HAMILTON BEWARE - CTHULHU IS COMING!
David Neil Lee launches The Great Outer Dark
VOC Silent Film Harmonic performs live music soundtrack to The Call of Cthulhu
BEFORE HE WROTE the Hamilton Literary Award-winning “Midnight Games” trilogy, local author David Neil Lee was known for writing about music. Stopping Time, his collaboration with Canadian jazz pianist Paul Bley, has been published in both English and Italian; after the New York City launch of The Battle of the Five Spot, the book based on his McMaster University thesis, Lee was commissioned to write the text for a plaque that now marks the site of the legendary Greenwich Village jazz club, the Five Spot Café.
Lee’s “Midnight Games” novels, on the other hand, feature rich, scary sci-fi cosmic horror, as a teenage protagonist finds that the horrific extraterrestrials of novelist H.P. Lovecraft are alive and well on the night streets of present-day Hamilton.
These two streams of Lee’s writing come together at Hamilton’s Playhouse Cinema on Wednesday, January 10 at 7 p.m. when David Neil Lee launches his newest book The Great Outer Dark, the final volume of the Midnight Games trilogy. After his reading, Kitchener/Waterloo’s VOC Silent Film Harmonic will perform a live soundtrack to a little-seen silent film version of Lovecraft’s 1926 short story The Call of Cthulhu. Directed by Andrew Lehman, this 2005 labour of love is true in spirit and detail to the silent classics of Lovecraft’s time (“The Brave Sea Captain and his ill-fated crew – what horror they unleash!”).
After The Midnight Games appeared in 2015, followed by The Medusa Deep in 2021, the books caught the attention of VOC, an ensemble that has become popular at the Playhouse for their performances of live musical accompaniment to silent film classics.
The Call of Cthulhu (pronounced Cuh-thoo-loo) was produced by the Los Angeles-based H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, in the grand tradition of silent era expressionism seen in such films as Nosferatu, Vampyr, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Think Lovecraftian cosmic horror – not so much in the style of Guillermo del Toro or John Carpenter, but more like Guy Maddin!
David Neil Lee launches The Great Outer Dark, with the VOC Silent Film Harmonic accompanying The Call of Cthulhu, at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, January 10 at the Playhouse Cinema, 177 Sherman Avenue N., Hamilton.
Advance tickets:
https://playhousecinema.ca/movie/cthulhu-is-in-hamilton-david-neil-lee-with-voc-silent-film-harmonic
For more information contact David Lee, email: lee.davidneil@gmail.com.
A joint production of
Playhouse Cinema ▪ VOC Silent Film Harmonic ▪ Wolsak & Wynn Publishers ▪ Epic Books
