BUCKET LIST UPDATE – No. 529: Watch the silent movie version of 'The Call of Cthulhu'

I scratched another item off my bucket list on Sunday night when I finally watched the silent movie version of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Lovecraft is my favorite all-time writer, and “The Call of Cthulhu” is arguably his most famous story. For those of you unfamiliar with Lovecraft, he was a horror, fantasy and science fiction writer from Providence, Rhode Island. He died in 1937 at the age of 46. Lovecraft’s stories have had a huge influence on people like Stephen King, Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, John Carpenter and countless others. Other Lovecraft stories that are somewhat well known include “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

Despite Lovecraft’s heavy influence on modern writers and Hollywood, there’s never been a full-length feature film made of “The Call of Cthulhu.” The closest thing to it is a silent film version of the story that was released in 2005. I’ve known about this film for several years, but had never sat down to watch it until Sunday when I watched it online through NetFlix.

Directed by Andrew Leman, this 47-minute film looks like it was filmed in the 1920s, not 2005, which befits an adaptation of a Lovecraft tale. Lovecraft’s stories appeared in pulp magazines in the early 1900s and it was cool and a lot of fun to see an old-timey, black-and-white version of the story. Distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, the movie starred John Bolen, Ralph Lucas, Chad Fifer, John Klemantaski, Jason Owens, D. Grigsby Poland and David Mersault.

“The Call of Cthulhu” movie was based on Lovecraft’s short story of the same title, which he wrote in 1926. The story was first published in the February 1928 edition of Weird Tales magazine and is about a young man who tries to make sense of some unusual documents left behind by his uncle, a deceased college professor. The professor’s papers are about a weird cult that worships an ancient deity called “Cthulhu.” The young man’s investigation takes him from Australia to Norway, but not before his own sanity begins to unravel as he looks deeper and deeper into the mystery surrounding the cult’s activities.

One thing that was very cool about the silent movie version of “The Call of Cthulhu” was that it was shot using a film technique called Mythoscope, which is described as “a blend of vintage and modern filmmaking techniques intended to produce the look of a 1920s era film.” I thought the makers of this film did an awesome job of making the movie look like an authentic 1920s silent film, but I did notice some very modern-looking fluorescent light fixtures in one scene.

In the end, how many of you have seen the silent movie version of “The Call of Cthulhu”? What did you think about it? Did you like it or not? Let us know in the comments section below.

For more information about this movie, visit its official Web site at http://www.cthulhulives.org/cocmovie/festivals.html.