Cthulhu

[September 10th, 2008]

During the opening credits of the H.P. Lovecraft update Cthulhu, a radio newscaster pronounces a dire forecast: “The oceans are rising, and fast.” History professor Russ March (Jason Cottle) is about to realize exactly how fast. Within minutes of returning from Seattle to his island hometown of Rivermouth (a fogbound Astoria) for his mother’s funeral, Russ is deluged by unfortunate events: He happens upon a fatal car crash, is followed by a procession of shrouded monks and, escaping for a drink, is buttonholed at the bar by an ancient mariner who wants to talk about humanoid salamanders. And that’s before Russ’ family, never terribly accepting of his homosexuality, sets him up with Tori Spelling, who wants to have his baby—by any means necessary.

What does any of this have to do with Lovecraft’s unspeakable, squid-faced space monster Cthulhu? (It’s pronounced kuh-THOO-loo, though I wouldn’t recommend it.) Not much, honestly, though the movie is loosely based on Lovecraft’s short story “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” What it shares with the 1920s New England horror writer is a tone: It isn’t expressly frightening as much as dreamily unsettling and endearingly batty. Portland may have an annual H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival each October, but the Pacific Northwest has long needed some brash regionalist filmmaker to seize upon its gloomy wilderness as a setting for Weird Tales pulp. Now first-time director Dan Gildark, a Seattle-based alum of Portland’s NW Film Center School of Film, has transformed Oregon into the Mountains of Madness.

Gildark and screenwriter Grant Cogswell’s nervy work is a reminder of the timidity of most independent filmmaking—even when Cthulhu fails, it fails with panache. (The acting is a weak spot: Cottle is a bland lead, Spelling overplays the lady rapist, and only Scott Patrick Green connects as Russ’ teenage flame.) But cinematographer Sean Kirby—whose work was the only good thing about 2006’s bestiality movie Zoo—again guides the camera expertly, suggesting menace around every coastal-highway curve. Even Gildark’s most obvious gimmick—gay love story meets otherworldly horror—has emotional weight. Cthulhu is basically the tale of a religious-fundamentalist family willing to take extreme measures to cure their son of his sexual orientation. (It happens that the Marches worship slimy sea beasts instead of Jesus.) And it takes a certain daring to repurpose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as an allegory for a gay idyll.

But that’s just where Dan Gildark starts getting weird. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that Cthulhu wasn’t content to follow the path of other horror movies—maybe it was when Spelling tried to seduce the hero next to a polar-bear tank at the local aquarium—but I recognized the disquieting sensation of seeing something fresh. The movie, like most bold pieces of art, flirts with unintentional comedy, but it pushes right past that threat, even as its plausibility crumbles. Lovecraft would be confused and probably appalled—he wasn’t comfortable with any kind of sex—but even the agitated mythologizer would have to appreciate the way a local sheriff interrogates Russ with quotations from Yeats: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? I’m your rough beast, Russ!” The movie falls apart—the center does not hold—but its anarchy is a blast to watch. R.