This is the first film ever made about H. P. Lovecraft — and almost no one has seen it.

Shot in 1989–90, it has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.

The footage captures something that can never be filmed again: people who actually knew Lovecraft. Friends, fellow pulp writers, a Providence neighbour whose husband was the model for one of his characters. They spoke on camera only for us — and every one of them is now gone. This testimony exists nowhere else.

In the years since, Lovecraft has gone from cult figure to cultural phenomenon. His monsters drive video games and role-playing games; his work has been adapted for the screen from Roger Corman to Stuart Gordon, and his shadow falls across True Detective, Lovecraft Country, even South Park. He has entered the Library of America. He has inspired musicians, philosophers, theorists, and artists, and a field of scholarship that keeps on growing. In June 2026, the word "Lovecraftian" entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

Lovecraft wrote of vast, indifferent forces rising to wipe humanity from the earth — a fusion of cosmic horror and science fiction that now reads less like fantasy than forecast. Climate collapse, runaway technology, endless war, plastic in the oceans, the dawning sense that we could be erased within our own lifetimes. Horrors too big to hold in the mind. Lovecraft got there first. His work is both a lens for looking at the unthinkable and a way of imagining past it.

We are truly living in Lovecraftian times — and this film asks why his work grips us as it does.

We have already digitised 90 minutes of footage, and it looks great!

With your help, we would like to digitise the remaining 8 hours of footage, and then complete the film. 

This crowdfunder is your chance to be part of a unique and important film about H. P. Lovecraft, his work and influence.

We offer a variety of rewards if you can contribute - see below.

Lovecraft's first biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, interviewed at his home in Plano, TX. This is from the footage that was recently digitised. This has had minimal restoration work on it so far - and we hope you'll agree that the image looks very good indeed.

More framegrabs of the material we've digitised so far, and samples from the material we've yet to digitise (which this crowdfunder will pay for) can be found on my Substack:

https://paracelsus1966.substack.com/

The Story of the Project

In 1989, the film’s director Seán Martin, fresh out of college, decided to make a film about  legendary horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Little did Seán know at the time, but this would be the first film ever to be made about Lovecraft’s life, work and influence. 

A lifelong Lovecraft fan, Seán was fascinated by Lovecraft’s use of landscape and originally set out to find the locations that Lovecraft had used in his stories. 

What he found instead was a community of devoted fans and scholars who had worked for decades to keep Lovecraft’s work from obscurity. 

Seán and his crew also interviewed people who had actually known Lovecraft, who had lived in Providence at the same time as HPL, or who had also started their careers in the pulp magazines in the 30s. 

Interviews include:

Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), writer. Frank first corresponded with Lovecraft in [1921], and met him in 1921. Frank was one of Lovecraft’s closest friends.

L. Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), writer. Sprague wrote the first (and, at that time, the only) full-length biography of Lovecraft. Sprague started writing for the pulps in 1937, the year of Lovecraft’s death. 

Stuart Gordon (1947-2020), film maker. Stuart directed the classic Lovecraft adaptation, Re-Animator (1985), and went on to make a number of other films based on Lovecraft’s work, including From Beyond (1986) and Dagon (2001).

Grace Mauran (1916-1999), writer, magazine editor, and neighbour in Providence. Mrs Mauran was the widow of William Lippitt Mauran II (1910-1984), who was the model for the character Charles Dexter Ward in Lovecraft’s novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward  (1927, first published 1941). At the time Lovecraft wrote the novel, he was living round the corner from the Maurans. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144931204/grace-mauran

Colin Wilson (1931-2013), writer. Colin Wilson discussed Lovecraft’s work in his book The Strength to Dream (1961), where he was critical of Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s correspondent and disciple, August Derleth challenged Wilson to write fiction in the Lovecraft vein, and Wilson responded with The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), acknowledged Mythos classics. 

Catherine Crook de Camp (1907-2000), writer. Catherine collaborated with L. Sprague de Camp on the first biography of Lovecraft’s friend and fellow Weird Tales author, Robert E. Howard.

David Gale (1936-1991), actor. David memorably played Dr Hill in Re-Animator and its first sequel, Bride of Re-Animator (1990).

Interviews were also shot with: 

Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi, Peter Cannon, Will Murray, Eileen McNamara, and Marc Michaud.

Filmmakers Brian Yuzna and Sam Raimi.

Writer, theatremaker and filmmaker Clive Barker.

Writer Ramsey Campbell.

A work-in-progress cut, running 33 minutes, was screened at the H. P. Lovecraft Centenary Conference in August 1990. Then the money ran out, and the project was reluctantly shelved.

And this is where you come in!

This crowdfunder is your chance to be part of a unique and important film about H. P. Lovecraft, his work and influence.

Stuart Gordon, director of the classic Lovecraft adaptations, Re-Animator and From Beyond, interviewed in his Los Angeles cutting room. (He was working on Daughter of Darkness at the time.) The image on the left is unrestored; the image on the right, restored.

Director’s Statement

I discovered the work of H. P. Lovecraft when I was 17, and his stories have haunted me my whole life. When I discovered, as an undergraduate, that Lovecraft often used real places in his stories (through reading Philip A. Shreffler’s H. P. Lovecraft Companion) I thought this would make a great subject for a documentary.

I thought that it would be easy: just fly to New England, hire a car, and drive around. 

It wasn’t that easy, as it turned out.

I talked the project up with two friends from college, Mike Tims and Michael Baxter, and when we graduated, we decided to go for it - make the film.

We decided no one would be interested in funding the film, so we funded it ourselves with bank loans and credit cards (we do not recommend this method!). 

We spent a month in the U. S., filming everyone we could. The footage shows us going in search of Lovecraft locations, and discussing his life, work and influence, and also the differences between horror on the page and horror on the screen. 

Our original influences were films like Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March and Michael Moore’s Roger and Me. More recently, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside has provided me with additional inspiration for the style of the Lovecraft film. If you want to know what our film will look like, what its style will be like, watch Chris’s film.

My idea was that we would demonstrate that it’s not possible to make a biographical portrait of Lovecraft in a documentary - there would always be gaps, things we can’t ever know, things that are lost. We can only hope to film fragments that illuminate the whole - a bit like the way Lovecraft’s characters glimpse the truth (and then usually go mad!). No one ever reads the Necronomicon in its entirety; only a few pages are ever seen, and that’s enough to convey the sense of the whole thing.

But what we shot, I think, was not so much a fragmented portrait of Lovecraft, but a portrayal of a community of Lovecraftians. This is what the film is really about: what it’s like to be a fan - in this case, a Lovecraft fan - and what it’s like to be haunted by their work. 

Why we are crowdfunding

Seán Martin received a small amount of academic research funding for this project in 2025, enabling Seán and the team to digitize 90 minutes of footage. Encouraged by the quality of the material, it has been decided that the rest of the footage needs to be digitised so that it can be edited. It is historically important, and needs to be preserved.

We are crowdfunding because traditional routes of film finance are unavailable to us (e.g. public funding bodies in the UK advised Seán to try crowdfunding, as they themselves are not able to come on board).

It also seems fitting to approach Lovecraft’s fanbase to raise funds for the film: Lovecraft himself was a part of a community - that of amateur journalism - for most of his life. He unfailingly helped other writers with their work. Now it’s the fanbase’s turn to help us pay tribute to HPL.

What Do We Need Funding For?

The funding raised through this campaign will cover: 

1. Materials acquisition (scanning, hard drives, etc.)
2. Editing
3. Mastering (grading, mixing, DCPs, etc.)
4. Film Festivals, conventions, & marketing

Production status:

Post-production

Timeline

August 2026: Fundraising

13-16 August 2026: NecronomiCon, Providence RI - Seán will be talking about the film at the Armitage Symposium sidebar of the NecronomiCon.

October 2026- April 2027: Editing

2027/2028: Festivals/conventions/streaming

Where it will be seen

We are aiming the film at the festival circuit, with a particular emphasis on horror, fantasy and documentary festivals, as well as conventions.

The film will also be made available on streaming platforms, and also for purchase and download.

Substack/

Seán is currently writing about the film on his Substack here:

https://paracelsus1966.substack.com/ 

Team

Seán Martin (Director) (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1459398/) has made documentaries for Criterion/Janus Films, and the British Film Institute, among others. He has been a Lovecraft fan ever since buying a copy of The Tomb and Other Tales (Panther, 1970), which he bought for 25p in a second-hand shop in Weston-super-Mare in 1984. To this day, he can't walk past a disused church without thinking of 'The Haunter of the Dark.'

Restoration - Mark Rance

CONTACT

If you have any questions about the project, please contact Seán on artist.elias@proton.me.

STATEMENT ON AI

There is no AI in this film, at any stage.