Editorials
[Best of 2018] What Lovecraft Adaptations Can Learn from Cyanide’s “Call of Cthulhu”
There was once a time when knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, much like the insane truths that inspired the Mad Arab’s Necronomicon, was a secretive burden carried by a small legion of nerdy horror literature fans and tabletop gaming enthusiasts. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of Lovecraft adaptations since as far back as the 1970s, but with the exception of Stuart Gordon’s ridiculously entertaining films, none of these really resonated with mainstream audiences.
Of course, since the rise of internet culture and a resurgence of interest in both tabletop role-playing games and Howard’s literary works, figures like Dagon, Cthulhu, and even Shoggoths have become household names. In gaming especially, it’s hard not to run into copious amounts of Lovecraft references when playing anything from Terraria to The Elder Scrolls series. Once an incomprehensively terrifying elder god, Cthulhu has now been immortalized and watered down in the form of plush toys and Funko Pops. Every day we’re treated to new trailers and images of Lovecraft-based/inspired media, and in some ways, it seems that the Mythos has never been so alive.
However, in a world so full of homages to H.P. Lovecraft, it seems ironic that the writer’s unique brand of existential cosmic horror still lies deathly dreaming at the bottom of the proverbial media ocean, with very few instances of media that managed to capture exactly why his work was so terrifying. That’s why I’d like to take a moment to talk about Cyanide Studio’s Call of Cthulhu, and what other Lovecraft adaptations can learn from how the game handled the Mythos. Neil already provided us with an in-depth review, so I’ll only be discussing the story here, but in case you haven’t played the game yet (which I think you definitely should), beware some minor spoilers!
An official adaptation of Chaosium’s homonymous tabletop RPG, Cyanide’s game puts players in the (gum)shoes of private investigator Edward Pierce, a traumatized World-War I veteran compelled to take on a new, mysterious case. Pierce’s investigation leads him to Darkwater Island, off the dreary coast of Massachusetts, where he must piece together the events that led to the fiery death of the infamous Hawkins family. Naturally, Lovecraftian shenanigans ensue, with unnamable creatures and ancient cults slowly pushing the unfortunate investigator towards the limits of what the human mind can handle.
This probably isn’t going to end well.
It’s a familiar setup for anyone who’s even remotely familiar with Lovecraftian tropes, but things change as the game goes on. What really sets it apart isn’t necessarily how it emulates specific story moments or ideas from the Mythos, but how it uses these same ingredients to prepare an all-new horrifying and unpredictable tale that would feel right at home in a 1920s weird fiction magazine.
Sure, there are a few characters and plot threads that don’t quite go anywhere (at least during my playthroughs), but the fascinating mythology behind Darkwater Island’s whaling history and the ominous associations with both real life and other works of fiction like Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick make this story feel like much more than just another adaptation. While dimensional shamblers and tentacle-adorned cultists are well-trodden territory for Lovecraft enthusiasts, prohibition-era conspiracies and the terrifying effects of eldritch whale meat are wholly original story threads that help lead us to a truly apocalyptic finale.
Back in 2005, the now-defunct Headfirst Productions released their own take on the Mythos with Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. While it remains one of my all-time favorite games (despite some frustrating segments and a huge list of technical issues), the developers approached the narrative like many filmmakers do, turning the story into a best-of compilation, stitching together several elements from the mythos into a smorgasbord of Lovecraftian insanity. This can work, as I believe it did in that game (although it mostly appeals to folks who are already familiar with the mythos), but most of the time this method leaves us with movies, comics, and games that adapt only the most superficial elements of Lovecraft’s literary universe. This kind of narrative almost always ends up ignoring the nuances that made silly creations like octopus-faced dragons scary in the first place.
With their take on Call of Cthulhu, Cyanide understood that Lovecraft isn’t just fish-people and tentacles (not that the game lacks these things), choosing to adapt the same creative spirit of the tabletop RPG it’s based on rather any specific story. In Chaosium’s original playing manuals, game masters would be handed the keys to a treasure trove of Lovecraftian nightmares and tasked with using the mythos as a jumping-off point to tell their own stories. These player-based narratives would usually select the best aspects of Lovecraft’s stories and expand them into something new. After all, you could only face the same few cultists and fish-monsters so many times before they became stale. Over time, by diluting the lore with their own original ideas, players would form unique narratives that still managed to stay true to Lovecraft’s original intentions.
Giant fish monsters are cool but not required!
These distinct tales could tap into intrinsically human fears and anxieties about our tiny place in a cold and uncaring universe without so much as mentioning the Great Old Ones, proving that some horrific entities are scarier when they’re felt rather than seen, and that there’s more to the mythos than the famous alien deities and fishy iconography. That’s not to say that direct and faithful adaptations of the Mythos are a bad idea (I mean, we’re all still waiting on a benevolent deity to deliver us Del Toro’s vision of At The Mountains of Madness), but writers would do well to remember that it’s more important to be faithful to the existential spirit behind these stories rather than the superficial details that most Lovecraftian media seems to go nuts over.
Some reviewers have rightly complained about Call of Cthulhu‘s false promises of an intricately tailored player-driven experience, where every minor action could have huge consequences, but no one can deny that this is one of the few adaptations that dares to look beneath the surface of Lovecraft’s tales, finding exactly what makes them tick instead of just lifting the tried-and-true aesthetics that are usually associated with the author. If anything, the illusion of choice here actually makes for a stronger and more disturbing narrative, with the oblivious investigator reluctantly setting the stage for the cultists’ endgame. Additionally, while some players might find the slow and text-heavy investigations tedious, they’re also strangely faithful to Lovecraft’s appreciation of epistolary storytelling, with the player picking up narrative pieces left behind by other characters.
Overall, the game might feel rather clunky, with several instances of stunted gameplay and outdated graphics, but much like its flawed-but-memorable 2005 predecessor, I feel that it’s destined to gain a cult following, remembered as one of the best Lovecraft adaptations to date, if not necessarily a ground-breaking video game. Hopefully, more filmmakers, game designers, and writers, in general, will take note of Cyanide’s novel approach to translating eldritch horror to modern gaming, and we’ll see some more spiritually faithful Lovecraftian media in the future, before the Great Old Ones finally awaken and decide to consume us all.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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