H.P. Lovecraft Gets the Silent Treatment
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POPLAR GROVE, Ill. - illiNews -- Spooky Ventures is continuing their string of short, silent, 1920s styled films by looking to horror author H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration. "The Statement of Randolph Carter," the second pseudo-vintage film from Spooky Ventures is live on Youtube.

Spooky Ventures has been around since 2019, but producing films is a new activity. Its roots are tied to the horror hosting show from Spooky Ventures, Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary.

So, how did that spawn a series of short, silent horror films? Well, each episode of "Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary" starts with one such movie (some of the early episodes had more than one). Then that short gets a silly remix of it, all before the main feature airs. Well, that requires a steady stream of silent shorts, and while there were enough for all sixteen episodes of season one, there aren't that many available to be used. So, the idea was born to create new, pseudo-vintage short films for Spooky Ventures.

Gary Hill, who runs Spooky Ventures, and is both Scary Gary and D.B. Lovecraft (although D.B. is credited as Dark Starr – a pen name and former stage name Hill has used), serves as director, co-producer, script-writer and more for the series. While it's his first time doing something of this scope, the "Spooky Movie Time…" shows are done almost entirely by him alone. He's also no stranger to a movie set and has been appearing as an actor in small parts in several films recently.

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For the second season of "Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary," there will be a total of 15 of these films done and released. Each will go up as a separate film before being used in an episode. The first five have been filmed and are in various states of post-production, with only "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" being release thus far.

The films are intended to look like they were done in the hey-day of silent film, but it's also somewhat tongue-in-cheek in that regard. All the films will be based on short stories or novels. The majority of those are literary works that were around in the 1920s. The exceptions are stories by Gary Hill.

Hill's co-producer Sam Cornn is a set and prop wizard, having done haunted attractions for many years. A number of actors took part in the first five films, some who have been acting for years and others who are completely new to it.

The cast of "The Statement of Randolph Carter" is Andrew Laabs (Randolph Carter), Mike Korn (Harley Warren), Jeff Scaduto (detective one) and Jim Woodward (detective two). The film can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4lZGiQI6lo