Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998)

An uncle he never really knew about bequeaths a mysterious package to young artist Randolph Carter (Art Kitching). Inside that package is a curious book written in a language Carter does neither know nor understand. Nonetheless, in a move that discloses a horrifying lack of genre knowledge, he reads aloud from it.

Afterwards, Carter falls into a series of waking dreams and nightmares that seem connected to the works of the late, great H.P. Lovecraft (Christopher Heyerdahl, making a great Lovecraft for what the film sets out to do), who has been regaling the audience with excerpts from letters and essays even before we met our protagonist. Carter will become somewhat obsessed with Lovecraft’s body of work and uncover some strange connections between it and his uncle. What he finds out will probably not save him from inevitable doom, but at least he gets to go on a walk with Lovecraft in his dreams, which is rather a lot more than most of us get.

Out of Mind is one of the more peculiar documents of Yogsothery I’ve encountered on the screen. This is a French Canadian TV production, directed by Raymond St-Jean, and includes a surprising amount of sometimes disparate material: there are the scenes of Lovecraft talking stiffly – in a wonderfully proper and awkward 30s to camera style – at the audience that seem to come from a more whimsical kind of documentary, dream versions of some of HPL’s tales, or variations thereof, until you realize that Carter’s tale itself is actually a variation on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” where much of the Providence focus and the historical tales within the tale have been replaced by what the production could actually afford.

The film isn’t always successful with this approach – the bit that is meant to remind us of “Herbert West, Reanimator” for example, must by the rules of TV be pretty tepid and indeed is – and there can be a certain randomness to the way Lovecraft’s material pops up or not. When it works, though, Out of Mind is genuinely successful at evoking not the details of Lovecraft’s plots or mythology (which was never precise when Lovecraft used it anyway, because that’s not what it’s for), but the feeling of reading his work at the right moment, under the right circumstances. There’s an undercurrent of a dream-like and feverish intensity you lose a bit once you’ve gone through the body of work in so many different forms and so many times as I have by now, and I’m genuinely thankful to the film at hand for reminding me of it. Particularly since St-Jean clearly knows his Lovecraft well enough to have drawn out some of the writer’s main themes. Particularly the mix of love for the past and inheritance and the abject fear of what one might learn about it and oneself when one looks a little too closely, that to me always felt much more important to Lovecraft’s work than the racism ever was (though of course not always separated from it).

One might criticize here that the film focusses on the most flowery elements of early and mid-period Lovecraft, yet this feels like the proper choice to me for something that has to work on a TV budget, with TV opportunities for locations, and a TV effects budget. I genuinely don’t believe you could do justice to Lovecraft’s more clinical moments under these circumstances, and I’m glad St-Jean did what he could actually pull off.