Assigned to a missing person case, reporter Trish Bostwick follows the trail to a secluded asylum hidden in the New England woods. But everything changes when a knife-wielding stranger hijacks her car, plunging her into a descent of paranoia and madness.
GRIMMFEST SAYS: H.P. Lovecraft was a damaged man, whose unusual and traumatic childhood left him with all manner of fears and hang-ups, and with a profound sense of paranoia and alienation, all of which fed directly into his work. The Lovecraftian Cosmology is born from that alienation; an attempt to mythologise it, and so make sense of it, to render it as metaphor in distancing fiction. So many would-be Lovecraftian films fail because they do not understand this fundamental detail, and instead get bogged down in tentacles and things unspeakable. WHERE DARKNESS DWELLS, the latest film from Michael May, producer of 12 HOUR SHIFT and GHOSTS OF THE OZARKS and featuring many of the same creative team, scores by leaning in the opposite direction. It’s a film about surviving and facing up to past trauma, in which the more fantastic elements serve almost as a form of concrete metaphor for the more mundane, but no less horrible experience, that the protagonist is recuperating from. But while the Lovecraftian elements are kept quite low in the mix – more a case of New England back woods folk horror weirdness than the crawling cosmic chaos of Cthulhu – writer-director May clearly knows his lore, with clear nods to “The Dwellers in Darkness”, as well as to the works of Lovecraft’s fellow WEIRD TALES alumnus Manly Wade Wellman. Boasting a strong sense of location, stunning cinematography and score from Reaper-Award-Winner Matt Glass, and excellent performances from Tara Perry as the damaged protagonist, Katie Parker as her loathsome, manipulative old friend turned exploitative boss, and May himself as the blandly sinister doctor with a highly suspect agenda, this is an intelligent, engaging, gripping and thought provoking reimagining of Lovecraftian horror.