This is a day-by-day account of Necronomicon 2001, held in Providence, Rhode Island, in August 2001. Originally this was a set of entries in my diary for August 2001. There's also a Flickr photoset of pictures from that weekend, though mostly not from the convention.
Fri Aug 17 2001: Necronomicon, day 1: I woke up on time and didn't have to rush around in order to make it to the airport on time. In 1999 I made the mistake of taking the train from DC to Providence, an unnecessarily long (10 hours!) and tortuous overnight trip. This time I flew, which only takes around 50 minutes from takeoff to landing, and then caught a cab to the hotel. It wasn't much more expensive than the train, either, though being a US Airways flight it was crowded.
The Friday at Necronomicon is usually a fairly slow day. There are a few panels and other events scattered through the afternoon, but there aren't very many of them and they aren't packed very tightly. The dealer room isn't full either, as several dealers don't arrive until Saturday. This meant that arriving around noon was just right, After checking in and dumping my baggage, I picked up my convention badge and made a pass through the dealer room, getting signed in at the Cthulhu Live table, picking up a copy of the CL Delta Green book and listening to two explanations of the game's combat mechanics. I also got the stuffed Cthulhu I wanted; Pagan Publishing had one covered in stars, and another in a dark blue Hawaiian-style fabric, but I decided on the conventional dark green.
At 4 PM, I went to the "Future of (e)Publishing" panel. I was pleased to see that the panelists (Charlie Krank of Chaosium, Marc Michaud of Necronomicom Press, Richard Lupoff and Allen Ruch) were all positive, but also quite realistic, about electronic publishing. No one thought it was going to provide a magical renaissance for books, or even that there was much of a purpose in putting fiction on the Web. Mostly they see it as being more useful for reference documents that benefit from continuous updating, such as encyclopedias and bibliographies, and for making available things that might otherwise go out of print.
The panelists were more interested in print-on-demand technology and its use for printing small runs of a title. Conventional printing demands a substantial up-front cost for setting up the plates and the machinery, after which producing more copies is quite cheap. Print-on-demand costs more per copy, but the initial set-up cost is much closer to zero. Currently the crossover point is around 1000-2000 copies; for runs below that number, print-on-demand is cheaper. Krank mentioned that Chaosium already uses print-on-demand for some titles such as Masks of Nyarlathotep, so they can print 2000 copies of 5 different books rather than 10,000 copies of a single title. Lupoff is also enamored of print-on-demand, but was worried about it attracting the "vanity press" stigma in the future because some unscrupulous POD publishers are resorting to that approach to get business. Michaud, however, is unconvinced that a POD book, produced through a toner-based process similar to the one used by laser printers, will last as long as a conventionally printed book, and wonders if the pages will start to fade 30 years down the line.
After this panel, I had nothing planned until 7:30, so I had supper and took a quick nap. At 7:30PM, there was a panel, "The John Dean Necronomicon", that was the inaugural event for the longer-running Cthulhu Live game. The ostensible purpose of the panel was for the unveiling of a copy of the Necronomicon found among some previously undiscovered papers of Lovecraft's, discovered by Dr. John Dean, a Brown University professor. Except for Dr. Dean, the panelists were all actual figures in the Lovecraftian community, such as Robert M. Price, editor of Crypt of Cthulhu. Various audience members asked general questions about the book's contents and its provenance, and then the plot came to more of a focus as Dr Dean squabbled with a calm but increasingly angry preacher in the audience. The preacher, who was an NPC, was in turn being shouted down by another audience member who was actually a player acting in-character. The panel climaxed with Dean reading aloud from the book to make his point that it wasn't actually magical, but while he was doing that, smoke began pouring out from underneath the table, accompanied by a weird glow. Then the preacher shot him. This caused the audience stampeded out of the room and the book to be carried off by unknown parties in the chaos, and was an effective curtain-raiser.
After the panel, the second Cthulhu Live game, "Witchfinder", was carried out. The scene is the Balkans in 1943; an OSS commando team is parachuted into the area to locate a magical book that's in the possession of the Nazis. The OSS team have to make contact with the partisan underground, figure out what's going on, and then infiltrate Gestapo headquarters; I was a player in this group, the medical specialist.
It was an exciting idea, but I found the game bitterly disappointing because very few of the players made even the tiniest, feeblest attempt at staying in character. Here's an example: the parachute drop was simulated by piling us into a van, driving us up onto Federal Hill, and ... well, the plan was for us to get out one at a time at various locations, so that we'd have to make our way to a rendez-vous point, but for no clear reason we wound up all getting out at the same time, putting paid to that idea. Anyway, while we were sitting in the van, the other commandos were gaily chatting about how they were almost done with their degree, and with the convention's progress so far, and joking about their character names, and similar trivia. I kept thinking to myself, "If you wanted to chatter, wouldn't it be more comfortable in the bar or in a room, not on the streets of Providence on a rainy night?", but held my tongue.
This made it almost impossible to get into the mood of the situation, even though that's really easy to do for anyone with the slightest imagination. Running around on Federal Hill provides a good example of this, as I had the most fun during this phase of the game. It was almost 10PM at this point, so night had fallen, and there were intermittent showers of rain making the streets wetter and gloomier. Our group looked at our map, looked at the cross streets, and headed off to the meeting point at Prospect Park. (In the daylight on Sunday, I realized that during this walk we'd walked past Lovecraft's final home.) Another person and I were bringing up the rear, keeping an eye out for anyone sneaking up from behind. If you take the game seriously, it's easy to get appropriately paranoid. Every time a car passed us slowly, I wondered if a bunch of Gestapo officers would jump out and demand our identification papers; every time a person was walking on the other side of the street, we spent some time peering at them and trying to figure out if they looked dangerous or not; as we walked I kept continually planning a hiding place or escape route in case something happened. It was creepy and unsettling and great fun.
The other problem I noticed from not trying to be in character was a lack of direction. I did a bit of reading on WWII commandos before the convention, and one characteristic that emerged very strongly was their confidence. Allied commandos were rigourously trained; the last exercise before graduation was to attack a target defended by their teachers, who were using real ammunition and grenades. (Only 3 or 4 students were actually killed in training, according to the book I read.) On several occasions commandos posed as superior officers in the opposing army and pulled off the deception for 6 or 12 hours. None of that attitude could be seen in the role-playing in this game. The OSS players didn't pay much attention to who their commanders were (none of us were clear on who outranked whom), and the commanders didn't act like commanding officers, so we just meandered. The situation was worsened by the fact that there were so many people, around 10 to 15 people.
This bit us most strongly when trying to negotiate with the partisan players, who did a much better job of role-playing and seemed have more fun. After the two groups connected, we were standing on a residential street trying to figure out the situation and to come to an agreement so we could move on to the next stage of the game, but the negotiations just drifted aimlessly for some 20 minutes. This was long enough that someone in a neighbouring building complained we were making too much noise, and someone (perhaps the same person, perhaps not) called the police, reporting us as "an unruly mob". This resulted in a single officer arrived in a squad car and ran his siren for around 30 seconds. (This was ironic -- if people were complaining about us making noise, the siren was far louder and more piercing than we ever were.) With the police officer's arrival, each of us became painfully aware of the cap pistol and, in some cases, the rubber knife that we were carrying. Robert McLaughlin, the game's Keeper, was present and told us to move along downhill while he talked to the officer. (At the post-game meeting he reported that the officer was quite understanding and just suggested warning the police station before holding any future games.) All the players simply headed back to the hotel, because separated from the Keeper, there was little else we could do.
Back at the hotel, things were no better; some desultory wandering around, a clumsily executed assault on Gestapo headquarters (during which some innocent prisoners were accidentally shot while a Nazi officer was left unguarded and just walked away), and things finally dragged to a conclusion around 1AM. The game was originally planned to have an encounter at the Athenaeum and a final climactic battle in another park, but because the game moved so slowly that the Keepers simply said to hell with it and ran the climactic scenes at the hotel. Doubtless it was a disappointment for them, too, as all of that planning and location-finding turned out to be for naught. The Keepers did a good job, as far as I can tell, but were sabotaged by a sloppy and careless bunch of players. I finally reached my bed around 1:30 AM, highly annoyed by the debacle.
Sat Aug 18 2001: Necronomicon, day 2: Tossed and turned all night, mostly fuming about how "Witchfinder" turned out, until I finally conked out around 7:30 & woke up at 10. That was around the starting time of the walking tour I intended to take, so I gave up that plan, and instead simply lazed around some more and only left my room around noon.
My first panel of the day was "20 Years of Call of Cthulhu", featuring Charlie Krank, the president of Chaosium, John Tynes from Pagan Publishing, and other people involved with Cthulhu gaming. Krank talked about the origins of the game; surprisingly, Sandy Petersen, who's well known as the game's designer, didn't originate it, but was brought in to finish it after the initial author couldn't complete it. Tynes (who bears a startlingly close resemblance to c.l.python's Aaron Watters) talked about the upcoming d20-based version of the game, being done in concert with the AD&D folks, and Bruce Ballon talked about the supplement he'd written, "Unseen Masters", persuasively enough to make me go buy it the following day. From there the panel shifted to a discussion of how to create and maintain atmosphere in a CoC game, and other tips for Keepers.
Up to this point, most of my time at the con had been spent in gaming-related activities, even though I don't actually play the game at all. Thinking only about gaming was beginning to suck the life out of me, though, so I shifted to the literary and historical track. "The Times of H.P. Lovecraft" was a superb panel discussion with Faye Ringel and Gary Myers; a third person didn't show up for the panel, but wasn't missed at all. Discussion ranged all over the place, from the depopulation of New England in the 1800s and whose influence can be traced in HPL's work, to James Branch Cabell and his current obscurity, to HPL's vision of Utopia as portrayed in alien civilizations. I also noted down several books to look for, starting with Ringel's own New England's Gothic Literature, and places to visit, such as Salem MA and Hammond Castle.
The next panel was on the Colonial Revival, presented by Donna McDermott-Thorland from the Peabody Essex Museum. HPL's infatuation with the Colonial past seems eccentric in retrospect, but as explained in this talk, genealogical and historical tourism was actually fairly common in the 1920s. The talk was illustrated with slides of contemporary photographs and pictures of Salem, of reconstructed Colonial rooms, and of the Museum itself; nothing too exciting, but nicely illustrative of Lovecraft's environment.
At the "Times" panel, it was mentioned that Darrell Schweitzer is just about the only person writing about James Branch Cabell today. He had a table in the dealer's room, selling both his books and titles from other authors and publishers, and the mention of him at the panel was intriguing enough to make me stop by and page through his books. I ended up buying three different collections of horror and fantasy criticism, and was amused to see he'd noted the similarities between Bram Stoker's Dracula and Prospero's Books. I'm looking forward to reading them.
The next panel was "The Future of Necronomicon". The attitude wasn't as grimly depressed as the description in the schedule ("Does Necronomicon have a future?") implied. This year's planning started late and was scattered because practically everyone on the committee was busy because of work or personal reasons. However, the concom is still willing to work on a 2003 convention, but they desperately need more people willing to volunteer for either the planning committee or for gopher duties at the con itself. (This was a convention with roughly 250 attendees, and 3 gophers.) Audience members brought up lots of neat ideas for future conventions -- having an art room, arranging sponsorships, getting more publicity -- but all these ideas need people to actually implement them. I can empathize with this from my experience with the Python community -- the list of documents, software, and Web pages that could be written is endless, but the problem is just finding bodies to actually do them. I wish I could help Necronomicon out, but all I really know is Web stuff, and Web knowledge is likely not in short supply. I lack the organizational skills to do anything else, really.
After this panel, I ran into Robert McLaughlin, who told me the game was going well and that another character was looking for me. Instead of acting on that, I went and had supper, something I'll doubtless feel guilty about for a long while, but at this point I was so far out of the game that there seemed little point, and after last night's disaster, little reason for me to bother trying to get back into it.
Then it was off to the short film festival. The slate of candidates was very strong this year, as there were several good films, no real disasters, and only one weak entry. Several of these movies are available, in whole or partially, on the Web and I've linked to them where possible.
- I showed up a few minutes late, and arrived in the middle of Andrew Leman and Sean Branney's hilarious Shoggoth on the Roof, a pseudo-documentary about a failed attempt at a Lovecraftian musical. It features incredibly funny rehearsal footage, and a great song, "Byakhee, byakhee" over the closing credits. Reference is made to a mysterious man who appears in the background of the rehearsals. This man bears an amazing resemblance to Neil Gaiman, though Gaiman's name didn't appear in the closing credits. A sneaky cameo? Additional weight for my theory: in Peter Cannon's Lovecraft/P.G. Wodehouse pastiche "Scream for Jeeves", the introduction mentions Gaiman claiming to have seen correspondence between Lovecraft and Wodehouse, stemming from their collaboration on a... wait for it... Broadway musical! (At the film panel on Sunday, I asked Leman about this -- was it a cameo, a sly reference, or a coincidence? Coincidence, it turns out; Leman was entirely unaware of this connection!)
- A Portion of Ka is a brief film, and the weakest one of the evening. A character introduces himself as Thomas Ligotti and then undergoes a lengthy session of the psychic surgery that James Randi spent so much time debunking in the 70s and 80s. In psychic surgery the surgeon removes various bits from the patient's body and tosses in a bowl; in this movie, the doctor also rants about the soul while that's going on. At the end there's a shot of the patient looking zombified, and he says "I feel much better now". The audience laughed at this point, but it's not obvious (to me at least) whether the film was intended to be funny or not. If it's actually a comedy, then it's played far too earnestly; if a drama, it's kind of plotless.
- A rough cut of The Yellow
Sign, by Aaron Vanek, was shown. The sound and editing
weren't finished yet, but even in its incomplete state the
production is as professional looking as Vanek's Return to
Innsmouth was at the previous festival. The plot of the
The Yellow Sign concerns an art gallery owner who,
troubled by disturbing dreams, goes in search of a reclusive
painter. I was also pleased to see that John Tynes of Pagan
Publishing collaborated on the story and screenplay, because for
some time I've thought that, with the volume of excellent gaming
supplements available for Call of Cthulhu, some of the stories
would be excellent choices for film adaptation.
Despite that, though, I didn't like The Yellow Sign all that much, but it's infuriatingly difficult for me to articulate why. Conceivably the problem might be that the film is exceedingly dialogue-heavy, but I'm a Greenaway fan and can certainly handle a talky movie, so it seems unlikely. To some degree the rhythm of the acting feels subtly off; at a few points the painter says something startling or frightening, to little apparent reaction from the other actor. It's hard to say if that's due to the actors, the unfinished state of the editing, or what. Hmm... I'm going to have to watch the finished version and see what I think about it then.
- This was followed by a trailer for an upcoming "Dagon" movie that's due for theatrical release some time in 2002. The trailer seems to give a complete outline of the plot, which is essentially that of "Shadow over Innsmouth" (pay no attention to the movie's title), and doesn't seem to stray very far from the generic town-of-evil storyline. Still, it'll be worth checking out.
- Nyarlathothep, by Christian Matzke, is an effective mood piece, shot in gloomy black-and-white and with a few overtones of 1984. Not much actually happens in this movie -- it's more of a prose poem than a story -- and at a few spots the low budget is apparent, but much of it is memorably well done.
- Two more trailers: one for The Yellow Sign which we'd just seen, and one for The Terrible Old Man. The latter trailer is quite clever, only showing a number of bottles containing swinging pendulums while dialogue from the film runs and the letters of the title slide over the screen spelling ominous phrases such as 'are ill entombed'. Simple and effective...
- In the Vault, by Geoffrey Clark, is the first animated Lovecraftian film that I've seen, and it's also the first computer-generated one. It sticks closely to the original story, emphasizing the black humour of the tale and mixing a smile with the supernatural. Quite good, and remarkable work for a lone filmmaker, CGI or not.
- Cool Air is a spectacular piece of work, and it demonstrates the importance of getting good actors, an area where most amateur films often fall down. In adapting this story, one of the few HPL stories where there are no any characters who are actually evil, the story of Dr. Muņoz is expanded upon with the addition of a lost love interest, increasing my sympathy for the character and making the ending even sadder and quite moving. There's nothing amateur about this production at all.
- Comedy was well-handled in this line-up. In addition to Shoggoth on the Roof and In the Vault, The Hapless Antiquarian by Anthony Reed is a tribute to both Edward Gorey and silent movies. It's quite clever and very funny.
- One last snippet: a one-minute bumper to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, with a man running around, sticking his hand into a loathsome maw, and pulling out a sheet of paper with the festival's title. Cute.
Brief break, and then it was back to the video room for the final movie of the evening. Late Saturday night is traditionally used for something really strange and usually bad. I didn't see the late Saturday movie at the 1999 con, where a Lovecraftian porn film was shown (as mentioned in this account). This year it was a very cheaply made movie, We Await ([IMDB] [distributor]), described in the program as "If H.P. Lovecraft was a sex pervert...", and that's not a bad description. The plot bears some strange similarities to "Manos": The Hands of Fate; We Await is about a bizarre cultish family, and a man who becomes their captive. There's the father, two deeply-cleavaged and vaguely Goth daughters, and two brothers (I guess they're brothers, though everything about this plot is murky). One of the daughters is pregnant with "The Child", and they're all awaiting its birth, intoning "Praise the Child" over and over. One son is a violent skinhead type who kills people, while the other one thinks he's a dog and crawls around on all fours in a loincloth and mating with people's legs. The ending, like that of "Manos", is grim; after being tormented for most of the movie, the kidnapped guy embraces the cult, killing a friend who's come to rescue him and then bares his throat for sacrifice. It's very strange and unpleasant, with many scenes that will keep me in therapy for years to come:
- A hilariously bad bluescreen trip through other dimensions in a car. The audience was naturally riffing on the movie, so at this point someone said "And you thought the TARDIS travelling through space looked bad..."
- A naked 50-foot tall vampire Jesus (yes, you read that right) that picks up the car and gets shot in the eye.
- A guy in a loincloth who thinks he's a dog.
- Slimy green potions.
- Necrophilia.
- By far the the ickiest scene comes early in the movie, when a minor character is shown spreadeagled with a vise clamped to his penis and scrotum, and with a dominatrix applying an acetylene torch to the other end of the vise. This is shown in a full-screen medium shot and, worse still, in close-up! In fact the filmmaker has a predilection for injuring the groins of the male characters, doing it about four times in this 65-minute film.
That brought day 2 to an end for me. <shudder>
Sun Aug 19 2001: Necronomicon, day 3: Slept a bit better, but not by much. I woke up in time to pack, check out, and head for the Prayer Breakfast. At the table the group was mostly CLive gamers, including one of the scripters and the person who played the monster in last night's climax. We talked about LARP gaming and I brought up my dissatisfaction with Friday night's game. It was suggested that if people weren't acting in character, the Keeper should have been informed so he could have taken some appropriate measures. I'd thought of doing that, but on Friday I wasn't sure if there was actually anything to complain about (perhaps all LARPG acting was that slipshod and my expectations were impossibly high) and didn't want to seem like an overenthusiastic first-timer. Still, the breakfast conversation did show that games do go better, and confirmed my determination to try it another time. Two people from Toronto mentioned that a convention there this fall will feature another LARP game; maybe I'll arrange to go to that.
I skipped out of the Prayer Breakfast after eating and before the festivities started, because last time I found them more silly than entertaining. The only thing I really cared about were the winners of the film contest, and I figured later I could just ask someone who had won. Instead I went to the alternative panel, which had 4 audience members and two panelists, James Anderson and Donovan Loucks. It was a pleasantly informal discussion session, ranging over Lovecraftian geography, the likelihood of a Cliff's Notes for HPL's works, and stories, both favorites and suggestions for good introductory ones.
Waiting for the film panel, I chatted with someone about comics and B5 and X-Files, and found out that "Cool Air" won the award for best long film (no argument here), and "In The Vault" won as the best short film. (I'd probably have given that award to "Shoggoth on the Roof", myself, but really, all of the short films were quite good. Give 'em all awards, that's what I say.)
The film panel had Aaron Vanek and Andrew Leman as panelists, and was moderated by Friday Jones who organizes and runs the video room at Necronomicon. They discussed how much films cost to make, the highs and lows of submissions to the HPL Film Festival, and recent movies that capture a Lovecraftian feel. I came away from it with a lengthy list of movies to look for: something called Session 9, Lars van Trier's series The Kingdom, Ginger Snaps (a Canadian werewolf movie that was also given a good review in Sight and Sound), and a few others.
The "How I Met Mr. Lovecraft" panel was another high point of the convention for me; it's hard to decide between this panel and "The Times of H.P. Lovecraft" as my favorite. The purpose of the panel was for panelists and members of the audience to discuss how they first discovered Lovecraft. It's interesting to see the range of different reasons people had for liking HPL's work, from Charlie Krank's affection for the language, to Chris Jarocha-Ernst's precociously early discovery through an index of short stories and Marc Michaud's fascination with Lovecraft the man. Richard Lupoff told the most moving story, of reading "The Dunwich Horror" and only many years later realizing how the events in the story (a deceased mother, a distant father, a frightening older brother) were parallels to his own childhood. Several audience members were intrigued by the description of the Mythos in an early AD&D book and so were introduced to HPL through gaming. During this panel, the idea struck of writing up my first introduction, not to Lovecraft, but to Lovecraftian ideas, as a conceit because it's kind of interesting; I'll try to do that before too long.
That was the final panel of the weekend. On Sunday Necronomicon is mostly winding down, as people head out to catch planes and the dealers pack up. The video room kept running for a bit longer, though, so that's where I went after the final panel. There had been a lot of good word-of-mouth about two Japanese movies on the video program. One was a version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" called Innsmouth Wo Oou Kage that I didn't get a chance to see. The other, Spirals (Uzumaki), was being re-run for people who'd missed it and I wanted to take advantage of that. The showing had started at 2PM and the panel had ended at 2:30PM so I'd missed the first part, but the story wasn't hard to follow. In "Spirals", a Japanese town comes under some sort of otherworldly attack. People are going insane, becoming obsessed by spirals or terrified of them; one character's mother mutilates her fingers because of the spirals in her fingerprints. In a subsequent scene, after the mother has been confined to a hospital room, her son is shown tearing down an anatomical chart of the ear, saying "Can you imagine what would happen if she realized there was a spiral inside her ear?"; at that point you could sense a general "uh-oh..." from all the audience members. Exactly who or what is responsible for all this isn't clear; a serpent cult is referred to, but never appears on stage.
There's little gore, and odd and disturbing details are constantly accumulating -- violent characters, a videotaped suicide, physical mutations -- and the tension just never stops increasing, though the ending lapses into a comparatively disappointing screaming monster scene. The soundtrack is at times techno-ish and at other times the unsettlingly disembodied scrapes and rattles of Kwaidan. Highly recommended; while the movie isn't an adaptation of any particular Lovecraft story, it captures HPL's mood and tone very well indeed.
I had missed all of the walking tours for one reason or another. It was around 4PM at this point and my plane was only leaving at 7, so I set out to walk around Federal Hill for an hour or two, armed with a copy of Donovan Loucks's map and my digital camera. (See the separate page of photos.) The day was overcast and seemed to get muggier as it got later; I arrived back at the hotel about an hour and a half later sweaty and bedraggled, but also still impressed with the placid beauty of the neighbourhood. In his letters HPL rhapsodizes about Providence a lot, and it's clear that he loved the city. Walking around Federal Hill, you can see its charm and its restfulness, and it's apparent that this is a city one could definitely fall in love with.
At that point it was around 5:30, so I picked up my bags and asked the hotel to call a taxi for me. While I was waiting for the cab to arrive, another departing attendee came along and asked if I was waiting for the shuttle to the airport, so I offered to share the cab ride with him. He turned out to also be a gamer, and amazingly, he thought that a friend of a friend knew someone who ran LARP games in the DC area. I gave him a business card so that he could pass it on to those people. (This points out another nice thing about the convention: everyone is really friendly. While that's true of any convention to some degree, fandom-related or not, it's particularly true of Necronomicon. Part of it is that it's a small convention, and perhaps it's also because Lovecraft fandom is small enough and obscure enough to strengthen the sense of commonality.)
The plane ride back to National was uneventful, though it took me half an hour to get my luggage; while the monitors said the luggage from flight 971 would be delivered to baggage carousel 12, the bags actually went to carousel 9. Then I went home, fed Duncan, called Barb, and so ended the day.
To summarize, Necronomicon 2001 was a lot of fun, just as Necronomicon 1999 was, and I'll definitely be first in line to register for the 2003 incarnation. While the live-action role playing didn't work out as well as I'd hoped it would, I definitely want to give it another try with a more focused group of players; the question is how? Time will tell about that, at any rate.
Related Links
Friday Jones has a page of Necronomicon memories, and also links to some other reports of the convention.