own acrostic we hoped captured some aspect of the moment. Each member in the group wrote a line in some fashion of meter and rhyme, and when it was left unfinished by the end of our picnic, Wilum promised to finish it at home and post a reading of it on YouTube sometime in the future.

"In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d"By H. P. Lovecraft

"Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,

Wilum Pugmire and our group.

Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,
Arch’d high above a hidden world of yore.
Round all the scene a light of memory plays,
And dead leaves whisper of departed days,
Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.

"Lonely and sad, a spectre glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, tho’ his song
Peals down thro’ time with a mysterious spell:
Only the few who sorcery’s secret know
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe."

After we'd composed the poem and finished our ice cream, Pugmire answered questions about his work and what it meant to be a Lovecraftian today. "I’ve been a Lovecraftian since the early 1970’s, and now is the finest time ever to be a Lovecraftian. We have so much and a lot of it is due to ST Joshi, my hero; it’s his obsession to get as much of Lovecraft in print so the next ST Joshi has the resources to study the man and his work."

When asked if he’d taken any notes while in Providence and if he kept a journal, Pugmire answered,

“I don’t keep a journal, but I bought this little book in 2007 at the NY Public Library. I was having a whole lot of health problems and this was meant to be my health and sanity journal… it lasted two pages- screw health and sanity! I stopped writing in it but I brought it with me to this convention because I want my next solo book of short stories to be set in Providence. You will probably all be in it- I’ll do a story of a bunch of cultists having a picnic in a cemetery! When I was here in 2007, I kept a partial diary of experiences, like walking through that little park on Benefit Street; I even counted the steps because I knew I’d write about it in a future story. Yet I didn’t record enough, so now I’m recording every hour, every moment, every breath I take of this enchanted elixer... Yog Sothoth!!! I just need to experience this week, and when I return home, I’ll let it all percolate, I’ll dream about it. I’ve had seven books published in the last two and a half years, so I think I need to just chill out. I thought I was gonna die of a heart attack- seriously, I’m such a drama queen! But I thought, I can’t die until I’ve written three more books, I’ve got to write! And I went completely crazy and didn’t stop writing books because I knew I was gonna die, but then, alas! I did not die!"

Shortly after we took the above group portrait, the rain I'd left in NJ several hours earlier finally caught up with me, and as it began to drizzle we packed up our things and headed back to the hotel. Thunder rumbled in the distance, which Pugmire attributed to having read a Derleth poem on such a momentous occasion. Passing by the hosta garden on Benefit Street, Wilum wanted to spend a few quiet moments there to gather his thoughts and write a few words, and before we continued onward in the increasing downpour, he posed for a timeless photograph among the lush growth of late summer.

It was a wonderful way to kick off the convention and I wish we'd had more time to spend there,  and when the thunder boomed overhead as we walked over the Providence River and our clothes became waterlogged, I thought of no better way to enter Lovecraft's city, washed clean by a New England storm and newly initiated into the mythic reality of which Pugmire spoke.

A Picnic with Wilum Pugmire, part I

When the NecronomiCon Kickstarter launched in early December 2012, devoted fans able to make the trip to Providence, Rhode Island, considered at which reward level to pledge. Once I'd decided how early I could be in town, I committed to "the Keepers of the Crypt," which was described as follows: "Enjoy a cozy picnic (we'll provide the food) the afternoon of Thursday, August 22nd, with our Poet Laureate, Wilum H. Pugmire, alongside ye ancient graves at St. John's Episcopal Church - where you'll pen and recite Poe-inspired poetry and rhymed acrostics, just like Lovecraft loved to do at this very site!" I've been a fan of Pugmire's weird fiction since his first chapbook, Tales of Sesqua Valley, was published by Necropolitan Press in 1997, and leapt at the opportunity to spend an hour with one of the most unique voices in today's mythos fiction, and how weirdly appropriate it was to have our meeting in a graveyard!

Rhode Island is a four hour drive from my house in northern New Jersey, so I left the morning's light drizzle behind with time to make our group's noon appointment that had been co-ordinated via emails by Pugmire and the convention's generous organizer Niels Hobbs. A small group gathered in the Biltmore Hotel's lobby at 11am, and I was surprised to recognize familiar faces from Facebook groups, Google + circles, and the Lovecraft eZine's video chats, and we fell into easy conversation about the convention weekend ahead. Mr. Pugmire gathered the half-dozen of us and led us on a short walk across Kennedy Plaza and the Providence River to locations of Lovecraftian interest, pointing out the Fleur de Lys house described in "The Call of Cthulhu," the Providence Art Club (where the convention's art exhibit was held), and we stopped at at 135 Benefit Street, notoriously known as "the Shunned House." Next to that old fungi-ridden building there was a small hosta garden that we recognized as the setting of one of Pugmire's tales in his recent Enoch Coffin book. As we continued down the street, I asked our author if he'd mind if I photographed and recorded him. "NecronomiCon is an important occasion and it should be documented as throughly as possible," he said, and, in hindsight, it was- there are enough photos on Facebook and videos on YouTube to make all absentee Lovecraftians feel as if they were present. 

St. John's Churchyard, our destination, was described in Lovecraft's "The Shunned House:" ""I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard - the place that Poe loved - the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street." The spot was a favorite destination for Lovecraft to bring friends he hoped to frighten, as he mentioned in a letter to Helen V. Sully in October 1933: "About the hidden churchyard of St. John's - there must be some unsuspected vampiric horror burrowing down there & emitting vague miasmatic influences, since you are the third person to receive a definite creep of fear from it ... the others being Samuel Loveman and H. Warner Munn. I took Loveman there at midnight, & when we got separated among the tombs he couldn't be quite sure whether a faint luminosity bobbing above a distant nameless grave was my electric torch or a corpse-light of less describable origin."

As the group settled around a picnic basket of crackers, cheeses, sparkling cider, and a variety of ice cream (coffee ice cream, we were told, was Lovecraft's favorite), our host spoke of Lovecraft's and Poe's association with the churchyard, and he read David E. Schultz's "In a Sequester'd Churchyard" from Crypt of Cthulhu #57 which tells Helen Scully's version of her visit to the graves with Lovecraft. 

“It was dark, and he began to tell me strange weird stories, and despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the streets before he or whatever it was grabbed me. I reached the streetlamp trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face… almost of triumph. Nothing was said.” 

"When ST Joshi recounted that, he added, 'What a lady’s man!'" Pugmire laughed. "I think that’s a very appropriate way for Lovecraft to date; I highly approve."