A friend of mine told me about this a couple of weeks ago.
He told me that he had seen an old interview with HP Lovecraft on YouTube. This friend is smart, but it's not the first time he's been taken in by a hoax.
One thing that immediately raises suspicions is the idea of the WPA sending a film crew out to interview HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft's fame is almost entirely posthumous. His work in Weird Tales and other pulps certainly was distinctive enough to gain him a cult following, many of whom corresponded with him. Still and all, he was an author of uncollected short stories with no literary standing. The government wasn't going to treat him as a great cultural resource whose thoughts had to be preserved.
The comments about his stories perhaps being filmed "in the far future" are a little too cute, especially coming right before the logo of a Lovecraft movie this clip was plugging. It did make me wonder, though, about what Lovecraft would think about an adaptation of his work where a severed head parts the fuzz on Barbara Crampton.
The makers behind this did do a good job of making the film look distressed and recreating the effect of uneven lighting. Points on that end.
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2 comments:
I haven't seen very many films based on his stories but Re-Animator was a very good one.
He was a strange and interesting character but you're right, the WPA would never have taken an interest. The 'reporter's' questions gave the game away in the first 30 seconds.
Yeah, he sounds sort of like what you imagine a thirties reporter talking like, but then you start to think.
I remember "The Haunted Palace" too. It was officially one of Roger Corman's Poe movies, but it had Vincent Price playing Charles Dexter Ward. Good casting.
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