![]() ![]() When Wilmarth finally arrives at the Akeley farm, he sees mysterious insectoid tracks in the mud. ![]() Akeley’s last message to him had a dramatic change in attitude from fearful to confident, but the locals are a largely dour and suspicious bunch, more willing to talk from behind a screen door with a shotgun in hand. He travels to Vermont to check things out, and he finds that things are just a little bit off. His colleague Nathanial Ward ( Matt Lagan) warns him against it, but the hook has been set and he agrees to travel to meet Henry. The Professor claims that, without proof, all the stories are just fiction turns to dust when confronted with this newfound information. When Akeley’s son George appears, bearing photographic evidence of potential monsters, and bearing a wax cast audio recording of mysterious rituals, Wilmarth is overcome with curiosity and agrees to make the trip to see the older Akeley. A man named Henry Akeley ( Barry Lynch) has been requesting that Professor Wilmarth investigate the situation, but Wilmarth dismisses these entreaties and takes to the lecture circuit defending science against fantastical claims of monsters and the like. When confronted with tales of mysterious aliens running loose in rural Vermont, he scoffs at the idea. Matt Foyer plays Albert Wilmarth, a skeptical professor of folklore at Miskatonic University, the hallowed institution of all things Lovecraftian. It’s heady and effective, and when the monsters and the cultists need to be shown, everything makes as much sense as it possibly can. Director Sean Branney here leans into the mood and tone of a noir-era pulp fiction piece, from which the story was derived, and delivers exposition by way of conversation and academic debate. It does a more straight-up interpretation of the author’s tales and eschews the more exploitation leanings of previous filmmakers. Think the Stuart Gordon productions of From Beyond or The Re-Animator, or the nightmarish scenes from At the Mouth of Madness. How then, do you take something so over the top horrifying and put it to film?įor many people, the association with the sub-genre is with over-the-top gore and plenty of tentacles. The blasphemous beings from another world were not meant to be understood, and those who did see these horrors would be driven mad. The trick with doing Lovecraftian cosmic horror is that so much of the author’s work is consumed with the flowery and arcane language that he liked to use. It will also be playing again at the streaming portion of the festival. The Whisperer in the Darkness celebrated its 10th-anniversary release and was also celebrating a blu-ray printing, and it was a featured film once again on the big screen at the Hollywood Theater for the HPLFF. They often bring stage actors to do reenactments of famous Lovecraftian stories, and made a significant splash with their low-budget silent film creation of the famous tale The Call of Cthulhu back in 2005, with the context set in the 1920s, the classic heyday of the Cthulhu Mythos stories. Lovecraft Film Festival for its entire existence. Lovecraft in film and audio radio dramas since 1986 and has been an integral staple of the H.P. Lovecraft Horror Historical Society is an organization that has been faithfully adapting the works of H.P. ![]() Matt Foyer is Professor Wilmarth in The Whisperer in Darkness (2021)
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