Animated Lovecraftian horror film scares up a poster and a trailer

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Ever since Universal broke our collective hearts by cancelling Guillermo del Toro’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, the future has been sadly empty of any hope for a possible Lovecraft project.  But wait, what’s this? A 3D animated film called AGES OF MADNESS from a Spanish studio that is currently in pre-production? Now the bad news: they need thirteen million euros and about three years total to finish the film, meaning that they’re shooting to show the thing come December 2014.  

Still.  If this comes to pass after all, it might very well be the next best thing to Guillermo’s own Lovecraft project.  But how about you be the judge? Check out the trailer and the poster and let us know what you think below!

Plot synopsis: There is a book that invokes gods older than this world, a book that can doom mankind: the Necronomicon. It changes hands through the years thanks to Nyarlatothep, causing madness and death; a young monk in the Middle Ages, an innocent girl in the Second World War, naive teenagers in the Roaring Twenties and an American misfit in today’s Tokyo. The book alters behaviors and unleashes horror. When the Elder Ones return, the existence of mankind is in danger…

The people behind AGES OF MADNESS also have a short film coming out this September called HELEN that acts as a sort of prequel.  Here’s the suitably disconcerting poster:

And a plot synopsis: Angelic Helen wakes up barely dressed and very confused after his first night at a hall of residence for female students during the Roaring Twenties. Her friend Elizabeth reminds her, mischievously, of the unbridled “petting party” celebrated in her room last night. Helen met other girls, new substances, adult games …. However, the disappearance of a mysterious book may put them at a terrible risk….

If you really need it, what follows is a background of the horrific well from which these movies draws their inspiration:  The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe created in the 1920s by American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Mythos stories tend to refer to the “Great Old Ones,” a fearsome assortment of ancient, powerful deities who came from outer space and once ruled the Earth. They are presently quiescent, having fallen into a death-like sleep at some time in the distant past. The best-known of these beings is Cthulhu, who currently lies “dead [but] dreaming” in the submerged city of R’lyeh somewhere in the southeast Pacific Ocean. One day, “when the stars are right”, the stones of R’lyeh will rise from beneath the sea, and Cthulhu will awaken and wreak havoc on the earth…