Last year, Christina and I had the pleasure of being in Portland, OR for the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhucon (The Only Festival That Understands), where my short script Flypaper won the screenwriting award.
This year, Brian and Gwen Callahan, the current directors of the fest, spun up a virtual version of the festival so that Lurkers everywhere could enjoy the event from the comforts of their homes. I am so impressed and grateful with all of their hard work. This year has taken so much from all of us, and the HPLFF could have been one more of those things. There is a strong and active weird fiction community online, and I know that many of us enjoy those occasional opportunities to meet one another in meatspace, share meals and drinks and stories, and generally get the chance to interact with each other F2F instead of through (but really in addition to) social media.
Before I looked at the fest schedule, I had visions of finally being able to see the entire film lineup. I have lofty goals every time I go to the HPLFF, but there are so many people, places, and things competing for just a handful of days. Brian and Gwen pack the weekend with programming on screen and off, so there is simply no way to do it all in person. However, I thought things might be different with a virtual fest. I’m actually relieved to say that I was completely wrong. I think even if I strapped myself to a chair in front of my computer for the whole weekend, it still wouldn’t have been possible to see every hour of streaming they put online. I haven’t done the math (“You do the math!”), but my sense was that it was simply a losing battle. So, I needed to make some decisions.
My eventual strategy was to watch as many blocks of short films as I could and then add in feature films as I had time. I’m proud to report that I saw every shorts block offered, except for Cthulhu Girl’s Shorts, along with two feature films. My overall impression is that the level of quality was well above the general level that I have seen before at the festival. LOTS more wheat and not much chaff to speak of. Here are some very quick thoughts on a ton of films.
THE RETURN (2020, Dir. Verot, Canada) – An interesting feature that pays as much attention to character development and arcs as it does to the supernatural and VFX. Worth your time.
THE HILL AND THE HOLE (2020, Dir. Darmon and Ernst, USA) – This feature is based on a short story by Fritz Leiber, and it delivers on its premise of rural strangeness with believable characters, lively dialogue, and occasionally jarring visuals. This one did a fine job of building up real dread.
Short Films I Enjoyed Immensely (the best of the best of the films I enjoyed):
Oak – iPhone-shot quarantine film; disturbing and deeply weird
Secluse – stop-motion wonder from Monsieur Soeur
Exit – fantastic Russian film with serious House of Leaves mojo
Magic Hour – fabulous Tokyo-set film
Smiles – Spanish film that is profoundly funny and disturbing at the same time
Clearwater – excellent VFX carry this well-done set piece
Bad Seed – hardscrabble, agrarian weirdness
We Said Forever – you should dread marriage counseling
Circle of Stone – slickly produced genre-bending tale
PHX – a deft twist on a classic supernatural scenario
The Instrument – a soul-quaking dreadfest ripped right out of a Delta Green op
Exist! – peerless Belgian surrealism
The Appointment – peerless British surrealism
The Black Tome of Alsophocus – awesome Argentinian short that goes from interesting visuals into fantastic graphic novel animation
Every year at the HPLFF, there is a 72-Hour Lovecraft Under the Gun filmmaking competition. Teams enter and are given a prop and a line of dialogue that must both be in the film and then 72 hours to write, shoot, edit, score, and deliver their short film. These are always great fun to see, and believe it or not, it is quite often the animated films that blow me away the most. There is a team that does stop-motion animation (in 3 days!!!) pretty much every year. But this year it was a fantastic musical short using cardboard cut-out puppets that knocked me out and made me smile for hours. If you ever get the chance, check out The Infernal Teahouse.
Those who follow me on Facebook especially will know that I spent the last few weeks pushing the Word Horde StoryBundle horror bundle curated by Molly Tanzer in support of Planned Parenthood. I was very excited to be asked to be involved, and it seems to have been a smashing success. “We” sold hundreds of bundles, the vast majority of which were the $15 bonus bundles that include Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows and fourteen other awesome books from Word Horde. That’s not only a nice royalty check for me, but it’s also a nice donation to a tried and true provider of reproductive health services. Even if you missed out on the StoryBundle, I encourage you to head on over to Word Horde and see what’s on offer.
Thank you, all!