Thirteen Revelations from Lovecraft’s Visions:

1. This festival devoted to Howard Phillips Lovecraft–misfit, misanthrope, master of cosmic horror fiction, dead in 1937 at the age of 46–attracted a healthy percentage of females, as well as…

2. not one, but two Betamax video collectors.

3. I rubbed shoulders with William F. Nolan, co-author of Logan’s Run (which became an iconic ’70s film, a not-so-iconic TV show, and which will soon become a new film starring Ryan Gosling).

4. S.T. Joshi, the world’s leading expert on H.P. Lovecraft and author of a two-volume biography of the horror master, fielded questions right at the front desk of the SAM’s auditorium.

5. The Haunted Palace (a 1963 Lovecraft-derived film written by Charles Beaumont and directed by Roger Corman) presented eeriness in bold color schemes, but not nearly so much gore as became standard in later years. The movie came complete with…

6. Vincent Price. Compulsively watchable in almost anything, here he played two men–one young and kind, one impossibly old and impossibly malevolent–switching beween the two with nary a make-up change, only a narrowing of the eyes and a sly smirk.

7. Stuart Gordon’s 1985 movie Re-Animator delivered gore, bondage, and bone saws, showcasing Jeffrey Combs as an amoral scientist convinced that his re-animation potion should work perfectly given only a little more research…a little more this…a little more that…just hold on a minute…(reminiscent of U.S. nuclear power policy).

8. Die Farbe (The Color), an elaborate feature film from Germany, proved that Lovecraft fandom knows no borders.

9. SAM presented an extremely rare director’s-cut work print of  The Ancestor, a film directed by Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter for Alien and Total Recall). This film, drastically re-edited and commercially released as The Resurrected, stems from the same tale which inspired The Haunted Palace, but hews closer to Lovecraft’s original, with slow but steadily-mounting unease culminating in a gaudy but gut-punching duel to the (un?)death.

10. The Whisperer In Darkness, from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society and directed by Sean Branney, won my vote for the best serious-minded (i.e., non-Stuart Gordon) Lovecraft film ever, a tale of human collaborating with monstrous “from beyond” entities to further their own agendas, selling out humanity to assist in humanity’s destruction, only to find their betrayals damn them in the end (reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration).

11. The art show curated by David C. Verba, feauring works from Verba and Bryan K. Ward, sent cosmic horror leaping at the viewer from the page and canvas, plus…

12. steampunk horror, Lovecraft-inspired graphic novels, and last but not least…

13. a deck of Lovecraft playing cards. The man/myth himself, cast as the Joker.