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The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival celebrates Lovecraft, literary horror, and weird tales, and as Legend of the Seven Bloody Torturers fits squarely within the third category, it will be screening as part of the festival on the first weekend of October at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

Obscure during his lifetime, Lovecraft has since become a cult figure, though something of a contentious one.  His often extremely strange and wordy stories originally appeared in Weird Tales and other early twentieth century pulp magazines.  Witchcraft, cannibalism, humans interbreeding with aquatic monsters, and ancient space-travelling tentacled beasts made up his subject matter, and together his stories formed a mythology that has since been used by countless authors, illustrators, and film directors.

Though American, he was apparently something of an anglophile as he used English spellings, as in The Colour Out of Space, and his stories are noted for their total absence of sex (except, perhaps, via metaphor).  His most frequently used plot device involves a man travelling to a remote house or inherited estate where he gradually uncovers horrible, monstrous secrets and ultimately undergoes some form of supernatural transformation.

With a growing reputation has come a growing number of detractors; this Salon.com article dubs him “America’s greatest bad writer” and Jorge Luis Borges called him “an unconscious parodist of Poe.”  Generations of horror and fantasy authors have cited his work as a great influence, however, and his popularity seems to grow annually, as evidenced by an ever-growing pile of merchandise (just about the greatest honour an author can receive in a capitalist society?).

He was a pulp writer, and those approaching his works expecting intricate literature about the human condition will be disappointed; his views on race and gender are pretty embarrassing by today’s standards and his prose is sometimes comical in its forced antiquity.  But despite (or, more likely, because of) certain crude aspects of his work, he managed to hit on something deeper, more visceral, and more fundamental than most of his forgotten contemporaries.  Pervading his stories – and missing from the Lovecraft pastiche There are More Things by Borges, an author whose work is far more intellectually complex – is a deep sense of doom, of the world as we see it being under the shadow of something strange and ancient and horrible. Willingly or accidentally, Lovecraft tapped a vein of fear and discomfort that continues to resonate.

All of Lovecraft’s stories are in the public domain, so if you’d like to read some you can do so online right here.  I recommend The Colour Out of Space, The Rats in the Walls, and The Dunwich Horror.

This year’s edition of the festival will include the acclaimed documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, a new adaptation of The Dunwich Horror starring Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator) and Dean Stockwell, playing a different role than he played in the 1970 original.  Guests will include Necroscope author Brian Lumley, Hellboy writer and illustrator Mike Mignola, and Robert Lloyd Parry, who will perform readings of two tales by M.R. James — another old horror author worth seeking out.

More on the screening here.