The Quatermass Experiment (1953)

Broadcast live, four years before the launch of Sputnik 1, eight years before Gagarin orbited the earth and fifteen years before Armstrong and company landed on the moon, The Quatermass Experiment was the television serial which kindled our fascination with the extraterrestrial.

Nigel Kneale's script really captures post-war pioneering science, cold war fear and cosmic horror but grounds it all with large doses of humanity. Reginald Tate is perfect as the scientific evangelist, Professor Bernard Quatermass and there's some great studio-based set design. The programme is pretty tense in a knob-twiddling, oscilloscope-wobbling kind of way and contains an almost Lovecraftian fear of the unknown.

Unfortunately, only the first two episodes survive and it's extremely unlikely that any recordings will ever be found of the missing four episodes.

Jolly good fun, chaps!

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In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Carpenter's acid flashbacks are given form in this, his final great film. A psychotronic, Lovecraftian fever dream.

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Dagon (2001)

Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna are justly famous for their humour but I feel that it's utterly misplaced in this otherwise decent but loose adaptation of Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The film builds a dank and ruinous sense of dread in a great setting and then throws it away for a few cheap gags. Also, why did they chant to Cthulhu ("Rejoice! Rejoice! Cthulhu waits!") at the end instead of Dagon ?

Uxía? yum!

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The Whisperer in Darkness (2011)

The evocation of a 1930s Universal-styled film is perfectly realised and the film is filled with dread and the threat of cosmic horror. The Whisperer in Darkness has a much slower pace than The Call of Chuthulu but it does reward the patient. The only issue is the CGI creatures at the end; mechanical or stop-motion would have been more effective and better fitted the period but I assume that a limited budget made this impossible.

mglw'nafh fhthagn-ngah cf'ayak 'vulgtmm vugtlag'n

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The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

After watching the "making of" documentary I'm bumping Cthulhu up to 5 stars as what they accomplished and how they pulled it off was really amazing.

Letterboxd Review