Buried Alive…

The wonderful Maria Chelidoni as Angelique Roulet – wife of Cthulhu cultist Etienne Roulet in ‘The Shunned House’.

Robert Harrison Blake

Hi there Survivors!

I’ve been absent for a while working on the VFX for the film and also putting together some actor showreel footage which I thought I’d share with you – below you can see a number of Dan McSherry’s (Robert Harrison Blake) scenes from the movie:

It’s not finished footage but hopefully you’ll agree it has a suitably Lovecraftian feel…

(Oh, and I know the lip-sync drifts a little at the end – that’s an MP4 thing I’m trying to fix…)

Pages from the Necronomicon…

Well – from the Director’s Journal anyway…

From the initial idea of Arkham Sanitarium all the way up to filming (and beyond) I’ve kept a journal which has all my story notes, character bios, sketches etc.

It’s an interesting record of the development of the script and the film – here’s a glimpse inside:

Contributors donating $10 or more to our IndieGoGo campaign will be entered into a draw to win the actual journal – we’re also making the entire scanned journal available on our IndieGoGo contributors page right here at survivorfilms.com!

Arkham Sanitarium Props!

One of the perks you can get from supporting Arkham Sanitarium at IndieGoGo is a genuine, certified prop from the movie! Here’s a few of the items we’re making available to our contributors:

If you haven’t contributed yet, please consider it! Any and all contributions will help us make the most faithful H.P. Lovecraft movie seen yet!

Building a better R’lyeh – Part I

Whilst great Cthulhu himself won’t be making an appearance in Arkham Sanitarium, his watery grave features quite prominently.

How do you go about designing such a thing? R’lyeh is as mysterious as it is iconic and in attempting something like this on a small budget, any film runs the risk of disappointing the fans (and the film-makers).

There’s no ‘canon’ to follow in designing R’lyeh other than the words of H.P. Lovecraft himself – and HPL was big on creating atmosphere rather than detailing the specifics.

So what do we know about this forbidding and unearthly sunken city that rests at the bottom of the Pacific?

In Lovecraft’s classic tale, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ we learn the following:

• The coastline is of mud, ooze and “weedy Cyclopean masonry”
• Cthulhu lies dreaming in a “monolith crowned citadel” of “dizzying height”
• This citadel is built from massive “greenish stone blocks”
• It features colossal “statues and bas-reliefs” of “stupefying identity”
• It also exhibits “vast angles and stone surfaces” with “horrible images and hieroglyphs”
• The geometry is “non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres”
• Johansen’s men climb “titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase”
• On the monolith is an “immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief”

As we’re creating a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft, these above descriptions have to be our starting point – but where next? There’s some very nice artwork out there already for R’lyeh but nothing that really works for me in the context of Lovecraft’s story and what we want to show in Arkham Sanitarium.

I’ve got two specific ideas in mind for the styling of this legendary necropolis – in Part II you’ll see how these ideas come together but for now, here’s a couple of pictures (courtesy of Wikipedia) to give a glimpse of what’s to come…

Arkham Sanitarium Teaser Trailer!

We’ve just launched our campaign over at IndieGoGo! In order to finish the post-production for the movie we need to raise some more finance – please help us complete H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium by either contributing or by spreading the word about the film!

Contributors get great perks including posters, props from the movie and access to an exclusive area of this website with behind the scenes material, work-in-progress visual FX, and notes and articles by the director! In addition, everyone that contributes towards the film with be entered into a draw to win the director’s journal – a one-of-a-kind souvenir of the the making of the film!

Interview with the director of Arkham Sanitarium on Twitch!

The teaser trailer for Arkham Sanitarium is now available  for viewing at twitchfilm.com!

Also, an interview with the director and details of Survivor Films’ IndieGoGo campaign for Arkham Sanitarium!