H.P. Lovecraft Receiving The Animated Treatment

Not only is Ages of Madness going to be a big-budget Cthulhu movie, it’s going to be a 3D animated feature.

Despite today’s popularity of eldritch horror, H.P. Lovecraft’s works haven’t seen a great deal of success in Hollywood. While smaller, indy projects like Cthulhu, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu have all managed to earn cult followings, projects like Guillermo Del Toro’s The Mountains of Madness keep on getting proposed and then wind up canceled. However, it turns out that Lovecraft’s mythos is getting a 3D animated movie by Lince Studios.

The Spanish film company has announced that it’s working on a Ages of Madness. The feature is going to be an adult-oriented film, and it’s being directed by Helio Mira, who’s got more experience working in television as a writer than as a director. At the moment, the film is still in the concept phase of production, will take three years to create, and will also require a budget of 13 million euros. It’s also been revealed that Lince Studios is producing another Lovecraft animated short, Helen, which will supposedly tie in to Ages of Madness.

Here’s the plot summary for Ages of Madness, courtesy of the movie’s official Facebook page:

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 behaviours and unleashes horror. When the Elder Ones return, the existence of mankind is in danger…

The teaser trailer for this project can be seen at right, and it certainly looks promising, but we’ll have to wait a while before final judgement can be passed. Helen is due out this September, but Ages of Madness is currently scheduled for release in December 2014.

Source: Twitch