USA. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Chad Ferrin, Based on the Writing of H.P. Lovecraft, Producers – Chad Ferrin, Gina La Piana, Robert Miano & Jeff Olan, Photography – Jeff Billings, Music – Richard Band, Makeup/Creature Effects – Ojala Productions (Supervisor – Jim Ojala), Production Design – Zebediah DeVane. Production Company – Crappy World Films/Laurelwood Pictures.
Cast
Gina La Piana (Alex), Robert Miano (Russel Marsh), Johann Urb (Petri), Silvia Spross (Ingrid Krauer), Jackie Debatin (Deb), Kelli Maroney (Ambrose Zadok), Nicolas Coster (Finlay), Timothy Muskatell (Dr Gene Rayburn), Jerry Irons (Constable Legrasse)
Plot
Alex and her husband Petri arrive in Oxnard, California, wanting to take time out to get over a miscarriage she had. They sign into the luxury AirBNB at Solar Beach rented out by Russel Marsh and his pregnant partner Ingrid Krauer. Russell and Ingrid prove over-friendly and Petri is swayed by their charms. While on their yacht, Russel hypnotises Petri and makes him swallow a tentacled creature that emerges from Ingrid’s womb. Alex becomes paranoid as the people around the beach area appear to belong to a cult that seems to want to target her for a purpose, while killing all those that oppose them.
Minnesota-based director Chad Ferrin has maintained a modest career down the low-budget independent end of the market since the start of the 2000s. Ferrin first appeared with the psycho film Unspeakable (2000) and then went onto The Ghouls (2003), Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! (2006), Someone’s Knocking at the Door (2009) about demonic rapists, the Death Row horror The Chair (2016), Parasites (2016) about killer homeless people, the gonzo comedy Exorcism at 60,000 Feet (2020), Night Caller (2021) with a phone psychic against a serial killer and its sequel Scalper (2023), the True Crime Pig Killer (2022), and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Old Ones (2024).
With The Deep Ones, Chad Ferrin takes on H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft cinema has become legion ever since Stuart Gordon’s cult classic Re-Animator (1985) and throughout the 2010s has headed down towards the low-budget end of the spectrum. (A more detailed listing of Lovecraft appearances on film can be found with Lovecraftian Films). Ferrin appears to have very loosely taken the basics of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), which concerned a seaside town where the locals were the result of miscegenation between humans and fish people. In the story, ‘The Deep Ones’ was the name given to the sea creatures. The same story was also loosely adapted in Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (2001).
Lovecraft would probably have had an issue with some of the modernisations that come in Ferrin’s adaptation. Lovecraft preferred sinister New England towns so the idea of a film set around a California beachside town and a sinister AirBNB would probably have been an alien world for him. The sinister AirBNB trope has become a popular one in the last couple of years with the likes of Tone-Deaf (2019), The Rental (2020), Sacrilege (2020), Superhost (2021), Barbarian (2022) and Mid-Century (2022).
Chad Ferrin gives the impression he gained the use of a beach house in Ventura County – indeed, the location is the home of lead actress/co-producer singer Gina La Piana – and conceived the film around it. There is not really that much of H.P. Lovecraft to the film – some fish hybrid people, cultists and a fish creature that rises from the sea at the end to mate with Gina La Piana. Mostly the plot has been lifted from the basics of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – young couple move into a house where husband is wooed away by the friendly elderly neighbours and drawn into their cult, which has sinister intentions in impregnating the wife for a chosen purpose.
As a Lovecraft adapter, Chad Ferrin sits down around as being a low-budget Stuart Gordon. There’s an amusingly perverse image where Johann Urb is lured to Robert Miano’s yacht (which remains moored in the harbour and never goes out to sea) and is hypnotised while a tentacle that looks like a sprig of asparagus emerges from pregnant Silvia Spross’s bikini bottom and forces its way down Urb’s throat. Later we see Urb dragged away by a host of tentacles coming from Silvia’s Spross’s crotch. The film climaxes with the cultists holding Gina La Piana down so that she can be impregnated by a fishman that emerges from the ocean. The general cheesiness of the effects in these scenes seems the complete antithesis of the mood that Lovecraft creates on the page.
Other films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft include:- The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die/Monster of Terror (1965), The Shuttered Room (1967) and The Dunwich Horror (1969). The big success in the modern era was Stuart Gordon’s splattery black comedy version of Re-Animator (1985), which popularised Lovecraft on film. This led to a host of B-budget Lovecraft adaptations, including Stuart Gordon’s subsequent From Beyond (1986), The Curse (1987), The Unnameable (1988), The Resurrected (1992), Necronomicon (1993), The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993), Lurking Fear (1994), Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (2001), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006), Cool Air (2006), Chill (2007), Cthulhu (2007), The Tomb (2007), Colour from the Dark (2008), The Dunwich Horror (2009), The Color (2010), Pickman’s Muse (2010), The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), The Dark Sleep (2013), The Haunter of the Dark (2015), Herbert West: Re-Animator (2017), Color Out of Space (2019), the tv series Lovecraft Country (2020), Markham (2020), H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021), The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021), The Lurking Fear (2023) and Suitable Flesh (2023). Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008) is a documentary about Lovecraft.
Also of interest is The Manitou (1978), which features an appearance of the Great Old One; Cast a Deadly Spell (1991) and its sequel Witch Hunt (1994), a tv movie set in an alternate world where magic works and where the central character is a detective named H.P. Lovecraft; Juan Piquer Simon’s cheap and loosely inspired Cthulhu Mansion (1992); John Carpenter’s Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness (1995); the fan parody The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu (2009) and the parody Call Girl of Cthulhu (2014); even a trilogy of animated children’s film Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016), Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom (2017) and Howard Lovecraft and the Kingdom of Madness (2018) in which a young Lovecraft encounters his own creations; while Batman faces Lovecraftian horrors in the animated Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023). The Elder Gods turn up at the end of The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Lovecraft (Paul Titley) appears as an imaginary companion in Ghostland/Incident in a Ghostland (2018) and In Search of Lovecraft (2008) features a tv news crew discovering that Lovecraft’s works are true. Lovecraft’s key work of demonic lore The Necronomicon also makes appearances in films such as Equinox (1970), The Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), and was also borrowed as an alternate retitling for Jesus Franco’s surreal and otherwise unrelated Succubus/Necronomicon (1969) about a BDSM dancer.
Trailer here