And that’s right, I don’t live in Hollywood, New York or Vancouver. I live in Portland, birthplace of such diverse talent as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Judd Nelson and Liv Tyler.

So what have I got? Well, a little ingenuity, some blessed ignorance and a passion for the writing of an obscure author named Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Lovecraft? Ugh, you mean the guy who “wrote” those schlocky Stuart Gordon films back in the ’80s? The guy whose name above a movie’s title is as ominous a warning of cheesy horror as poor Stephen King’s? Well, yes. It’s not his fault, though—he’s been dead for over six decades, and in that time has been badly handled by Hollywood. But things are changing.

In Portland, Oregon the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival has been fostering and celebrating the potential for good Lovecraft adaptations for six years now (and honestly, even Stuart Gordon’s new Lovecraft film, Dagon, looks pretty faithful). It was with their encouragement and support that I began working on my film.

For just under $2,000 I outfitted myself with equipment and stockpiled the props and costuming I needed for my 1920s period production. With nearly 30 characters and extras shown on camera, this in and of itself took a fair amount of time. Luckily, locations were much easier. One of Portland’s best attributes is its architecture. Portland still has cobblestone streets, gilded storefronts, brick sidewalks and working clock towers. Plus, it’s a safe city, where a modest film crew and some strangely dressed extras can film in a back alley at night with no fear of muggings.

With so small a budget I wasn’t able to physically alter exteriors, so I often had to compose shots based more on what I couldn’t show than what I could. A shot of a wonderful old building won’t work if the windows are reflecting the cars and telephone poles across the street. In one shot I placed an extra in the background as much to block a Chamber of Commerce window decal as to add interest to the shot. Interestingly, it is these very shots that people often point to as being memorable or arresting!

My film tells the story of a single man who witnesses the end of civilization, brought about by a traveling Egyptian showman named Nyarlathotep. The story was actually a dream Lovecraft set to paper, although he always maintained that he had written the first paragraph before he had truly awakened. I embraced the dreamlike quality of the story and allowed it to influence the look of the film. Thus my 1920s became a paranoid and lonely place, where armed soldiers patrol streets lined with banners bearing the faces of those deemed traitors. This approach also led me to copy the look of early horror films, especially Murnau’s Nosferatu, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr.

I opted to film without sound, letting the music and a running narration tell the story. This again had a practical effect, as it allowed me to film downtown on busy streets without worrying about traffic noise. But worse than any car would have been the sound of the tour bus that drove by the setup for the “Egyptian” scene. Early in the film, we see Nyarlathotep rise out of the Egyptian desert before coming to the cities of America.

I scouted out the curious “Desert of Maine” and found that if the camera was placed directly on the ground in one exact spot I could achieve the horizon line shot I so desperately needed to save the sequence from looking like it was shot in a sandpit. The trade-off was listening to the guided tour that passed by us every 15 minutes. Since we were there for nearly three hours, my crew and I became intimately aware of the woes of poor farmer Tuttle, whose lack of foreplanning when it came to irrigation caused his entire farm to be swallowed whole by a deposit of sand lurking just under the topsoil since the last ice age. Or so they tell it.

When a casting change suddenly landed me in front of the camera as well as behind it, I found I was in the dubious position of directing myself throughout much of the production. Luckily I had two things working for me: first, I was shooting on DV so I could stop and review my acting as soon as a shot was completed. But more importantly, my girlfriend Angela was on hand. She kept my over-acting in check and challenged me to find more subtle ways to convey my character’s emotions, which improved both the quality and the maturity of the film.

When filming wrapped, I began the editing process with the help and guidance of Jordan Kratz of Gore Productions in Portland, Maine. The soundtrack was provided by Pennsylvania-based musician Derek Pegritz, who contacted me over the Web to donate his services. The material he sent me was wonderful. His score carries the film over some rough spots and raises the caliber of the project

Since my film’s completion in March of 2001, it has received some wonderful publicity. The Lurker in the Lobby, a book by Andrew Migliore and John Strysik covering the history of Lovecraftian cinema, published an essay I had written during pre-production. Charles Mitchell kindly reviewed my film for both The Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope Magazine and his own book, The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Filmography.

Nyarlathotep played at six festivals over a period of three months. The final two festivals, coming within a week of each other in October of 2001, marked the high point of my festival circuit. The first of these was the Portland Festival of World Cinema, held in Portland, Maine and hosted by MM. The five-day festival had a wonderfully diverse mixture of films and celebrities, with the appearance of Troma Pictures’ Lloyd Kaufman being the highlight for me.

Me: Hi, my name’s Christian Matzke.

Lloyd: (shaking my hand enthusiastically) Nice to meet you, I’m Jewish Kaufman.

My stomach was in knots when I attended a showing of Nyarlathotep. I hadn’t made my film for a broad audience. I began to wonder if perhaps I had made a modern day Incubus, the world’s only all-Esperanto film. I was overcome with the fear that I’d made my film for so exclusive an audience that it would be unintelligible to the people sitting around me. My fears were unfounded. People saw something in it that held merit, and I ended up winning the Katahdin Award for best Maine film. I am still glowing as I write this.

On the heels of my success, I jumped on a plane and flew to the “other” Portland, where the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Oregon screened Nyarlathotep and Lovecraft films from around the globe at the historic Hollywood Theatre. The festival was an inspiration to us all.

I’m now at work on a second Lovecraft adaptation, with plans to shoot an original story and a documentary in the future. But regardless of what the future brings, my first film will always hold a special place for me.

For more information, please visit: www.nyarlathotep.8m.com MM