The Festival Out of Time
It has been 25 years since I first conceived & planned the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (HPLFF) to promote cosmic horror and weird tales. Clearly this “epoch” was the result of some inherently random bombardment of synaptic activity in a remote and dormant portion of my brain. Now that we near the end of 2020 (a most turbulent year by any form of measurement), I must admit I feel a mix of melancholy, pride, joy, and some sadness about the festival’s milestone.
This year we lost two major pillars of our community director Stuart Gordon (Re-animator, Dagon, From Beyond, Dreams in the Witch House) & author Joe Pulver (Nightmare’s Disciple, Blood Will Have Its Season, The King in Yellow Tales, Vol. 1). They both were integral to the history of the fest and they will be missed but not forgotten as they have become part of us.
I also learned as the month of October was coming to a close, that author Richard Lupoff had also passed away. Dick and his wife Pat (both participants of past festivals) produced and edited the Hugo Award-winning fanzine Xero (definitely check out The Best of Xero at major booksellers). Dick was also author of the short story “12:01 PM” (adapted into both a short film and feature film) about an executive stuck in a time loop repeating the same hour of the same day, over and over. Fortunately for the rest of us, time marches on.
With time comes change, and that is a good thing. With Black Lives Matter and similar human rights movements, it is great to see and hear new voices and interpretations of the cosmic horror and weird tales tradition at the festival. Shows like HBO’s Lovecraft Country (based on the novel by Matt Ruff) have also provided a new canvas for the fusion of Lovecraftian themes with the true horror of the American Jim Crow era. Hopefully such new interpretations will make us all have a little more empathy for our fellow travelers all sharing the same human predicament.
Finally, I cannot talk about this year’s 25th anniversary without mentioning the elephant in the room, COVID-19. Yet another real life horror that is affecting us all and also a real challenge for a film festival built around in-person live events.
Fortunately our lovely directors Gwen and Brian Callahan did an amazing job of converting the festival to a completely online event. Well almost… Although there was no way we could have the festival as an in-person event in the Hollywood Theatre this year, we still wanted to find a way to do something special that was not strictly online. After brainstorming, the idea of doing an old fashion Drive-in movie was embraced (socially distanced of course) and held in The Dalles Oregon at The Sunshine Mill. This was a much appreciated activity including the 90 minute drive from Portland!
So was this the 25th Anniversary that I had imagined? No, clearly I had not imagined that we would be experiencing a world wide pandemic. But kudos to everyone, especially Brian & Gwen, for pulling together and having yet another memorable festival … hopefully in a very small way showing the indomitable and highly adaptable nature of the human spirit.
