H. P. Lovecraft wrote the novella “At the Mountains of Madness” in 1931, describing an expedition to Antarctica by the Miskatonic University. The journey ends in disaster, with the narrator, Dr William Dyer, recounting how the team encountered ancient creatures and a hidden city. It is one of the best known Lovecraftian stories, and one that introduced key parts of the Cthulhu Mythos. There is even a Call of Cthulhu scenario, “Beyond the Mountains of Madness”, that extends the story.
The short film we produced presents a trailer for the story – taking Lovecraft’s original, the layers of meaning and ideas that other authors and roleplayers have added over the years, and retelling it over a few short minutes – complete with shoggoths, elder things and albino penguins. We hope you enjoy watching it!
Background
The trailer has a three-part structure, inspired by the structure of the original story, where Lovecraft tells the “official” version of the expedition, then breaks and tells the reader “what really happens”. That pivot halfway through gives the story much of its tension.
For our purposes, we started off by establishing that the narrator, William Dyer, is stuck on his aircraft in the snow, apparently talking to his girlfriend, Liz “Dan” Danforth, over the radio. We cut to the mid-section of the trailer, a conventional three-act piece of its own, and then return to the aircraft, where a desperate Dyer is still in discussion over the radio.
Via some cut-scenes, and Dan’s efforts to convince Dyer that the recent events are all fictions in his mind, we hopefully build up some uncertainty about the narrator and the reliability of the presentation in the middle of the trailer. Has Dyer seen all the horrors unfold? Did he really see Dan die? If so, who is he actually talking to? Or is Dan, as one commentator suggested, “gaslighting” her boyfriend… and if so, why?
For this to work, there had to be a stronger connection between the two characters than in the original book, where the pair are portrayed as simply colleagues. In the original, Dan is also a male researcher, and shifting their gender enabled some diversity in the cast – never Lovecraft’s strongest suit. We hope viewers enjoy the license we took with the original narrative.
Lovecraft’s original novel makes heavy use of geology and other scientific references. We struggled with this – arguably, it makes the original story quite dense in places. It definitely doesn’t work in a film trailer. You can see some of the legacy of this in the background of the shots with Professor Lake, however, which perhaps makes up for the foreshortening of the scientific observations. In a similar way, we toned down some of the visual references to the slaughter of Lake, his men and – in particular – all their husky dogs. The film only alludes to the dogs being killed, which makes for a more watchable video.
A key part of the original story was the use of aircraft, which feature throughout it. Lovecraft both used the aircraft to reinforce the sense of this being a “high-tech” expedition (and in turn, to increase the sense of human despair on realising the true cosmic order) and as a plot device to avoid the protagonists having to travel overland for weeks at a time. The aircraft in the story were Dorniers, which for our film we replaced with the Handley Page H.P.42 biplane. In part, this was because the Handley Page is a really cool design, and we wanted to have it in the video. But the Dornier was also relatively small, and it was easier to fit some of the plot and narrative in the larger aircraft.
Well, that’s it – hopefully you enjoy it. If you’d like to use any of the images from the film for a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying scenario or event, just drop us a message.