You can listen to TheoFantastique Podcast 2.3 here, and at iTunes.

Related posts:

“Jeffrey Kripal – Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred”

“Christopher Knowles: Gods, Esotericism, and Comics”

“Donald Tyson: The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft”

“Avatar: Psychedelics and Shamanism”

Llewelyn’s website describes the book as follows:

Author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was a man of contradictions. He had a disdain for magic and religion, but ended up creating a whole new mythology in the classic book called the Necronomicon. His stories are fiction, and yet have become much more than that. They strike a deep chord in readers because the concepts are archetypal and tap into human consciousness.

To truly understand his writing you have to learn about Lovecraft himself. Here, occultist, author, and Lovecraft expert Donald Tyson looks fully at the man himself and how his psyche influenced his writing. Tyson reveals his flaws, including racism, anti-Semitism, and admiration of Hitler. He shares how Lovecraft’s dreams terrified him, and that it was through his horrific tales that he was, to a degree, able to come to terms with his night terrors, fears, madness, and idiosyncrasies.

Lovecraft is dead, but Cthulhu lives. This is the first biography that reveals the sources and prepares you for what may come.

But this brief description does not do justice to the unique and controversial approach that Tyson takes in this biography. For this the back cover of the volume must be considered:

Occult scholar Donald Tyson plumbs the depths of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic visions and horrific dream world to examine, warts and all, the strange life of the man who created the Necronomicon and the Cthulu mythos.

Lovecraft expressed disdain for magic and religion, and most of his biographers have dismissed the mystical side of his nature. This book redresses this imbalance. Here you will find the roots of Lovecraft’s extraordinary cosmic vision laid bare. The dream-world sources for his mythic Old Ones are examined, along with the practical esoteric implications of Lovecraft’s unique mythology.

A man in fundamental conflict with himself, Lovecraft lived always on the brink of madness or suicide. Tyson reveals Lovecraft for what he truly was — a dreamer, an astral traveler, and the prophet of a New Age.

Tyson’s controversial thesis is revealed above as most biographers and fans who have looked into Lovecraft’s life consider him an atheist. Tyson recognizes this element of the complex horror writer, but argues that his dream experiences, which had a strong influence on his writing, were mystical and esoteric in nature, and thus there is the possibility that he may be understood as having an esoteric spiritual dimension.

Although the book includes an endorsement statement on the back of the book by S. T. Joshi, a Lovecraft expert and atheist, stating that The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft is a “fusion of sound biographical knowledge and critical insight,” nevertheless, the esoteric aspect of Tyson’s thesis has not been well received by other skeptics. For example, Jason Calavito summarizes his review of the book by saying:

Tyson’s biography is occasionally fascinating, filled with interesting insights into Lovecraft’s dreams and their impact on his fiction; but his belief in the power and prevalence of the supernatural undercuts what might have been a truly unique exploration of Lovecraft’s dream world.

Beyond the disagreements skeptics and esotericists will have with Tyson’s treatment of Lovecraft, another interesting facet is Tyson’s discussion of the spiritual or religious dimensions of the Cthulu mythology wherein individuals have taken Lovecraft’s writings and used them as the basis for creation a new religion. This is the fascinating intersection of religion and popular culture known alternatively as hyper-real or fiction-based spiritualities. In the modern period more traditional religious expressions have given way to new forms of pursuing the sacred, and Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos is part of the mix. Regardless of the disagreements between biographers over how to understand Lovecraft’s own views on religion, Tyson’s mining of his fiction and dream-world can be considered as a fascinating source of the spiritual.

I encourage those fans of Lovecraft who want to probe the life and continuing influence of this writer more deeply to pick up this volume. Llewellyn’s website provides an opportunity to browse inside the volume, and Tyson has an article on the site on Lovecraft that provides some insight into what he develops further in the book. For those interested in securing a copy of The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft, simply click the link to order it through the TheFantastique Store.

Related posts:

“Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Documentary – Director Frank Woodward Interview”

“Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies: Lovecraft and Occultism”

“Adam Possamai: Jediism, Matrixism, and ‘Hyper-Real’ Spiritualities”

“The Otherkin: Fantastic Texts, Pop Culture, and Neo-Religiosity”

Lovecraft’s horror stories have become not just a literary cult like many others, but a tangible cult of the occult. The Cthulhu Mythos of the Old Gods with Unspeakable names are evoked and worshipped, and respected practitioners of the esoteric use the symbolism and mythos as the basis of a magical system. This essay examines some of the individuals, orders and doctrines of the adherents of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Related post:

“Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Documentary – Director Frank Woodward Interview”

TheoFantastique: Matt, thanks for coming back for a further discussion. Another element of your book that intrigued me was your essay “Gods and Monsters, Worms, and Fire: A Horrific Reading of Isaiah.” Your reading will likely alarm any conservative Protestants in particular who come across this interview, but how did you come to think of the biblical book of Isaiah, particularly chapters 24, 34, and 66 in terms of a horror story?

Matt Cardin: It was the result of a collision between my literary and philosophical passions and the work I did in grad school. The beginning of my career as a horror writer overlapped with the time I spent in the religious studies M.A. program at Missouri State in the late 90s and early 2000s. My professors proved quite accommodating as I lobbied to incorporate my passion for philosophical horror into my religious scholarly studies. In 2002 I took a semester-long seminar class devoted entirely to the study of Isaiah. This was four years after I had written “An Abhorrence to All Flesh,” a story that ended up appearing in my first fiction collection, Divinations of the Deep. The book came out the very month that I started taking the Isaiah class. The title “An Abhorrence to All Flesh” came from Isaiah’s final verse. I had latched onto in a moment of inspiration that I really didn’t consciously understand. Then, in the early weeks of that seminar class, with my book just published, I began to realize there was more to say along the same lines, only in nonfiction form. It was truly a daimonic prompting, all intense and passionate. It was like, “Oh, so this is what I was unconsciously noticing in Isaiah a few years ago.” At some point I rediscovered a paper by literary scholar Roger Schlobin that I had read a few years earlier: “Prototypic Horror: The Genre of the Book of Job.” Schlobin is an English prof at Purdue who has focused a lot on the literature of the fantastic, and in that paper he developed a three-part test or schema for determining whether a given text should be classified as horror. Then he applied it to Job and found that the answer was definitely yes. Bells and buzzers went off in my head, and I knew I had my semester’s project in hand. The paper took on a life of its own and became one of those really satisfying projects where everything comes together and synchronicitous events explode all around as exactly the right materials come effortlessly to hand. A couple of years later I revised and expanded it to serve as one of my terminal projects for the M.A.

TheoFantastique: Many Protestant evangelicals draw upon a historical-critical method in approaching the biblical text, and while you acknowledge these you also state that you draw upon an “explicitly reader-oriented” approach. Can you touch on this and how it impacts your reading of Isaiah?

Matt Cardin: What moves me in the Bible — in any religious text — is mythic meanings. I mean this in the high sense, the “myth is truer than literal truth” sense. And one way to access and work with this is through a reader-oriented approach that focuses on how you’re interacting cognitively and emotionally with the text at the moment. Reader-response criticism is an accepted and respected critical methodology, and I combined it with a literary-esque approach to understand how and why the Isaian text was hinting to me that it could be validly read as a cosmic horror story of a quasi-Lovecraftian sort. My goal ended up being to see if I really could offer a reading that remained true to the text and yet elicited a meaning from it that radically inverted just about everything I had ever been told about it, and that explained to me why I was feeling the same fascination toward it that drew me to Lovecraft and cosmic horror.

TheoFantastique: As you develop your thesis you apply Roger Schlobin’s “three, critical elements of horror” to Isaiah. Can you describe these for us?

Matt Cardin: Schlobin says horror stories do three things. First, they “distort cosmology” by reducing the normal world to chaos. In every horror story you’ve ever read or seen, something comes up — monster? killer? super plague? — to upset the established social/moral/personal cosmos, which of course creates the story’s major dramatic tension by making the reader long for that order to be restored.

Second, horror stories invert “signs, symbols, processes, and expectations.” That is, they horrify by creating a situation — the distorted cosmology of the first point — where conventional meanings and attitudes are reversed, and things that would have formerly seemed repugnant and awful now seem desirable. Think of the brutal violence the hapless heroine of a slasher movie inflicts on the killer. (This is my example, not Schlobin’s.) Think of Laurie in Halloween. She’s all sweet and virginal and gentle, and then she has to stab Michael with a knitting needle in the neck and a coat hanger in the eye, and we’re cheering her, for God’s sake. The kind of violence the monster himself represents has been flipped and made desirable. It’s like the monster’s desires are winning by default.

Third, horror stories portray a monster-victim relationship in which the human will, human autonomy, is utterly devastated. And, crucially, the monster is somehow incomprehensible. It’s thoroughly a-cosmic. In other words, its true nature and motivations are so thoroughly at odds with the normal human situation that we simply can’t comprehend it within our available frame of reference. Again, think of Michael Myers as “The Boogeyman,” the embodiment of raw, pulsing, incomprehensible, unkillable murderousness.

The true test of any kind of explanatory system like Schlobin’s is, of course, whether it actually works in action when you apply it to different texts. I’ve tried it idly with dozens of horror stories, novels, and movies. And it works.

TheoFantastique: How does Isaiah exhibit these elements in your view?

Matt Cardin: There’s a specific point-by-point answer and a more general answer that informs the other one with the correct intellectual-emotional undercurrent.

The general answer has to do with the recurring hints all throughout the Hebrew scriptures that Yahweh, the Hebrew god, is infinitely powerful, unpredictable, and somehow deeply terrifying or horrifying. Rudolf Otto did a really marvelous job of conveying this in his classic The Idea of the Holy when he said Yahweh’s wrath is baffling and terrifying, since it’s “like a hidden force of nature, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary.”

The specific answer, the one related directly to Isaiah, goes like this:

First, and corresponding to Schlobin’s first point, Isaiah presents a number of hair-raising apocalyptic scenes, especially in chapters 24-27 and 34, that show Yahweh reducing the world to a rubble that’s coeval with primeval chaos. The idea of such chaos, and the awful connotations associated with it, is a primary theme of all biblical literature. It’s one of the conceptual linchpins for understanding what this whole library of ancient texts is about. In Isaiah, Yahweh is perpetually threatening to destroy the world order because of human behavior that affronts his nature. From a purely literary standpoint, these apocalyptic scenes are located at key portions in the text that mark them as anchors of the book’s entire meaning. And they’re unbelievably bloody and violent in the way that only religious fantasies, especially those written by ancient people working in a premodern worldview, can be. So this establishes the book’s validity as a text that distorts normal cosmology.

Second, and corresponding to Schlobin’s third point (I decided to discuss them out of order in my paper, since it suited my purpose), Isaiah is positively drenched in a sense of Yahweh’s transcendent, terrifying otherness, in the manner of Otto’s words that I quoted a minute ago. The book is one of the key texts in the Hebrew canon that emphasizes Yahweh’s absolute holiness, which — significantly — isn’t so much a moral thing as a categorical thing. “Holiness” refers to the absolute otherness of Yahweh’s nature from the human point of view, not to any kind of pristine moral purity (although some would debate that claim). Combine this with the first point, and the picture starts to become clear: “What’s that, you say? An all-powerful and wholly other transcendent supernatural being that threatens to annihilate the cosmic order and reduce everything to primordial chaos? I sense the shade of Lovecraft.”

The third point of my argument, which addresses Schlobin’s second point about the way horror stories invert customary signs and meanings, focuses intensely on chapter 66, verse 24, which is in fact the final verse of the book: “And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” Yes, it’s the same verse that provided the title for my lead story in Divinations of the Deep. It’s spoken by Yahweh in an imagined scene after he has destroyed the world and created a new and blissful situation for those humans who remained true to him. What he’s describing is the perpetual desecration of the corpses of those who opposed him. This is presented as one of the primary components of the new post-apocalyptic world order: the corpses of Yahweh’s enemies suffer eternal putrefaction and violation, the eternal gnawing of worms and scorching of fire. And those who “shall go out and look at” these dead bodies are those whom Yahweh has saved. It’s almost as if it’s a holy duty for Yahweh’s protected ones to view this punishment. If you do the historical-critical thing and trace the significance of every piece of imagery in the passage, you find that it’s all very carefully constructed to invoke the precise things that would have aroused the greatest horror among ancient Hebrew readers. And its location as the closing verse of the text virtually shouts that this is the book’s final meaning, the point of closure toward which it has been striving. Ancient readers noticed this; there used to be an instruction in Jewish circles that whenever the final part of Isaiah was read aloud in the synagogue, the reading of 66:24 was to be followed by a repetition of 66:23 — a kinder, gentler verse — in order to avoid the shock of ending the reading with that scene of Yahweh’s awful wrath.

So I assume the full outline of my argument is pretty clear from all of this. Isaiah passes Schlobin’s three tests with flying colors. It can be validly read as a horror story. Of course, I pack the paper itself with much more detail that accounts for other parts of the text and shows how this reading is in fact internally consistent with the book’s overall content. It’s been said that the best interpretation is one that accounts for the most evidence. I tried and, I think, succeeded for the most part in accounting for Isaiah’s overall thrust in my horrific reading of it.

TheoFantastique: One of the more interesting and controversial facets of your argument for conservative Christians is the idea of the divine functioning as a monster. You state that “the biblical God is often portrayed as a source of horror as much as he is a source of comfort and blessing.” Can you say more about this idea, particularly in connection with Otto’s idea of “religious awe in ‘daemonic dread’”?

Matt Cardin: Otto’s The Idea of the Holy has become a touchstone text for a great many theoretical writers about horror and gothic fiction, and rightly so, I think. I’m sure many of your readers already know about his famous argument that the deep historical and psychological origin of the human religious impulse doesn’t lie in intimations and emotions of supernatural goodness and light but in a sense of “daemonic dread,” of uncanny fear and shuddering at the sense of an awesome presence. Otto took great pains to demonstrate that this emotion or intuition is entirely sui generis – unlike anything else, a special case of its own, irreducible to and unexplainable by any other experience – and he argued that it was the refinement, elaboration, and sublimation of this experience that gave rise to all of the higher religions. He also pointed out the obvious implications for horror fiction, namely, that the same emotion drives the genre.

To me, everything he says about the matter has the status of self-evident truth, because it corresponds to fundamental tropes in my own psyche. (And I am aware of the danger of falling into a kind of interpretive solipsism here.) It also helps to account for a huge amount of Christian biblical and theological material, as well as things from across the global religious spectrum, that are otherwise difficult or impossible to account for. Religion has always been associated with the same part of human experience that shows up in visions and — hint, hint — nightmares. The heads/tails nature of the relationship between the supernatural-as-blissful and the supernatural-as-horrific has always been obvious to everybody. The same ought to go for the flipside relationship between the idea of the biblical God in his infinitude, absoluteness, and transcendence as, on the one hand, infinitely reassuring, and, on the other hand, infinitely horrifying.

As for the reservations that conservative Christians may have about this issue, well, they’re welcome to them. It just makes the ideological spectrum all the more colorful. Of course, such people are engaged in an unacknowledged morass of hypocrisy and/or self-delusion, since their tradition really and truly does contain those Otto-esque intimations of daemonic-divine dread and monstrousness, and denying it won’t make it go away. But now I can feel myself wanting to start deploying Schlobin again by analyzing this conservative theological position in terms of Point Two, the inversion of signs and meanings, since I think many conservative Christians are prey to sentiments that resonate with the global über-violence of apocalyptic fantasies along the lines of the Left Behind craze, and their longing for such events to come to pass represents quite a moral inversion. So I’ll stop myself before I get started.

TheoFantastique: Your conclusion, then, is that Isaiah, at least in certain places, may be properly understood as horror literature? This is ironic in that Protestant evangelicals often have a knee-jerk reaction against certain forms of speculative fiction, particularly horror.

Matt Cardin: My conclusion is that Isaiah can be understood as a cosmic horror story, a la Lovecraft etc., in its entirety. All that’s required is a shifting of one’s surface focus and underlying assumptions. It’s not that some parts are horrific and others aren’t, but that the whole thing can be read and — importantly — emotionally experienced that way, while remaining entirely true to its concrete content. What’s at issue, what’s foregrounded, is the reader’s fundamental interpretive assumptions and — which I think may be even more important — emotional cast.

Note that one corollary of Otto’s insight is that religious/spiritual transcendence can be approached through daemonic dread. I think that’s part of my subterranean purpose here. That, and just laboring to articulate a textual/theological insight that was trying to claw its way out of me.

TheoFantastique: Matt, thanks again for sharing your thoughts. I wish you well with the book.

The special Halloween double issue of Rue Morgue magazine included a number of interesting features, as usual, but one which caught my eye was a description of a new documentary on titled Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Wyrdstuff Productions, 2008). This fim was directed and produced by Frank Woodward, and after getting in touch he graciously and enthusiastically talked about this production.

TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks for making this great documentary, and for allowing me to screen it for this interview. How did you come to develop a personal fascination with Lovecraft and how did it lead to this documentary coming about?
 
Frank Woodward:  I first became aware of Lovecraft like most people, I expect.  It was the Call of Cthulhu role playing game, mainly the monsters within.  I’ve always been a monster fan and who could resist the tentacled beasties in CoC.

That led to my reading some of the major stories… Call of Cthulhu, Pickman’s Model, Rats In The Walls.  I have to admit, though, that my Lovecraftian knowledge was basic. 

The desire to make a documentary was a more recent one.  I occasionally produce DVD extras for Anchor Bay.  There was discussion of doing a short bio of Lovecraft for the Re-Animator special edition.  It didn’t happen for various reasons.  By the time that decision was made, however, I had done quite a bit of research on the man.  In some way I experienced what many of the people who’ve seen the documentary experienced.  I was reminded how much I enjoyed Lovecraft’s work and wanted to throw myself headlong into learning more. 

Making this documentary was almost like a college course. I think that’s how all documentaries should be made.  They should be a journey of discovery.  The desire to learn all you can is why you bother making the film in the first place.

The other thing that really brought Lovecraft about was the response I received from Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Peter Straub.  They were the first people we approached and all three were generous and passionate enough to sit down and talk about Lovecraft for an hour.  Peter Straub even allowed us to interview him in his home.

But, by the time they said ‘yes’, the plans to make a DVD featurette had fizzled.  So here I was with Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Straub all willing to be in a piece about Lovecraft, but there was no more piece.  That’s when my producing partners Jim Myers and William Janczewski said, “Let’s just do it ourselves.”  So Wyrd was formed and Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown became our first documentary.

TheoFantastique: You have assembled an interesting group of commentators that provide their perspectives on Lovecraft. How did you assemble this group, and specifically, how did Guillermo Del Toro and John Carpenter come to be involved with this project?
 

Frank Woodward: I think each and every person we interviewed agreed to be a part of the film because they love Lovecraft.  It helped that they were also fans because, like many true genre fans, we delve into our favorite subjects and discuss them with others.

For the most part, the only thing we had to do was ask.  Obviously we had gained some respectability once Gaiman, Straub and others came aboard.

In the case of Guillermo, I first approached him at Comic Con in San Diego.  He had just told a packed hall about his plans for At The Mountains Of Madness (I believe he told us that we would cry and masturbate in a corner once we saw the designs he had in mind for the Elder Scientists – he’s right, by the way).  Guillermo said ‘yes’ there and then, but it took a lot of phone calls to actually schedule the interview.  This was right before Pan’s Labyrinth was nominated for a few Oscars so he was understandably busy.  Thanks to an assist from Andrew Migliore, the director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and an associate producer on the film, we finally arranged a date.

John Carpenter was also made possible with Andrew’s help.  Andrew wanted to honor Carpenter with a Howie Award at the festival.  Carpenter couldn’t physically make it so Andrew arranged with me to help videotape an acceptance speech.  We timed our request to interview Carpenter for the documentary with this taping.  Carpenter was more than willing to answer a few questions.

This passion for all things Lovecraft was also responsible for convincing artists like John Coulthart, Paul Carrick, Tom Sullivan, Paul Komoda and others you’ll see in the film to loan us their work.  It also put me in touch with Mars, the film’s composer.  Mars put 30-plus years of being a dedicated cultist into the film’s score and I think you can tell.

TheoFantastique: You have screened this film at various festivals and conventions to the delight of audiences. Can you share some of these locations, how it has been received by viewers, and the awards you’ve won as a result?
 

Frank Woodward:  We’ve screened Lovecraft in Los Angeles (Shriekfest), San Diego (Comic Con), Portland (H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival), Erie, PA (The Eerie Horror Film Festival), Fargo (The Fargo Fantastic Film Festival), Sacramento (The Land Beyond), Montreal (Cinema du Parc) and Buenos Aires (Rojo Sangre).

We won Best Documentary at Comic Con.  That was all kinds of cool. Montreal’s Cinema du Parc gave us a week-long theatrical run in collaboration with the Fantasia Film Festival.  We’ve also received nice write ups in Rue Morgue, Dread Central, Horror.com and the Montreal press.

Audience reaction has been very positive.  Obviously fans of Lovecraft have the strongest reactions.  I’ve had a few people thank me for making the film.  One guy was so thrilled that he had something to show his wife and say, “See?  This is why he’s so important.”  I’ve also been receiving wonderful emails from people in Montreal.  Lovecraft fans are legion.

Even people who don’t appreciate Lovecraft’s writing have been complimentary.  I mean, you have to admit that the man, for all his eccentricities, is a captivating subject.
 
TheoFantastique: As the film concludes it notes how Lovecraft died in relative obscurity as a writer, and yet it also touches on the incredible influence of his writings on the horror genre as well as various parts of pop culture. Can you touch on some of these?
 
Frank Woodward:  The obvious aspects of pop culture that bear the mark of Lovecraft are the ones discussed in the film.  Alien and The Thing have definite ties to At The Mountains Of Madness.  Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean is clearly Cthulhu spawn.  Hellboy takes place in a Lovecraftian universe.  You also have the entire Chaosium line of RPGs and board games.

You can also see a fondness for tentacles on line.  Sites like Boing-Boing.net, Ectoplasmosis and i09 frequently have posts about Cthulhu inspired art, films and plush toys.

There’s also loose references to be found in Batman (Arkham Asylum), The Evil Dead movies (Necronomicon), Peter Jackson’s Fellowship Of The Ring (if the Watcher in the Lake outside the gates of Moria isn’t an Old One, I don’t know what is) and lost world stories such as King Kong.  Caitlin Kiernan pointed out the Kong connection to me.  I believe we posted a YouTube video about it.  They may not be as apparent as the ones in Hellboy, but the similarities do make you wonder.
 
TheoFantastique: Why do you think a man who was haunted by his own personal demons of various types has become one of the most influential horror writers of our time?
 
Frank Woodward: Lovecraft didn’t write stories about standard monsters like vampires and werewolves.  He invented his own universe with creatures unlike anything writers were conjuring at the time.  To paraphrase Guillermo, I think anytime someone creates a rich mythology like the Cthulhu mythos, it’s hard not to take notice.

The cosmic chaos at the heart of Lovecraft’s work is also something that resonates with people.  It’s the whole idea that mankind, for all of his accomplishments, is insignificant in the face of what may lie beyond.  If you go through any sort of existential period in your life, the thoughts Lovecraft expresses in his stories may suddenly make sense to you.

There’s also the unexplained.  For me (and many other horror aficionados), it’s the things we can’t describe that frighten us the most.  The things we don’t understand.  I mean, once you explain a monster or shadow, it doesn’t seem as scary. 

Think of the first people to experience a tiger.  Before its mystery was explained, a tiger was a striped demon with a thirst for human blood striking from the shadows of the jungle.  Before… it was a supernatural monster.  After… it was another big cat. It became something you could deal with… more or less.

The best horror doesn’t explain itself.  This is a lesson Lovecraft taught us.
 
TheoFantastique: What does the future hold for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown in terms of future film festivals and wider distribution? Any chance it might get picked up by a national distributor or perhaps be shown on places like Bio, Chiller, or the Sci Fi channels?
 
Frank Woodward: I think we’re done with the festival circuit (though we did submit to Sundance and Slamdance, just in case).  Now our focus is on distribution.  Obviously we would love to have the film handled by a major distributor.  We have screeners at many such places. 

With regards to cable, we’re talking to the usual suspects.  Believe it or not, Sci-Fi Channel has already passed.  They passed on Doctor Who initially so we’re in good company.   Maybe they’ll reconsider.

Documentaries in general are a tough sell. One way or another, though, Lovecraft will be available to people soon. You can check our blog at www.wyrdstuff.com for updates on our crusade. 

TheoFantastique: Any plans for the next documentary or project through Wyrd Productions?
 
Frank Woodward:  Wyrd is currently editing a piece called The Splat Pack.  It was a term coined by British film critic Alan Jones to describe the new wave of horror filmmakers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Darren Lynn Bousman.  Whether you respond to their brand of horror or not, these filmmakers were responsible for reviving R rated horror and showing Hollywood that such films could be well crafted as well as profitable.  The Splat Pack will most likely be our first foray into internet distribution.

We’re also in production on a non-genre themed documentary.  Something about a way of life in America that has come and gone.  That’s all I can say at the moment.

I’d love to do another piece on the weird tales genre.  Possibly something on Weird Tales magazine itself.  First things first, though.  Our primary goal is to get Lovecraft out in the world.
 
TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks again for this great work. I hope this film is disseminated as widely as possible and that more people become aware of the significance of Lovecraft to the fantastic in popular culture.