Microcinema DVDs - The Whisperer in Darkness

2012-10-15 Video Librarian
By S. Axmaker

3 Stars - Like its predecessor—The Call of Cthulu (2005)—this second feature film from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society adapts the American author’s work in the style of yesteryear. Derived and expanded from the 1931 titular short story, The Whisperer in Darkness resembles an early ’30s gothic horror film, shot in black-and-white with period costumes, cars, and performance mannerisms. The tale follows Professor Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer)—a folklorist from Miskatonic University who studies modern myths and cultural tales but is skeptical of supernatural explanations—as he explores the hills of Vermont and winds up confronting technology beyond his comprehension and creatures that defy rational explanation. Despite being a bit talky and not particularly scary, the film is filled with a Lovecraftian sense of dread, hinting of worlds beyond understanding and a conspiracy of epic proportions. Working with a small budget, director Sean Branney makes the most of minimal resources to create imaginative sets, evocative effects, and a shadowy atmosphere. Sure to delight devotees of Lovecraft, this is recommended.

2012-09-05 Cinema Sentries
By Max Naylor

Everyone enjoys H.P. Lovecraft.

That is to say, I think there's something universally appealing about Lovecraft's strange and terrifyingly unique mythos. Something about the truly alien and unnatural images he conjured out of his fevered mind that tickles at some primitive part of our brain in a modern world almost completely explainable through science and study. There's an irresistible draw to something that, as it is told to us, is completely unfathomable to the human mind. Even those who aren't necessarily drawn to his storytelling, which is long-winded and expository, can find some draw in the unworldly qualities of a mythology he invented out of nightmares.

Because of this, I find the idea of transferring that canon onto film very exciting. You find a lot of his imagery bleeding into other works, Hellyboy 1 and 2 being probably the most popular examples, and indeed Guillermo del Toro was at one point developing an on-screen adaptation of another Lovecraft title, At the Mountains of Madness, with del Toro's work having been pervasively influenced by the writer. However, with that project now scrapped, we're lucky to have independent features like The Whisperer in Darkness being produced at a level that, while maybe not at a major production level, is still very enjoyable and serves as wonderful supplemental viewing to the stories.

Most of the period pieces produced at a low-independnet level like this are difficult enough to pull off. The budget constraints on any project that's going to require so much costuming and historically accurate locations, props and post-production, can be enough to throw the entire film into a limbo of disbelief, the viewer constantly reminded of the modern elements that accidentally or unavoidably leak into an otherwise acceptable film, but Whisperer... does a lot right to offset these problems.

For one, shot entirely in black and white, the film has excellent cinematography, and with the exception of a few sequences where a scene was unconvincinly shot rain-for-daylight or perhaps a study seemed too suspiciously to have been shot on a not-perfectly disguised soundstage, it does a wonderful job of strikingly and dramatically portraying early 1900s New England, the atmospherically dominating and eerie location of most of Lovecraft's work. The dense forests, suffocating fog, and disconnected rural settings are well-implemented in the film, and the filmmakers have done a wonderful job in using the stark, constrasting images to convey a feeling of danger and foreboding.

The unlikley leading man, Matt Foyer, originally coming across more like Peter MacNicol than the hero of a horror story, carries the film as a straight-laced man of science who discovers along witht he audience how unfortunately narrow his rationale has been. There are great performances ranging from the smug and cloying fellow scientist of Charlie Tower to the truly excellent performance from the youngest member of the cast, Autumn Wendel, who sincerely gives any of the actors in Super 8, the last widely-released film with a main cast dominated by child actors, a run for their money.

Even with the limited budget, the creature effects were fun and a shot in the right direction of paying credence to the legacy of Lovecraft. Even for a major production studio, the creation of the nightmarish Elder Gods that populate Lovecraft's stories isn't an easy job. If any complaint can be made, it certainly isn't on the production aspect, but more a desire that more design would have gone into the monsters to begin with. We know that much of the Lovecraft mythos is essentially crustacean, betentacled, bat-winged monstrosities, and because of the film's adherence to re-creating the mood of a Lovecraft work rather than a word-for-word adaptation, we know we're not going to be seeing all that much of the creatures, but the monsters themselves came across slightly under-imagined, and once you're past the soul-crushing epicaricacy of turn-of-the-century New England, what else really is there in a Lovecraft story. Not really something that's going to make or break someone's enjoyment of the film as they're still perfectly fine in their monstrous way, but I could hope for more, if not expect it.

The Blu-ray contains the basics, commentary tracks and trailers, but also has a great making-of documentary featurette that is really fun. Watching someone put together this film on a showstring budget, fueled by nothing but a passion for filmmaking and, clearly, an almost-unhealthy devotion to Lovecraft is something anyone who enjoys film can appreciate. It's at this level, where the money's not always guaranteed and creative solutions must constantly be found to keep you within the razor-thin margins of production, that the bravest kind of filmmaking comes out.

There have been a few Lovecraft-inspired indies coming out recently, and while certainly no big-studio CGI blockbuster, this is by far the best. Not enough to really cast your mind babbling into madness, screaming the names of beings too old to be gods, but as long as the director keeps making films we still have a chance.

2012-08-30 Pop Matters
By Michael Curtis Nelson

Immersed in a Gulf of Unutterable Horror: 'The Whisperer in Darkness'

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any direct evidence to support these assertions. I cannot prove even now whether I was wrong in my hideous inferences. Yet the hints and portents, taken together, are persuasive.

For aeons, alien beings have inhabited Earth, wherein they have settled in caves in remote regions from Nepal to New England, keeping their existence a secret from all but a few humans, mining the planet for minerals they cannot find on their own far-flung worlds. The Mi-Go have left their mark on our religion, mythology, and folklore, but have for the most part kept to themselves—until now. Forced to find a home for legions more of their kind, the Old Ones are preparing to open a portal that will bend space and time to their will, and allow swarms of their genus to travel unfathomable distances to colonize our planet, and to embark upon the domination, and eventual annihilation, of mankind.

Seizing the most powerful lever of propaganda, the American motion picture industry, the Outer Beings from beyond the borders of the known cosmos seek to calm and distract moviegoers, while they carry out their insidious plan. The Unknown Ones’ diabolically ingenious stratagem is to tell… the very truth!. For by exposing their aim to invade Earth and enslave mankind within the confines of a fictional film safely compartmentalizes the horror as the subject for entertainment, and not the source of blood-curdling terror.

The Whisperer in Darkness adapts the 1931 short story by the same name by H.P. Lovecraft, the prescient seer whom literary historians have criminally relegated to the rank of a mere purveyor of pulp-friendly science fiction, horror, and fantasy. The tale follows the travails of Miskatonic University professor Albert Wilmarth as he investigates sightings of mutant corpses that wash up in waterways in Vermont after heavy flooding. His attempts to discover what, if any, truth lies behind these bizarre phenomena bring him into contact with amateur scientist Henry Akeley, who holds that creatures not of this earth are massing in the remote region of the Green Mountain State where he lives.

Wilmarth at first attempts to debunk this theory, and his outspoken views on the subject bring him a notoriety frowned upon by the university administration. As evidence mounts, however, he decides to pay a visit to Akeley in Vermont, where he quickly finds himself at odds with the fearful and suspicious local populace. A series of shocking revelations soon follow that shake his easy faith in science and threaten his very sanity.

Produced through an infernally clever process dubbed Mythoscope—which combines the adoption of a slight frame flicker with traditional effects such as miniatures, puppets, and suggestive lighting in order to mimic the cinematic conventions and appearance of beloved horror films of the ‘30s—The Whisperer in Darkness engenders nostalgia for the golden age of film, distancing viewers from the all-too-real threat facing them at this very moment.

Most misleading of all is the film’s supposed low budget, an allegation designed to invite skepticism about the production. In fact, The Whisperer in Darkness boasts an excellent script, builds suspense and dread slowly, and convincingly presents the ages-old battle between credulity and rationality, captured well by a debate between Wilmarth and the author of sensational books on unexplained phenomena.

True, much of the cast are not well known or have labored mostly as character actors, yet they turn in excellent performances. Barry Lynch, veteran of episodic television, imbues Akeley with supernatural glamour and creeping horror, while Matt Foyer lends academic turned reluctant sleuth Wilmarth the appropriate clumsy, yet dogged determination. Young Autumn Wendel shines as a farm girl who sees through the machinations and plots of the adults around her.

In order to disguise the film’s origins in the unfathomable distances of space, the Outer Beings have founded a production company (The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society), helmed by a pair of middle-aged dabblers in film, purported director-writer Sean Branney and co-writer Andrew Leman, who are also credited with The Call of Cthulu—created in Mythoscope in 2005, in the style of a silent picture. (This title is available on the provocatively named online service Hulu.) The Mi-Go seem to have been manipulating these hapless pawns into cloaking their nefarious plans with Lovecraftian productions since their high school days.

A companion DVD devoted to extras offers a glimpse into the pedestrian, even banal workaday production of The Whisperer in Darkness, further undermining the picture’s dreadful veracity. These materials are well worth perusal for the hints they provide to viewers attentive to the truth. For example, and perhaps foolishly, the would-be authors of our destruction let on that the latest computer techniques augment the effects of the vaunted Mythoscope process! What other sophisticated artistry, far beyond the skills of the ostensible makers, went into the creation of this picture?

And yet perhaps the Old Ones have made a slight miscalculation, for the film offers valuable information on their intelligence, powers, and technology. Know your enemy. Watch The Whisperer in Darkness—while there’s still time.

2012-08-07 KC Active
By Loey Lockerby and Dan Lybarger

Influential horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) didn’t live long enough to make much cash or receive enough recognition for the work that influenced later writers like The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury or filmmaker John Carpenter.

The recent adaptation of his 1931 story “The Whisperer in Darkness” has been made as if Hollywood studios had been interested in his work, while he was able to buy a ticket to see the film for himself. It’s in black-and-white, and the special effects and miniature work are designed to match the look of films like King Kong or Island of Lost Souls as well as the unnerving spirit of Lovecraft’s work.

The attempt to match up 21st century filmmaking technology to that of the early 20th isn’t exactly seamless (some CGIs are showing). For the most part, this approach works because the high contrast photography and retro gadgets do have an inherent spookiness, and the pseudo-retro effects evoke the things that scared generations before us.

The Whisperer in Darkness follows a folklorist named Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) who is getting annoyed about all the letters he’s receiving about giant cave dwelling creatures in New England. Initially skeptical, Albert learns that a variety of cultures have been dealing with these same flying crab monsters in their myths.

Of course, Lovecraft wouldn’t have a story, and the film wouldn’t have been made if they weren’t more than legends. While director Sean Branney has had to expand Lovecraft’s tale to fit a commercial running time, fans will notice references to other tales and to writers whom Lovecraft inspired. Lovecraft wondered if the human race was worth preserving, and that sentiment runs throughout The Whisperer in Darkness. Thankfully, we’ve lasted long enough to enjoy his prophesies on interplanetary and inter-dimensional doom.

Extras: A second disc, which includes two-and-a-half hours of “making of” featurettes as well as deleted and extended scenes. It also includes subtitles for Greek, Turkish, Japanese and Euskera-speaking fans. There are 23 languages represented, so there might be one that you feel comfortable reading. (N/R) Rating: 3.5 —DL

2012-08-05 Los Angeles Beat
By Paul Gaita

On a very different plane – both cosmic and thematic – is The Whisperer in Darkness (Microcinema), a marvelously atmospheric adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story about an attempted invasion by elder space gods directed in the style of ’30s-era horror. It’s the second labor of love for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which produced an exceptional short film of The Call of Cthulhu (2005) done as a Jazz Era silent, complete with era-correct special effects. Whisperer is a more ambitious affair, both in terms of scope – it’s feature-length, with sound and (low-key) CGI effects – and style, which hews to the Expressionistic black-and-white classics from the Universal stable. The Blu-ray offers a feature-length commentary by the film’s dedicated creators, as well as a sizable making-of featurette and a gallery of deleted and extended scenes. Those weary of in-name-only Lovecraft adaptations will appreciate the faithfulness of this low-wattage but extremely ambitious (and successful) take on one of the author’s best stories.

2012-08-03 Salon.com
By Andrew O'Hehir

The hysterical and paranoid imagination of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, without doubt the most important American horror writer between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, has long bedeviled and defeated filmmakers. Lovecraft’s stories are first of all about tone and perspective, often narrated by a deranged protagonist who has made horrifying discoveries and gazed beyond the horizon of ordinary reality to see gibbering, flapping creatures dancing to a tuneless flute played by a shambling thing in a monk’s robe with tentacles where its face should be, somewhere across aeons of incalculable time in the bottomless blackness beyond space and time. The perfervid language and fanciful settings and non-Euclidean geometry and rugose cones and eldritch undead squid-beings – pretty much everything essential about Lovecraft — resisted both the technique and manner of cinema.

While Lovecraft’s cultural influence has grown immensely since his death in 1937 (in fact, he was a poor and obscure writer during his lifetime), the fanbase has never seemed sufficient to justify big-budget Hollywood versions of his tales. Furthermore, I would speculate that numerous writers have tried to adapt Lovecraft and abandoned it. His writing is deadly earnest, altogether humorless and full of antique phraseology and vocabulary words, in true autodidact style. (A solitary child who was frequently ill and plagued by nightmares, Lovecraft read widely across many disciplines, but never graduated from high school.) The possibility that any movie adaptation would end up as expensive, unintentional high camp must have seemed daunting.

Across the years, a few filmmakers have chipped away at Lovecraft’s work, here and there, while hardly ever touching the Cthulhu Mythos, the semi-coherent fictional realm in which a race of unbelievably ancient and powerful gods (the Great Old Ones) lie in wait behind our paltry and partial understanding of the universe. B-movie director Roger Corman made a few 1960s films loosely inspired by Lovecraft, including the memorable “Die, Monster, Die!” (somewhat based on the story “The Colour Out of Space”). Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond” are both Lovecraft adaptations – and I’ve never even seen his 2001 “Dagon” (although it’s evidently not based on the Lovecraft story of that name). John Carpenter’s terrific 1995 horror film “In the Mouth of Madness” might be the most successful mainstream Lovecraft adaptation of all – except that it isn’t a Lovecraft adaptation, but something more like a postmodern mashup of Lovecraftian themes.

And then came the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, a maniacal group of Lovecraft fans based in Los Angeles who have long since left amateur status behind, producing numerous radio dramas, role-playing games, assorted paraphernalia and souvenirs and two (count ‘em!) full-blown feature film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work. In the name of He Who Must Not Be Named, I declare the HPLHS to be one of the great triumphs of fan culture in the Internet age. Honestly, it probably took devoted fans to seize the key to putting Lovecraft on the big screen. First, of course, it required undying fealty to Yog-Sothoth (I think that goes without saying). Almost as important, Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, David Robertson and their collaborators grasped that making movies as they would have been made in Lovecraft’s time was the solution.

In 2005, director Leman and writer Branney made a silent, black-and-white version of “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s signature tale, more or less as such a film would have been made 80 years earlier. The suspension of disbelief required to enjoy this movie, when it comes to the low-tech special effects or the California locations or the acting, tracks pretty closely with the suspension of critical judgment required to enjoy Lovecraft in the first place. It’s a genuinely spooky and memorably atmospheric film, whose feeling of apparent antiquity only accentuates its power. It’s a marvelous example of the inside-outside possibilities of fan culture; at one and the same moment you may be recognizing that what you’re watching is a bunch of miniatures, likely filmed in a bathtub or aquarium, and allowing yourself to be swept up in the story of a seaman discovering a horrible sunken city.

Now the HPLHS is back with “The Whisperer in Darkness,” a handsomely mounted black-and-white production that employs a controversial cinematic innovation of the late 1920s, the “talkie.” Made in the style of a prewar Universal horror movie (à la “Frankenstein” and “Dracula”), “The Whisperer in Darkness” might, hypothetically, displease a handful of hardcore Lovecraftians. This time around, Branney and Leman (who co-wrote the film, with Branney directing) use the original tale about skeptical Miskatonic University researcher Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) and a remote Vermont farmer haunted by strange beings as the jumping-off point for a mixture of mad-scientist adventure, occultism and alien invasion.

If I don’t love “The Whisperer in Darkness” quite as much as “The Call of Cthulhu,” that’s mostly because the original story is pretty silly even by Lovecraft standards, featuring monsters who appear to have escaped from a supermarket lobster tank and a plot twist you can see coming a Vermont country mile away. But the filmmakers have crafted a seductive and admirably sinister rural gothic, in which the naive academic folklorist – after humiliating himself in a radio debate with real-life paranormal researcher Charles Fort (played by writer-producer Leman) — is lured into the remote hills of Vermont, where tales handed down by Indians and settlers have long maintained that strange beings from the stars yet lurk. (There’s no winking at the viewer in this movie, but anybody who’s spent any time in Vermont will find this hilarious. These days, the beings lurking in those hills are cheese-making, pot-growing neo-hippies, but most of them are human in origin.)

Aging farmer Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch) has been writing increasingly anxious letters to Wilmarth, and sends his young son to Miskatonic to plead his case: The rock-lobster hill creatures have surrounded his farm, apparently because he took an ominous black stone they use in horrible religious practices. (I know: Dude, give it back already!) Ha ha ha, says Wilmarth, the persistence of folk belief, dontcha know. But when he arrives at the Brattleboro train station, Akeley is nowhere in sight, and Wilmarth gets a lift from a mustachioed, Rolls Royce-driving fellow whose abrasive Boston accent sounds an awful lot like the one he’s heard chanting in praise of the dire deity Shub-Niggurath (“Black goat of the woods with a thousand young!”) on Akeley’s wax-cylinder recordings.

Nicely paced and decently acted – there’s no question that the more naturalistic demands of the talkie pose some challenges – “Whisperer in Darkness” has a chiller-diller conclusion and some moments of real terror. (Along with its not especially terrifying, but potentially delicious, mind-reading seafood villains from space.) OK, so this is only the second-best straight-up Lovecraft adaptation in cinema history. Still, I call out gratefully to the HPLHS – Iä! — marking my doorway with the Elder Sign, muttering invocations from the Pnakotic Manuscripts and awaiting the next visit of the Old Ones with both fear and longing.

2012-07-31 SeanAx.com
By Sean Axmaker

The Whisperer in Darkness (Microcinema), the second feature from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (following up their 2005 short feature The Call of Cthulu), once again approaches its adaptation of Lovecraft in the style of the era in which it was written. Where Cthulu was presented as a highly-stylized silent film in the German Expressionist mode, Whisperer is beholden to early thirties gothic horror, in black and white and a period style that goes beyond costumes and cars to evoke thirties-era performance, imagery, and lighting.

The script, greatly expanded from the 1931 short story of the same name, follows Professor Albert Wilmarth (underplayed very nicely by Matt Foyer) of Muskatonic University, a folklorist fascinated by modern myths and cultural tales but skeptical of any supernatural explanation. Entreated by a Vermont farmer to investigate the reports of fabled creatures in the hills, he confronts technology beyond his comprehension and creatures that defy rational explanation.

The Whisperer in Darkness takes its sweet time unfolding. It is rather talky and not particularly scary or tense, but it is filled with a Lovecraftian sense of dread, of worlds beyond comprehension and a conspiracy of epic proportions. “I think you’ll find time runs differently here,” he’s told upon arrival, a harbinger of mysteries to come. As the filmmakers remark in the disc supplements, Lovecraft wasn’t big on endings, so they have filled it out with pieces of other stories, added more fully-developed characters and motivations, and constructed a dramatic plot that takes the original story from a static single-room conversation to a rousing thirties-style thriller.

2012-08-01 Cobustible Celluloid
By Jeffery Anderson

It's hard to measure the literary influence of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). He was clearly an imaginative and impressive writer, with a legion of followers, yet he wrote in the "lower" genres of horror and sci-fi and has yet to command the kind of mainstream respect that, say, James Joyce does.

Like Joyce, Lovecraft's works have often been deemed "unflimable." American director Stuart Gordon has had the most success, starting with the cult classic Re-Animator (1985) and including From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995), Dagon (2001), and the Dreams in the Witch-House TV episode of "Masters of Horror." Gordon's take has been to adapt Lovecraft's style to his own, resulting in dark comedies.

Now the filmmakers Andrew Leman and Sean Branney have attempted a new series of Lovecraft movies. Their first effort, The Call of Cthulhu (2005), was a 47-minute silent film (which I haven't yet seen). Their new one, The Whisperer in Darkness, is a feature-length talkie, designed in the tradition of 1930s films, specifically those of James Whale.

Unfortunately, outside the opening credits and black-and-white cinematography, Leman and Branney don't even come close to getting the look and feel of a Whale film. Their pacing is unbearably slow, and scenes languish for long minutes in dialogue and suspense-free padding. Whale would never have been so wasteful.

The plot involves Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer), a professor who studies legends and folklore. A farmer in Vermont, Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), contacts him about mysterious happenings on his property, including weird artifacts and strange footprints. Eventually, after seeing enough evidence, Wilmarth agrees to visit the Akeley property, but when he gets there, he finds insidious things going on. The once-paranoid Akeley is now dismissive of anything strange going on, and Wilmarth learns about a secret experiment to transplant people's brains to jars.

I won't say anymore, but this is the kind of movie where it takes about half the movie just to get Wilmarth to the farm, and we watch him trudging through rain-soaked fields for about a reel before anything happens. In one scene, he tries to comfort a young girl with a long speech; this ends with an offer of singing her a song, to which she replies, "no." Not that I was eager to hear Wilmarth sing, but why spend all that time on a speech with no payoff? Most scenes like this go on with too much explanation and little point.

Lovecraft was all about creating dread, or, in short, atmosphere. Filmmakers Leman, who co-wrote, and Branney, who co-wrote and directed, attempt to come close to this with their old-movie look, but it doesn't create an emotional response so much as an intellectual one. It's an admirable effort, but one that sadly doesn't work.

My pals at Microcinema have distributed the nice-looking Blu-ray with a generous amount of extras, including a commentary track, extensive "making of" featurettes, deleted and extended scenes, and trailers.

2012-03-12 Famous Monsters of Filmland
By Holly

This is the kind of ideal adaptation that every literary work deserves.

Aint It Cool News
By Mark Miller

I loved every moment of this Saturday afternoon serial brought to life in the modern age... THE WHISPERER IN THE DARKNESS is the first Lovecraftian film done completely right and I can’t wait to see more from this production company...

The Stranger
By Paul Constant

...the most compelling proof to date that there is a way to bring H.P. Lovecraft to cinematic life... It's great fun.

Bloody Disgusting.com

You are about to encounter what very well may be the single most successful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ever to lick fear across a screen. Whisperer arrives like shadows out of time, a discovered relic from another dimension. A genuinely scary film and a hellishly great time.

Brutal As Hell.com
By Annie Riordan

Filmed in glorious black and white, the crew at HPLHS have once again managed to create a genuine, nostalgia ridden throwback to the good old days of Universal creature features with a noticeable nod in the direction of 40s film noir to boot.

Twitch.com
By Dejan Ognjanovic

The Whisperer in Darkness is exquisitely shot and edited by David Robertson and very well directed by Sean Branney.

Playback:stl
By Sarah Boslaugh

...provides a good reflection of Lovecraft's obsessions while affording contemporary audiences some good old-fashioned midnight movie fun.

Grognardia
By James Maliszewski

an amazing piece of work and one of the best adaptations of an H.P. Lovecraft story to film ever made. I'm frankly astounded that it's as good as it is

Chicago Examiner
By Gari Hart

The Whisperer in Darkness is the closest we can get to new releases from yesteryear, and reviews cannot do it justice – it must be seen to be believed.

Press Plus 1
By Benjamin Ross Hayden

Completely swept by the stunning visuals and period style, The Whisperer in Darkness at Calgary International Film Festival 2011 is a perfect visual ode to legendary writer.

Film Threat

Branney nails the spirit of Lovecraft. Through voice-over narratives and frightened faces, “The Whisperer in Darkness” conveys a sense of human sanity being unraveled by too much forbidden fruit.

Montreal Gazette
By Liz Ferguson

My advice is – do not miss The Whisperer in Darkness. It is a fantastic film... Just a few seconds after the opening credits began, I knew I was in for a treat.

British Fantasy Society
By Mike Chinn

It’s gratifying to watch an adaption of Lovecraft done with love and respect for the original