Trailer for Shadow over Innsmouth movie
by tdaxp ~ October 8th, 2008
I’ve always thought that H.P. Lovecraft’s classic, “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” is best when understood from the perspective of the high-functioning members of the Marsh family. As a survival horror, Innsmouth is not too original. As a tragedy of a family in decline, it’s first rate.
Now comes “Cthulhu,” a modern retelling of Shadow, from the perspective of the Marsh family, set in the Pacific Northwest. Fascinatingly, the homosexual subpolot appears not only to be well interwoven, but adds another layer of symbolism to the Innsmouth cycle.
“Family is family. We’ll take you back.”
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2 008/06/19/the-foreign-polic...
October 9th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Too bad they made the homosexual element explicit instead of a subtext. That will make the movie “about being gay”, which will reduce the story to a very narrow range, where the story is really “about being different” or “imagining yourself to be different” in any number of ways instead of just sexual proclivity, as well as being about a lot of other stuff. It looks like it will also destroy the fine line between metaphor and actual depiction that Lovecraft manages to walk in the story. Plus,, it is unfortunate that they are calling it Cthulhu, which will make it seem as if Lovecraft’s entire corpus of work is actually “about being gay”, which is a theme which is overworked at this point.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:11 am
They already did a pretty good version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” It was called “Dagon” and was directed by Stuart Gordon.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Lexington,
Adding sex and romance to a Lovecraft story is tricky in the best of circumstances, so it’s definitely a risky decision here.
I’m reassured by S.T. Joshi’s take “Fabulous – the essence of Lovecraft…
maybe the best Lovecraft adaptation I have seen to date” [1] — so there is hope. By the way, have you listened to Joshi’s speech at SUNY Cortland [2]? It starts off slow, but is informative. (I originally found it on the iTunes store.)
BeckoningChasm,
Thanks for the review!
[1] http://www.myspace.com/cthulhuthemovie
[2] http://danharms.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/s-t-joshi-podcast/