Asian Horror in Cthulhu, the Film

Because I hung around with the wrong crowd high school, and because I used to date the editor-in-chief of the late lamented H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, I know a little something about the Cthulhuian Mythos. So trust me when I say that Lovecraft’s cosmic overlord is not so much your usual slimy tentacled monster, but rather a permeating apprehension of erosion, mutation, alienation, annihilation, violation, madness and existential dread. This is best to keep in mind when you add Dan Gildark and Grant Cogwell’s 2007 award-winning film Cthulhu—loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth)—to your Netflix queue. Forget about popping some popcorn and settling back for a cheap fright. This is a personal vision film, one that requires some close watching. Fortunately it’s also visually striking, and directed with the seductive pace of Korean horror films.

The story is simple: Urban man returns to his beautiful-yet-creepy island childhood home (he’s gay, which only adds to the general sense of alienation) and discovers that he is, quite literally, scion to a cult that worships the arcane shadow over mankind. No, not Satan. Satan is a bag boy compared to this dark lord. We’re talking about a presence so old, so primal that, to it, we puny humans are the interlopers, the un-natural ones. Revelations ensue. The pull of blood is overwhelming for the protagonist. There are one or two scenes that will shock you, even if you don’t tend toward faintheartedness like me.

Now, Lovecraft was a rabid xenophobe, whose sense of exclusion and “otherness” was evident in the nakedly racist sentiments of his writing. When I was in my twenties and into Asian-American consciousness raising, I had a big problem with that. (In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the protagonist is damned in part because his grandmother was a South Sea islander.) Then when I started to write myself, I saw that his racism was a necessary component of the engine that drove him to create his stories. And what would you rather be confronted with, anyway—apprehension of the dark, or the dark itself? A piece of great fiction in Weird Tales, or Dachau?

That the color tones in Cthulhu are so crispy cool—Aryan, you might say—only adds to the Lovecraftian atmosphere. Purist fans have squawked that the movie wasn’t shot in the master’s proper setting, New England, where ancient secrets of our country still abide, but in the upper Northwest. But there turns out to be no difference after all. A couple of weeks after I rented and watched Cthulhu, an old hippie friend dropped by from her travels, and the conversation came around to the movie because I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

When I described the lengths of secret tunnels that figure so heavily in the film, she recognized them, told me they were real, that they were up in Oregon. During the early 20th century the Chinese cannery laborers, who were generally despised and at times abused by the white population, had built them. You don’t want to know what went on in those tunnels, she told me.

She’s right. I don’t want to know.