Unspeakable Horror!

I recently viewed Dan Gildark's film Cthulhu, which features the Lovecraft mythos with queer characters and queer themes.  On numerous levels, the film exemplifies the subgenre of Queer Horror.

I sampled a bunch of online reviews, and most of those reviews include unforgiving (and sometimes savage) criticisms of weaknesses and problems with the film.  Merciless reviews are very common for works in the horror genre, and also common for works with queer themes. 

So I'm going to discuss a bunch of stuff that is really awesome about Gildark's Cthulhu.

First of all, Tori Spelling is fantastic.  She does a great job with a layered portrayal of a femme fatale seductress who simultaneously embodies societal pressures to be straight (also referred to as "compulsory heterosexuality").  This becomes sinister and fantastical when she drugs the protagonist Russ and actually steals his seed.

Russ is positioned as the prototypical gay adult with a small-town, conservative religious background.  In this film, that background is transmogrified into a horrific Cthulhu cult that is quite aggressive about stealing Russ back from his gay lifestyle; considering how many gay kids are treated by their churches, the aggression by this nightmarish cult is very fitting.  The fantastical cult represents how queer horror works: taking the anxiety, rejection, and pain of conflicting forces of religion and sexual orientation and translating the experience into a nightmarish representation in the context of a horror story.  In this case, the film inhabits the Lovecraft mythos to accomplish this.

I really appreciated the modernist sensibility of the film, which used flashbacks, dreams, and nightmarish sequences that unsettles a viewing audience that is more accustomed to linear narrative. 

The film really inspires me to learn more about the Lovecraft mythos.  It is my understanding that the film draws on a variety of tales, and I think the film provides an excellent entrance into a larger study of Lovecraft's fiction.  For someone who is totally uninitiated into Lovecraft, I'm sure the film would be confusing, especially due to the sophisticated narrative structure.  It reminded me of the way that Chris Carter constructed his alien conspiracy mythology in the X-Files (also in the Pacific Northest).  I'm actually excited to read more Lovecraft, and then revisit the film in an attempt to decode some of the disturbing images from the film like the creatures in the labyrinth underground and the image of the people emerging from the sea. 

I also wanted to say that I thought the individual performances were excellent (in a few scenes, the group dynamic didn't work).  The ending was incredibly disturbing and puzzling in a way that I appreciated.  One of the final scenes with the cult was really disturbing, reminiscent of the Satanists at the end of Rosemary's Baby.  I also appreciated the unconventional love story that involved a pastiche of melancholy flashbacks and tender scenes.  The romance was also fraught with conflict, which worked well with Russ's conflicted family life. 

My favorite part was Russ's surreal underground odyssey, which reminded me of the strong paranoid impulses of postmodernism.  This scene was given depth by the background of the Lovecraft mythos. 

Overall, Cthulhu is a very exciting event on the landscape of queer horror, especially because it interfaces with the esoteric weirdness of Lovecraft.  I really hope we see a lot more queer horror that attempts this level of complexity and narrative sophistication.