You're hell-bent on trying to scare me off this thing, aren't you?

I was woken this morning by a phone call from Istanbul. I can say with perfect accuracy that's never happened to me before.

(The connection was terrible, so B. hung up and sent me a text message instead to explain that he'd just been to the Aya Sofya and thought of me and I was flattered and went back to sleep, but it was still one of the more randomly awesome ways I've had a day begin.)

I am slightly disappointed that on either side of this interruption, I dreamed nothing weirder than agreeing to marry a friend for political reasons and trying to get directions out of a city made almost entirely of rusted girders and new construction with something about bartering oranges for a place to sleep, because I spent the previous evening at the Brattle Theatre, watching the first night of their H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Tribute—the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) was having its Boston premiere, with The Call of Cthulhu (2005) screening first as a short. At the very least, I should have woken up screaming.

( Even now, I could not repeat the terrible things I heard whispered that evening in the darkened room among the lonely hills. )

So it seems I have a new film collective to keep an eye on, and another contemporary character actor to watch out for, and I would recommend both of these movies to anyone with an interest in Lovecraft adaptations that actually have something to do with Lovecraft. This qualifier brought to you by going back to the Brattle tonight to see The Dunwich Horror (1970), which was very nearly as gonzo as the previous night's presenter had made it sound. The 35mm print was sufficiently decayed to have turned a sort of broad-spectrum pink and we were reliably informed it smelled like a bag of chips and vinegar. There were not as many tentacles as I had been hoping, but there was honest-to-God Vaseline on the lens in the dream sequence with the orgy, or whatever those weirdly painted, mostly naked cultists were doing in the field. I was left with the feeling that I may be haunted for life by Dean Stockwell's mustache. (That's another of those sentences you don't expect to type.) Every now and then I felt a shudder at my shoulder and looked over wondering if I would see a lanky, reclusive old New Englander with an expression between awe and the death of God, but it was just derspatchel.