If this isn’t impressive, then I don’t know what is. I never thought (or allowed myself to hope) that someone would end up pursuing a long-form project to make a feature film incorporating / adapting / celebrating Lovecraft’s Dreamland tales. Simply amazing.
Read more about it here.
Watch the crowdfunding campaign video here.
THE DREAMLANDS is a dark fantasy film based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, destined to become one of the most ambitious and lavish independent films ever made.
. . . Roland, a troubled young orphan, is led by a mysterious old man into another world. This is a world that has been created over thousands of years by Earth’s greatest dreamers while they slept. In this world the old man reigns as king and hopes to train and guide Roland to be his successor.Unfortunately Roland cannot overcome the dark shadows that weigh upon him and he is forced to decide whether he will use his abilities to keep building the Dreamlands or to destroy what others have already created.
Screenplay is written by Huan Vu and based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories “Celephaïs”, “The White Ship”, “The Strange High House in the Mist” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” among others. It will build upon the world created by H.P. Lovecraft but also remain faithful to his core concepts of fantastic escapism and cosmic horror. THE DREAMLANDS is a film you are never likely to see produced by the established film industry.
Tangentially (or not), I have been deeply and enduringly inspired by these particular stories among HPL’s corpus. Here is my own two-minute musical meditation on them, titled simply “The Dreamlands” and composed amidst the same multi-year burst of inspiration that resulted in the creation of my Daemonyx album:
The trailer affected me powerfully. It captures so much of the allure that Lovecraft has for me, an allure that has many psyche levels and touches so many different aspects of mind and soul. When the mountains crumble and I beheld the White Ship, and then when the old gent utters that name, “the White Ship,” — I felt a kind of ecstasy and enthrallment that comes only from being an obsessed Lovecraft fanboy and writer. The trailer, in substance, is so removed from the typical kind of Lovecraftian horror film, and yet it is deeply and deliciously Lovecraftian. I sometimes feel like this obsessive passion I have for E’ch-Pi-El and his work is a form of madness–and perhaps it is, it is so unusually intense–but whatever it is, it has given me my writing life, and I celebrate it.
Right on I totally relate
I’m really glad you like the trailer, William! I’m sure the filmmakers would greatly appreciate a shout-out by a Lovecraftian of your renown. They’re more than 90% there through crowd investment, but they need a little help on the crowd funding front.
I applaud the intention but I am very skeptical what they can deliver with a budget of 150K euros, give or take; and after the Del Toro/Mountains fiasco, I no longer dare to hope. The trailer is good, but sometimes the trailer is all that is good about a film.
The dream-lands stories and especially ‘Kadath’ have always moved me and in a bizarre inversion, I have always found combinations of mood/location in the real world that have reminded me of these dreamscapes: a temple at Angkor near sundown, a large metallic octapus sculpture at Xiamen in the rain and so on. I think HPL tapped into the subconscious of all bookish dreamers and all wanderers with these stories.
They made Die Farbe / The Colour Out of Space for practically no budget, and that turned out great.