Eldritch Events
The literary, “CthulhuCon”, portion of the festival will take place in the two upper rooms from 1:30-5:30pm on Saturday and Sunday. The main screen downstairs will be used exclusively for films, opening and closing, and award ceremonies.
Doors open at 1pm on the weekend. The theater closes for cleanup and dinner at 5:30 and re-opens at 6:00pm with tracks starting at 7:00pm.
Events for the 2009 Portland Festival.
Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow is an award-nominated anthology of new stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Ellen will host a group reading by some of the contributors to the volume: Laird Barron, Marc Laidlaw, Michael Shea, and Caitlín R. Kiernan.
Caitlín R. Kiernan will be reading from her most recent short-fiction collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others (unless she decides to read something else, which is always possible). Time permitting, questions will be taken from the audience afterwards. Caitlín's most recent novel, The Red Tree, has been nominated for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award.
Explore the life and works of Lovecraft's protege Clark Ashton Smith, "Klarkash-Ton", the writer, painter, and sculptor, and poet who was one of the most admired writers for Weird Tales, one of the greatest explorers of cosmic and fantastic realms, and a major contributor to Lovecraft's "Mythos".
This panel examines the course of Lovecraft's literary from amateur journalist to pulp writer, discussing his (generally unsuccessful) attempts to secure book publication of his stories, and concluding with a survey of his posthumous editors, from August Derleth of Arkham House to the present day.
Screenwriters, directors and actors discuss shooting, casting, editing and funding a twisted celluloid story.
H.P. Lovecraft has been an inspiration to writers since he created his mythos and his Elder Gods. Generations of writers have used his creations to write their own interpretations of his work--some in pastiches that stayed close to the original texts, others in wholly original works that take Lovecraft's mythos and twists it into very modern and sometimes almost unrecognizable forms. Meet some of the contemporary writers who are playing in Lovecraft's universe but making it their own.
Cosmic horror, that literary discipline dealing with the vast, cold universe and its manifold terrors, is a cornerstone of Lovecraftian fiction and a genre lately revived and celebrated by the proliferation of independent presses. This panel will examine and discuss the cosmic horror niche from the non-Euclidian geometry of Lovecraft’s most febrile imaginings, to the seductive extra dimensional forces of darkness introduced by Clive Barker, to the latest trends of a panoply of dark stars such as Caitlin Kiernan, John Langan, and Wilum Pugmire.
Editors unlock some of their arcane secrets about why they started a magazine, how they assemble an anthology, and what horrors they seek.
Writers of the horror, the horror, tell (not show!) us about their craft, influences, ritual and business experiences.
