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The best lovecraftian movie ever done is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". It is not a lovecraftian movie in the sense that it borrows from the Mythos, but that it shares a lot of concepts with what Jorge Luis Borges called "cosmic anguish": The ultimate fact that we're just flea-sized, helpless, shortsighted creatures crawling upon the skin of something (the Cosmos/the ultimate reality etc) much larger than we can ever fathom.
Actually, upon reading Arthur Clarke's notes on making the movie, one can find many entries that corroborate this connection: Lovecraft is actually cited in the texts as a big source of inspiration, and Clarke says they had many a hearty laugh thinking up scenes such as "featureless dark shiny pyramids being escorted by Irish cops" through New York streets in open cars, as ambassadors who knows where from.
In the movie, humans are as defenseless against the God-like entities that created the Stargate as they would be against the Old Ones, and the Stargate sequence itself hits a lot of perfect lovecraftian notes: The light effects are attempting to translate what is basically an experience adequately "beyond words", "unnamable"; I look at those lights and think "The Dreams of The Witch House", or "The Color Out Of Space" (the friggin' colors out of space people);
Frozen shots of Dave Bowman's face show that he's taking in much more than his brain can hold. He collapses and most likely goes mad from the experience (when the fireworks end his face is shown shaking inside his helmet);
Lovecraftian entities cannot be described most of the time. If someone would ever try to translate that type of hierophanic experience, it would be best for them to stick to abstraction. Now, by the end of the Stargate sequence one can even discern what could perfectly be, say, Yog-Sothoth in a "real" Lovecraft-based movie: In "2001", we see gigantic structures with plasma-like "bodies", oozing slowly against the black backdrop of space (Kubrick did the right thing yet again, going micro to suggest the macro: filming microscopic chemical reactions as they happened, he got some surrealistic, slowly moving blurs that have a slow cadence to them, some strange gravitas that, coupled with the music (and our knowledge that Bowman's pod would be just a microdot in that place), helps building a sense of dread and awe;
Gyorgy Ligetti would have been *my* choice of music for a lovecraftian movie. Those scary disembodied voices that start chanting when the black monolith shows up could have been lifted straight from the descriptions of Azathoth's chamber. And, by the way - a black monolith showing up on Earth aeons before man showed up? How much more lovecraftian does it have to be? (What was that thing again with a shiny trapezohedron in one of Lovecraft's stories? Too lazy to look up now);
There are many more points of contact. The Discovery is adequately "non-euclidean": The astronauts pop from trapdoors in the ceiling, turn leftwise on the air and "climb" stairs in angles that make no sense (scenes filmed in a giant rotating wheel to create disorientation in the audience - and it works); the mainframes are half-circles that could have been used by the librarians of Yith etc.
In the end, the only thing that prevents "2001" from being a perfect lovecraftian movie is the ending, which is optimistic and uplifting (I can't recall any movie character ever to finish a story better than astronaut Dave Bowman does). But still is the closest serious cinematic rendering that we have from Lovecraft's vision - that I know of. |
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