After I had first filmed H.P. Lovecraft in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE (2017) on Dartmoor and in THE GARDEN (2019) in a cemetery in Savannah, the moment had come in 2023 to venture a third part. That spring, the poetry collection FUNGI VON YUGGOTH UND ANDERE GEDICHTE was published, full of first-class poems by Frank Dukowski. Surprisingly new to me was a poem called OCEANUS, which was part of the poetry cycle A CYCLE OF VERSE (1918). In it, he describes the horrors of old customers hidden in the sea. In a way, it is Lovecraft’s myth in a nutshell, i.e. in a highly condensed form.
So I decided to take a cinematic approach to the text and look for suitable locations during a round trip through Brittany. And I found what I was looking for: I filmed the two rocks in the sea in Guilvinec and the first scene with the lighthouse in Plogoff, Finistère. I found the geometric lines of Lovecraft’s legendary city of R’lyeh on the seabed at the Phare d’Eckmühl in Penmarc’h. I also filmed the enigmatic murals for the title sequence there. I filmed the all-devouring stone creature in In Pleyben, Finistère and the demonic-looking gargoyles in Perros-Guirec, Côtes-d’Armor.
As an Eric Rohmer fan, I also filmed in Dinard and on the way back some scenes in Villers-sur-Mer, Calvados. At the stand there, you could see countless fossilized prehistoric animals, a good omen for the film project! In 2023, the entire beach promenade was also decorated with an exhibition in honor of French filmmaker Claude Lelouch, as the beach was the setting for the film UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME (1966) in the 1960s alongside Deauville. While Lelouch told a love story here, I dreamed myself back to the gruesome prehistoric times, surrounded by fossils and roaring waves.
During filming, I was looking for a suitable ending, similar in effect to the one in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING. At the same time I was working on an article about John Ford’s films shot in Monument Valley for the German film magazine 35 MILLIMETER, I was studying Navajo mythology in depth. When I read that for the indigenous people the rocks represent carcasses of slain monsters that lived there before humans, I knew how I could expand Lovecraft’s myth to a global myth. I used slides that I had taken there in 2019 on 35mm Kodak Ektachrome.
But one problem stood in my way: during the entire shoot, the weather was fantastic, far too good for the intended images, which are supposed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable. The solution came to me when I read about the early color process of two-tape Technicolor, TWO-STRIP TECHNICOLOR, which is actually correctly called PROCESS 2. In the process used in the early 1920s, the special Technicolor camera used a beam splitter that simultaneously exposed two consecutive images of a single black-and-white film strip, one behind a green filter and one behind a red filter. This achieved a completely unreal aesthetic full of red and green tones. It was used in the silent film THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925) by Rupert Julian with Lon Chaney, among others. Who knows, maybe Lovecraft saw it in the movies?
I shot with a Bolex REX3 16mm film camera from 1963 and 120m Fuji Eterna film. For the Technicolor effect, I used a digital color correction technique similar to the one Martin Scorsese used in THE AVIATOR (2004) to achieve the look of the old two-color Technicolor process.
The viewer was now visually in a different world, but I quickly realized that the right music had to be found. I’ve been involved in the ANTENNE TRAUMSTADT podcast project for some time, and I’d noticed the music of Carlos Ebelhäuser, who contributed the title music, for some time. He was the former bassist of the band BLACKMAIL; when I showed him the edited film, he quickly connected with it. We are both lovers of Italian horror films, but also of John Carpenter, which resulted in a powerful score. Bernhard Plank is the narrator of Lovecraft’s text for the second time after THE GARDEN and once again hits the right note. The artist Bjoern Candidus, who drew the title motif for the film poster, is also involved again.
ANCIENT LORE was extremely physically draining because I wanted to finish it within three months in order to screen it in time for the prestigious H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Providence in the fall of 2023, which I did. So far it has been shown at 22 festivals worldwide, received several awards as BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM and a HONORABLE MENTION.
However, I have particularly fond memories of the moments when I was invited to present my film to an audience in person. On October 5, 2023, for example, at the 43rd Fantafestival (Mostra Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza e del Fantastico di Roma). The film was shown there as one of eight short films worldwide. I traveled there by train and presented ANCIENT LORE on the big screen at the Nuovo Cinema Aquila. It was unforgettable because Sergio Martino and Dario Argento’s screenwriter were in the audience. Or on August 25, 2024, during the German premiere at the 20th International Short Film Festival Detmold. For some reason, the film was shown there without any German subtitles, but with perfect sound and bass. A Frenchman from the audience said afterwards that the film was incredibly intense even without understanding the text.
Photo: Jan Harenberg
And on November 12, 2024, it even screened at the 38th Braunschweig International Film Festival as part of the small retrospective of my films, AUS DER TIEFE. Also fitting: the place where I showed my films with an analog 16mm projector was the Roter Salon in the castle, with a wonderful Q&A. The next day, I showed it again in analog, in front of interested students from the Faculty of German Studies at the TU Braunschweig. On August 27, 2025, ANCIENT LORE was then part of three of my films that I was allowed to present at the Kunsthalle Mainz at Best of “Andersartig”.
In the fall of 2024, ANCIENT LORE was even released on DVD/Blu-Ray by Plaion Pictures as part of the bonus material for the feature film THE DEEP DARK by Mathieu Turi. Many thanks to Stefan Jung. It was already shown in this constellation as a supporting film at the Fantastic Film Festival Australia in Melbourne in April of this year.
On the occasion of the film, Nils Gampert from the German Lovecraft Society 2023 interviewed me about the film, in which he spoke of the “Lovecraft Trilogy” for the first time.
ANCIENT LORE was an exhilarating experience for me, full of beautiful coincidences and new companions. I hope you enjoy watching my film.
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