rest and oblivion

“What I want are rest and oblivion -- or at least, a seclusion amidst ancient scenes wherein I may cast off the actual modern world in a quiet round of reading, writing, and pilgrimages to quaint and historic places.”

--H.P. Lovecraft, correspondence, 1926

up over yawning emptiness

"Beneath me, there is the crust of the earth. Beneath that, magma. Go far enough, through the core, eventually there will be crust again, and the bottom of the ocean. Then sea water. Then air. Then the edge of the atmosphere. Then infinite nothingness, directly beneath my feet. The entire earth is a little trapeze, holding me up over yawning emptiness. And space extends to either side of me, in front of me, behind me, and above me as well, forever."

--Michael Cisco, "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" in Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, 2009

uninterpenetratingly: the comprehensive cosmic horror of Moby-Dick

“How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Halloween Reading - H.P. Lovecraft - Mongolia

“I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me...”

--H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Unnatural sex acts, a dangerous secret cult, and one very long night...

H.P. Lovecraft's

“The Shadow over Innsmouth”

read by Radigan Neuhalfen

Cafe Amsterdam

Wednesday, 2010 October 27

8:00 PM

In the shunned New England seaport town of Innsmouth, something is very much not right, as one unfortunate traveller discovers on one unforgettable night.

Written and published in 1936 during the worldwide Great Depression, this popular and provocative classic of cosmic horror treats themes of economic collapse and desperation, miscegenation, racism, fear of the foreign, and humanity's wilful though perhaps necessary misinterpretation of the nature of the universe and our own role within it.

The subject of ever-increasing academic and mainstream attention, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) stands as the most influential American horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe.

Radigan Neuhalfen is the author of the novel The Steppe and the blog The Crush of All Things.

Cafe Amsterdam

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

Influenza Pandemic, World War I, mass death is individual loss multiplied many times over, cosmic horror

"Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn't been evidence enough of humanity's divine disfavor. That's what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he'd ever had from her: God's judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he'd packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn't. Not then, and not later, when he'd come home to face Elizabeth's mute and barren grave."

--Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, "The Crevasse," Lovecraft Unbound, 2009

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival goes to Los Angeles

"Date:
2010 September 11, 2:00 PM

"Location:
Warner Grand Theater
478 West 6th Street
San Pedro, CA 90731-2632

"Contact:
Aaron Vanek
aaron@hplfilmfestival.com

"Description:
The first H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles will screen six of the best movies that have played at the original HPLFF in Portland, Oregon, from the past 14 years.

"Schedule:
2pm - 2:45 = Socializing and opening ceremonies
2:45 - 5:45 = Movie Block 1 (180 minutes)
5:45 - 6pm = Q&A with block 1 cast and crew
6pm - 6:45 = Break
6:45 - 7pm = Astra Dance performance
7pm - 9:30 = Movie Block 2 (150 minutes)
9:30 - 9:45 = Q&A with block 2 cast and crew
10pm - 2am = Party at Whale & Ale (free admission with festival ticket, 21+), music by Thelonius Dub

"Block One:
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008) - An award-winning documentary about the man who created the Cthulhu Mythos, H.P. Lovecraft. Directed by Frank H. Woodward. (90 minutes)

Cool Air (1999) - "Never underestimate the power of the human will." Jack Donner (Transformers 3, Star Trek: The Original Series) stars in this powerful period adaptation of the classic Lovecraft tale about a man who will do anything to survive. Masterfully filmed in Los Angeles on a shoestring budget, directed by and also starring Bryan Moore. (44 minutes)

AM 1200 (2008) - Eric Lange (Lost), John Billingsley (True Blood), and Ray Wise (Reaper, Twin Peaks) star in this taut supernatural thriller about a man on the run who flees into a far worse Hell than the one he left. A modern Lovecraft-inspired tale directed by David Prior. (40 minutes)

"Intermission:
During the break, The Astra Dance Company, a theatrical dance company inspired and influenced by famed Gothic horror author Edgar Allan Poe, will perform some of their haunting scenes: http://www.astradance.com/

"Block Two:
The Music of Erich Zann (1980) - One of the earliest versions of one of Lovecraft's most popular stories. A boarder is drawn into the web of his mysterious old musician neighbor, who plays haunting music for an unseen audience. Directed by John Strysik. (17 minutes)

The Call of Cthulhu (2005) - Filmed in Mythoscope, this black and white film was made as if it were produced in 1926, the year Lovecraft wrote his definitive tale about a worldwide cult bent on raising their obscene god from the depths of the ocean. Expertly crafted by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, this is the most faithful Lovecraft story adaptation to date. Winner of many awards. Directed by Andrew Leman. (47 minutes)

Re-Animator (1985) - This extreme 80's horror movie spawned many filmmakers to follow in its footsteps by adapting Lovecraft tales. Starring Jeffrey Combs (Star Trek, The Frighteners) as Herbert West, a scientist obsessed with curing death. 2010 is the 25th anniversary of this outrageous horror-comedy. Directed by Stuart Gordon. (86 minutes)

"Guests:
Portland H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival founder Andrew Migliore

All directors of all six films: Stuart Gordon, Frank Woodward, Bryan Moore, David Prior, John Strysik, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney

Music composer Richard Band (Re-Animator, From Beyond)

Actor Eric Lange (AM 1200, Lost)
Actor Jack Donner (Cool Air, Star Trek: The Original Series)
Cast and crew from The Call of Cthulhu: Noah Wagner, Barry Lynch, Patrick O'Day, Richard Lucas, Leslie Baldwin, cinematographer David Robertson, and special visual effects artist Dan Novy

"Vendors:
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html
Behind the Scenes Costumes: http://www.behindthescenescostumes.com
Author Cody Goodfellow and Perilous Press: http://perilouspress.com/index.html
Artist Mike Dubisch: http://www.dubisch.com/theartofMike/TheArtofMike.html

"Advertisers:
Mythos Con: http://www.mythoscon.org/
Film Threat: http://www.filmthreat.com/

"The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival:
http://www.hplfilmfestival.com/ "

World War I and H.P. Lovecraft

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, belief in the rational suffered a massive blow on the charnel fields of the First World War. Here were the rational, modern, capitalist powers, expressing their supposedly rational interests with an eruption of mechanized human butchery unprecedented in history. The scale of the psychic and cultural trauma of the First World War is vast—perhaps even 'undescribable.' The war smashed apart the complacencies of 'rationality' and uncovered the irrationality at the heart of the modern world with a savagery that eclipsed any fantasist's nightmares. How, then, could the genre known as fantasy present anything that could compare with such horror? Certainly, its stock of werewolves and effete vampires were utterly inadequate to the task....

"Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo—one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact."


--China Mieville, introduction to At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, 2005

First Lovecraft Reading in Mongolia

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL at Cafe Amsterdam in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia:
H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories as read by Radigan Neuhalfen

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
--H.P. Lovecraft

Thrill to a selection of H.P. Lovecraft's sanity-shattering horror stories in a special Halloween live reading by Radigan Neuhalfen.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is the most influential American horror writer of the Twentieth Century and the acknowledged heir to Edgar Allan Poe. Through his stories, which blended gothic horror with elements of science fiction, Lovecraft presented a stark and compelling view of the universe as something incomprehensibly and horrifyingly vast, within which great forces operate that are essentially indifferent--and perhaps even malignant--towards humanity, a view that has come to be known as "cosmic horror."

Everybody is welcome Wednesday October 28 at 8PM in Cafe Amsterdam for a very special and thrilling evening.

Lovecraft Film Festival

Oregon, Portland, Hollywood Theatre

2009 October 2-4

Founded in 1995, the "H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival promotes the works of H.P. Lovecraft, literary horror, and weird tales through the cinematic adaptations by professional and amateur filmmakers."

www.hplfilmfestival.com

"The only festival that understands."

daily torture

“Doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”

--H.P. Lovecraft, “Ex Oblivione,” 1921

At the Mountains of Madness

"The studio is very nervous about the cost and it not having a love story or a happy ending, but it's impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe."

--Guillermo Del Toro, Time Out London

Happy Halloween

“Then Hallowe'en drew near, and the settlers planned another frolic—this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even agriculture; the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through ages in the midnight blackness of secret woods, and still hinting at vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy and lightness.”

--“The Curse of Yig” by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, first published in Weird Tales, 1929 November