27/10/2005

H. P. Lovecraft – The Terror Within has a very particular beginning.
It began as an ordinary documentary on the possible ties between H. P. Lovecraft and the Polesine region, inspired by the random discovery of a manuscript attributable to the American horror writer. The documentary (H. P. Lovecraft – The Forgotten Diary, 26 minutes) was, in fact, made. But the complete – and complex – results of the overall research have only been told in this cinematic version.
In the eleven days that the six-person crew spent alone in the Polesine region, searching for traces of the writer’s passage, something much more remarkable than what we were expecting happened. The question was no longer whether the travel diary belonged to Lovecraft and whether this trip to Italy inspired the stories that rendered him famous. The disturbing question became: what is really happening in that part of the country?

H. P. Lovecraft – The Terror Within is the answer, though certainly not definitive, that we attempted to give, after wading through eighty hours of shot material and attempting to reconstruct the story of those eleven delirious days.

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." (H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926)