Tetherd Cow Ahead

…who would take the starring role? My friends pretty much unanimously agree that I would be best portrayed on the silver screen by Bad Bob Balaban.

Ten Creepy Films You Should See:

★Jack Clayton’s The Innocents

★Tod Browning’s Freaks

★Tod Browning’s Dracula

★F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu

★Robert Altman’s Images

★James Whale’s The Old Dark House

★Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

★Dario Argento’s Suspiria

★Roman Polanski’s The Tenant

★Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby

In no particular order, but definitely in a darkened room.

In Tod Browning’s Dracula, there’s a great scene where Jonathan Harker arrives at Dracula’s castle and The Count bids Harker follow him up the stairs to his rooms. Bela Lugosi, in his most famous and inimitable role, walks up the stone stairway, across which is spun a huge spiderweb. He passes through the cobweb without even disturbing so much as a thread. Harker looks on dumbfounded and is forced to push away the thick webs so that he can follow. A spider scuttles away into the darkness.

It’s an amazingly creepy moment, and few cinema special effects have ever surpassed it for me. How is the Count’s unnerving act achieved? Simply with an edit: Dracula approaches the web, cut to Harker’s reaction, cut to Dracula on the other side of the web. Just like that.

You can pick up the Browning Dracula on DVD for a few dollars. It’s worth it. Sure, the script is lumbering and melodramatic by today’s standards, but I guarantee, if you sit in a darkened room with no distractions and immerse yourself in the black and white world of Browning’s interpretation, you can’t fail to be enveloped by the dark, dank atmosphere and the claustrophobic story.

If that scene was being made today, it would go very differently. Dracula would beckon Harker, and turn with a swirl of his cape into a tight close-up. Harker would not see The Count’s face morph for an instant into the visage of some hideous fanged-demon. Dracula would approach the cobweb, which would unwind strand by strand around his dark form. He would pass through the untwining web which a digital spider would then re-spin behind him. The sequence would have fifteen different CGI shots, thirty or forty cuts and a whole swag of obvious over-the-top sound effects. It would be impressive, possibly, but it would not be in the least bit creepy.

The modern cinema of the fantastic has lost its imagination. It has also lost its respect for the ability of the audience to have an imagination. In the Browning Dracula the spookiest moment of Dracula passing through the spiderweb happens way off screen, deep in the imagination of the viewer. No amount of clever CGI can ever hope to compete with that.

It’s time for ideas again. We’re all tired of seeing intricately detailed dinosaurs, gravity-defying superheroes and toothy aliens that look like they have bad head colds. We’ve seen it. It’s boring.

How about this for an idea Hollywood? Take away a third of the budget you spend on special effects and put it into creating some decent original stories. And for Pete’s sake, take some risks for a change.

Last week, a couple of friends and myself watched a DVD made by The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: an interpretation of one of Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ stories, The Call of Cthulhu.

The HPLHS* is basically a group of dedicated fans, who have, through an effort of sheer will and hard work (and not a little inspiration) done something which mainstream cinema has comprehensively failed to do – they have brought the peculiar storycraft and ambience of Lovecraft successfully to the screen.†

I have to say that I wasn’t expecting too much. I didn’t even know they were doing a film, and, well, let’s be honest – films that come out of fandom are rarely things you want to watch, let alone tell anyone you watched. But the fact is, these guys really pulled it off. And the main reason they pulled it off should be highly instructive for a lot of the people who make up the lumbering bloated juggernaut that is Hollywood.

That reason can be summed up in one succinct thought: they were clever. Instead of even attempting to compete with the high gloss, surround sound and expensive visual effects of mainstream movies, the HPLHS have elected to depict Lovecraft’s tale in the manner of the time in which it is set. The Call of Cthulhu is made as a silent movie.

It is a stroke of genius, and this simple, deft piece of insight has at once liberated the film-makers and illuminated the very essence of Lovecraft’s odd and unsettling writing.

It is easy to draw a direct line from The Call of Cthulhu to films such as Murnau’s Nosferatu, Wegener’s Vampyr and even Tod Browning’s Dracula, which is of course not a silent, but draws heavily from that tradition. The HPLHS film-makers have avoided the major pitfall of re-creating a silent film by taking the whole process very seriously and not camping it up (quite unlike the poorly executed Nicolas Cage-produced John Malkovitch vehicle Shadow of the Vampire ‡).

I don’t really want to make this post a review of the film. There are plenty of reviews already on the HPLHS site and elsewhere. I did like it, and if you are a Lovecraft aficionado I really recommend you buy the DVD, because it will be a valuable part of your collection.

What I really want to talk about though is why this inexpensive amateur film succeeds so well where mega-dollar Hollywood blockbusters fail. And that deserves a Part 2.

*Warning: highly geeky, obsessive and possibly sanity-sucking site.

‡ Which failed to realize that when Murnau created Nosferatu it was one of the scariest things to hit the Silver Screen; Murnau was not directing his actors in some kind of camp romp, as the SOV writer and director obviously saw it.