Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: The Call of Cthulhu; Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968); Outer Space
Format: Internet video on laptop.

People who read horror either love H.P. Lovecraft’s work or they hate it. I don’t know that there’s a lot of middle ground. One of the problems with Lovecraft’s writing is that, like Ray Bradbury’s writing, it doesn’t always translate well to film. In Bradbury’s case, it’s dialogue—no one actually speaks like Bradbury characters do. With Lovecraft, it’s the fact that his creepy crawlies and monsters defy description. This hasn’t prevented people from trying to film Lovecraft stories, but most of them don’t live up to the promise. The creature at the end of the original Hellboy is probably the closest we’ve seen to a true Lovecraftian horror on film. His story “The Call of Cthulhu” was thought to be unfilmable, but about 20 years ago, a group of independent filmmakers created The Call of Cthulhu as a traditional silent film…and it works.

Like a lot of Lovecraft (and Poe before him), the story is told in flashback, by a narrator who is relating his story to someone, trying to explain exactly what happened. In this case, a man (Matt Foyer) inherits the work of his great-uncle, who was obsessed with a religious cult called the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew pours through the work and becomes similarly obsessed himself. The fact that everyone who encounters or deals with the cult in some way seems to end up dead does not dissuade him. Encounters with the cult itself eventually leads the man to searching for the source of the cult, which leads him to the fabled city of R’lyeh, where great Cthulhu lies sleeping.

It's hard not to like The Call of Cthulhu for its earnestness. This is made in the style of a film from the 1920s, so it looks very much like a traditional silent film. Part of this was certainly done to save on costs. The “special effects” are clearly toys in many cases, but it works because it looks like it could have been made in 1922. On the other hand, the stop-motion Cthulhu is actually pretty impressive. Oh, it’s not Ray Harryhausen or anything, but for an independent, low-budget film, it works surprisingly well.

This is also a film that doesn’t really go for “scary” and goes more for existential dread, which is what Lovecraft was going for as well. This is all about the true horror of finding what is at the end of this road and discovering the terrible consequences of being alive in a world where something huge and terrible, mindless and insane might really exist…and be hungry.

The Call of Cthulhu is incredibly stylized, which is not a surprise. People unfamiliar with the style of silent movies might be put off by this. Additionally, because of what it is in terms of subject matter, people who aren’t fans of Lovecraft are going to find this harder to get into. But, it’s certainly worth its short running time, if only for the love that went into it. The filmmakers dropped a motto at the end of the film: Ludo Fore Putavimus, which translates to “We thought it would be fun.” I imagine it was.

One of the questions that Whistle and I’ll Come to You poses is whether or not it’s possible to have a short film that is still a slow burn. This was a made-for-BBC Television featurette originally part of a series called Omnibus that lasted for decades and won a number of BAFTAs. Most of the Omnibus episodes were documentaries, but Whistle and I’ll Come to You, evidently episode #17, was instead a short horror film that takes all of its 42 minutes to get to the true scares at the end.

Professor Parkin of Cambridge (Michael Hordern) books a seaside holiday for himself off-season. While many come to the area for golf, Parkin doesn’t play, and instead spends his days walking on the beach and exploring the dunes. One day he discovers an old, abandoned graveyard where he finds a bone whistle that he takes with him. If you’re a horror fan, you know this is the first of the bad steps he’s going to take.

As will not surprise you, Parkin cleans up the whistle and finds a Latin engraving on it: Quis est iste qui venit, which he translates as “Who is this who is coming?” And, of course, he’s going to do the bad thing and blow the whistle, and immediately, there is going to be a storm outside. And from here, things unravel. He is disturbed by terrible dreams of being pursued on the beach by a shrouded figure. When he asks for a blanket, the maids ask which bed he wants it on, since both appear to have been slept in.

All of this is in service of building up to the last few minutes, which I will not spoil. It’s a good moment, and it’s worth the 40 or so minutes to get to it.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You is reminiscent of some other British made-for-BBC films I’ve seen that do a lot with a little and are far better than their production value. I am thinking specifically of Ghostwatch and The Stone Tape specifically. This fits in beautifully with those. In fact, the only really difficult part of this is that Michael Hordern spends a lot of time in the film eating various breakfasts, and the man is a noisy eater. The film has a scary moment or two, but Hordern’s eating has strong “Denethor eating tomatoes” vibes.

Outer Space is a unique experiment that last a little more than 10 minutes, and it feels like longer because of the nature of what it is. This was created in the same year as The Blair Witch Project, and the two films are essentially the opposite ends of the found footage spectrum. Where The Blair Witch Project uses the conceit of people using hand-held cameras and filming themselves, Outer Space uses literally found footage from another film to create a new sort of narrative.

In this case, The Entity, a film where a woman (Barbara Hershey) is sexually attacked by a spirit, is the muse for the psychedelic nightmare created by Peter Tscherkassky. Through distorted images and more distorted sound, we are going to approach a house and see a woman (Hershey) terrorized by something. Eventually, the visuals will eventually become the sprocket holes of the film for some time. We’ve also had everything converted into black-and-white.

With the film running about 10:20 and much of it being sprocket holes and flashing lights, you’re not going to get a substantial amount of narrative in Outer Space, but this isn’t about narrative. It’s far more about the experience of what we are seeing than anything else. Despite this, I was put in mind of a filmmaker like Maya Deren and projects like Meshes of the Afternoon while watching this. Give Maya Deren a Herculean dose of meth or raging schizophrenia, and you’d get something that looks a lot like this.

Outer Space is not an easy watch, and it’s not supposed to be. This is supposed to be an assault on the senses, and in that respect it’s wildly successful. It legitimately needs an epilepsy warning; while the flashing lights aren’t something that goes on for an extended period of time, they are extremely intense and painful, even for someone without epilepsy.

This is not a short film that I think can be liked or enjoyed in the traditional sense, and yet there is so much happening on the screen in many cases—images of Barbara Hershey overlaid but slightly out of time, so she is always following herself in actions, or mirrored from one side to the other—that it feels like it needs to be watched more than once so that everything can be seen.

I don’t want to watch Outer Space again. There’s something here, but it’s one of those films where I feel like on some level the filmmaker is laughing at the audience, who are desperate to find meaning in something that doesn’t specifically have a meaning beyond it being a shared experience. I suppose, that being the case, that I will settle on grudging respect for it and leave it at that.

Why to watch The Call of Cthulhu: The story was thought to be unfilmable, but here it is.
Why not to watch: If you’re not a Lovecraft fan, there’s not much here for you.

Why to watch Whistle and I’ll Come to You: It’s a classic spook story.
Why not to watch: Professor Parkin makes a lot of nasty mouth noises when he eats.

Why to watch Outer Space: Intentionally or not, it evokes Maya Deren.
Why not to watch: It needs to come with an epilepsy warning.