TERROR FROM THE ABYSS

Official Selection to the Once a Week Online Film Festival 2012
http://onceaweekfilmfest.weebly.com/

TERROR FROM THE ABYSS is an independent production based on AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS by H. P. LOVECRAFT. Two scientists travel to Antarctica to discover an ancient civilazation from another world.

To bring life to Lovecraft's strange visions, the film uses mixed techniques like green screen compositing, cut-outs, and clay animation.
The production took place in Sweden during 2009-2010.

The director DANIEL LENNEER and composer CHRISTOPHER JOHANSSON have collaborated on several short films, animations and related projects since 2004. One of them is ONE MAN ARMY LEGENDS from 2007 that won the Audience award at Blekinge Film festival.

RICHARD SVENSSON ("The Lone Animator") created the blasphemous clay animations and STEFAN HARRYSSON tranforms the film into a 1920's silent film style.
More Daniel Lenneer:
http://www.lenneer.se
More Millroad Film:
http://millroad.lenneer.se

At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length. It was originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 -- March 15, 1937), often credited as H.P. Lovecraft, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.

Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror", the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind. As such, his stories express a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs. Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his lifetime, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft—as with Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century—has exerted "an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction". Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." King has even made it clear in his semi-autobiographical non-fiction book Danse Macabre that Lovecraft was responsible for King's own fascination with horror and the macabre, and was the single largest figure to influence his fiction writing. His stories have also been adapted into theater, film, and have inspired an award-winning role-playing game.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• hp lovecraft
• horror story
• iceberg
• caverns
• scary
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Shadow Out of Time
• horror fiction
• writing
• novelist
• adaptation
• short film
• black and white
• old film look
• grainy
• reading
• books
• geologist
• himalayas
• elder things
• exploration
• professor
• filmmaker
• cinema
• celluloid
• the man with the movie camera

[lenneer]

Thank you, Lovecraftlovers. We are working on our next Lovecraft adaption right now: Millroad Film, The Lone Animator and CJFilm are working on "The shadow out of time"! Follow my channel here, our homepage or Millroad Film on Facebook to be up to date. See you in the Dreamlands!

[cscdigitalgraphics]

good work. great concept and love the style.

[sachaput]

I loved it! Nice tribute to HPL and the silent films.

[CommanderFey]

fun animations :)

[aeionx1]

i thought the shaddows added to the artistic quality of the film...

[aeionx1]

GOOD STUFF... now im going to antarctica myself to verfy all accounts...

[axeofgod72]

oh wow. thank you for this... Lovecraft must be recreated within his own era... you cannot modernise Primal Horror... good work. keep the faith... ia cthulhu fhtagn.

[lenneer]

Thanks. Yes. We had some problems with shadows on the backdrop... I know... Independent filmmaking is a constant learning process. There's a two-part Making of-feature here on youtube, search for "Cold visions, dark deeds". It's some in english, some in swedish. Mostly in swedish, I'm afraid. I must use my own language when I talk about horrors of this scale...

[binarynightmare]

It felt serious enough up to the point with the Elder Thing's 'Home Sweet Home' sign and the Cthulhu Attack Force spaceship (although I laughed at that).

All in all, this was a pretty good little adaptation, nice 1930's era feel (at least to me) and I quite liked the music, but your greenscreen was very iffy.

The Shoggoth looked great, though!

[lenneer]

I'm a cartoonist and I usally draw sweet and silly. It was my way or no way, in that case. In fact this film started as a spoof or parody and turned more into real adaptation along the process.

I've never heard of Guy Maddin. I'm a fan of many things related to movies, from the early cinema itself, to the monster movies of the 50s and the horror and sci-fi of the 70s and 80s.