Lovecraftian Time Slip

H. P. Lovecraft saw time as a well, a living thing, a key to dark, terrible secrets and alternate realities. Brand new material is unearthed at Miskatonic University's Department of Ancient Manuscripts: Cinema Suicide reports that The Whisperer in Darkness produced by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society will be released in October 2010 (see the trailer below in this post). Eldritch Animation has a new animated version of The Statement of Randolph Carter (see the video link below in this post).

Lovecraft, like M. R. James, relied on a mood of historical authenticity. Lovecraft established his historical mood  by setting his stories in the well-guarded world of early twentieth century academia and indulging his politically incorrect love of the WASP middle classes of New England, now targets of parody.

New stuff on the author is a barometer of the meta-metahistory at work in the steampunk movement.  The Belle Époque and the 1920s are being revived with black and white silent films created in the first decade of the 2000s. Two things are revisited in the 'old is the new new' ethos. The nineteenth century placed its faith in mechanical progress, empiricism, posivitism, rationality and engineering.  That certainty confronted the unbridled emotion of Romanticism, which has been on a steady climb since the late eighteenth century. This hybrid of logic and illogic has become more and more integrated. In popular culture, sanity and madness have become one and indivisible. That is the itch we cannot scratch, the answer to a question like "What is the Matrix?" Our uneasiness about reality has made neo-gnosticism very popular. Awareness of that real-unreal hybrid inspires nostalgia and weird perspectives on time and history. A past recast through current eyes - anachronistic history that looks real enough to deceive, but is surprisingly fake - is one of the few things that gives us comfort during the Technological Revolution.

As a result, revisiting the last turn of the century resonates at the turn of the Millennium. A metafictional interview with the man himself:


The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's trailer for The Call of Cthulhu:


HPLHS trailer for upcoming film The Whisperer in Darkness:


Lion Head Movies' version of "The Statement of Randolph Carter":


New piece from Eldritch Animation, The Statement of Randolph Carter:


And another piece from Eldritch Animation, The Terrible Old Man: