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Call of Cthulhu Available on DVD

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the say-is-that-a-tentacle dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is finally finished with the ultimate labor of mythos-love. The Call of Cthulhu is now available on DVD! For those not familiar with the long-awaited project, The Call of Cthulhu is a silent film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's famous literary masterpiece of the same name. It really looks like something that would have been shot in the 1920's silent film era. I, for one, welcome our new multi-tentacled, aquatic, ancient overlord. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn."

4 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Server slow: see below by Winckle · · Score: 5, Informative

    Coralized links

    http://www.cthulhulives.org.nyud.net:8090/store/st ore.lasso?1=product&2=8
    http://www.cthulhulives.org.nyud.net:8090/toc.html

    These links do not go over standard port 80 and so may not work behind company firewalls

  2. Original Text by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of you who have no idea WTF is this, here's the original text:

    http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu

    and one of my favourites, the Mountains of Madness:

    http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_ Madness

    In general, wikipedia has lots of material on Lovecraft:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

  3. Fantasic Talents by Quirk · · Score: 5, Informative
    Fantasy, the more lurid the better, ate up great chunks of my childhood. Clark Ashton Smith should be remembered with Lovecraft. C A Smith and Lovecraft had a good friendship. From the above site: "The friendship of Clark Ashton Smith and Howard Phillips Lovecraft began in letters in 1922 and progressed over the years as each became famous to the readers of Weird Tales and other pulps of the 1920s and '30s

    Another great of the field was L. Sprague De Camp

    The Elric Saga by M Moorcock remains my all time favourite.

    --
    "Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
    Cohen
  4. No. And maybe. by Melllvar · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Reanimator is definitely in the public domain by now; any creative works produced in the United States with a publication date prior to 1923 is considered to be public domain, no matter what. Reanimator just squeaks in at 1922.

    Anything published after that is iffy -- but could very well be free, depending on how careful Lovecraft or his estate holders were in renewing their copyrights after the initial period was up. This includes Call of Cthulhu, which was written in 1926, and thus I assume published sometime in the late 1920's.

    For much of the 20th-century, initial copyright and renewal was for 28 years, by the way, not 14. Later on the renewal period was extended to a whopping 67 years; this includes anything published after 1922 -- which, as I mentioned above, includes a substantial portion (but by no means all) of Lovecraft's work. This doesn't change the fact that it would have to have been renewed in order for Arkham House to claim ownership.

    As for the "death plus 50/70" situation, that was generally only applicable for unpublished works. So if you're digging through some murky basement, and you stumble across a pile of ichor-splattered, hand-scrawled notes of hitherto unknown Lovecraftian ghoulishness, you can publish that in 2007.

    Here's a nice site with a handy-dandy chart that can help clear away some of the murk for you.