Back From the Dead

Washington’s battered film industry finds new energy, new talent, new funding, and some horrific inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft.

By Lia Steakley Dicker

Photo: John Keatley

THE PRESSURE MOUNTS as Daniel Gildark and Grant Cogswell race down the Oregon Coast to the Sea Lion Caves. The caves, a celebrated natural wonder and tourist trap, are the setting for a key scene in their first feature film, Cthulhu, and though the sea lions don’t know it, they’re in the script. Daylight is fading fast, the winding road adds an hour to the trip, and it’s their final day of filming with Cthulhu ’s one big-name actor, ex– Beverly Hills 90210 star Tori Spelling, before she returns to Hollywood. After a five-hour drive, Spelling and crew arrive at the caves—but the sea lions are a no-show. “It was a nightmare,” recalls Gildark, the movie’s producer, director, and coauthor. “Turns out the guy who assured us the sea lions were at the caves lied, because he wanted to meet Tori.”

Cogswell, Cthulhu ’s other author, recalls storming around in vexation, “with the whole crew pretending they weren’t staring at me out of the corner of their eyes.” And then he got it. “There was a piece of dialogue anyway about sea lions having once been people. I bent it a little so that Russ asks ‘Where are the sea lions?’ and Tori tells him the legend and says, ‘Maybe they changed their minds again.’ I hope to be that lucky next time something like that happens.” An hour later, the shoot wraps and everyone heads back up the coast to Astoria. The next day a violent storm drenches the seaside town, cutting short the filming and sending the crew back to Seattle, ahead of schedule but short on footage.

Phantom sea lions, a starstruck rube, a sudden storm that shuts down shooting… all in a day’s work for independent (or, as Cogswell calls them, “guerrilla”) filmmakers in the Pacific Northwest. Investors pulled out at the last moment, actors canceled days before filming began, cameras suffered rare software glitches. But every other setback and crisis seemed like a minor inconvenience compared to the challenge of financing the film. “There were several times when the project was threatened and we thought it would fall apart at any minute,” says Gildark, 38. “But we were determined to make this movie even if that meant shooting it with a video camera.”

Sometimes that meant scrambling in other ways. A 12-hour location shoot in Astoria, in a house owned by conservative Christians, was interrupted when the generator died right before a critical seduction scene between Spelling and Cthulhu ’s male lead, Jason Cottle. It took the crew’s gaffer three hours to get the generator running—leaving 45 minutes to complete the shoot. Spelling was half-naked, crawling on Cottle in the kitchen, when the homeowners walked through the front door. Gildark hurriedly wrapped up shooting while his assistant producer distracted the hosts.

Phantom sea lions, a starstruck rube, a ­sudden storm that shuts down shooting… all in a day’s work for ­independent filmmakers in the Northwest.

This month, all the hasty rewrites, improvised solutions, and sheer perseverance will pay off, as Cthulhu makes its debut at a private screening and then hits the festival circuit. An art-house film with a political message, it is loosely adapted from the early-twentieth-century horror master H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” It tells the tale of a Seattle professor who returns to his small hometown for a funeral and discovers that his estranged father leads an ominous New Age cult whose followers worship an ancient god named Cthulhu. Not your typical blood-and-guts horror film, Cthulhu is laced with broader themes: suburban sprawl, the state of national politics, the challenge people face when they return to a past they thought they’d left behind. “This film oozes Northwestiness,” boasts Cogswell. “We are telling a story that is very much of this region. This story wouldn’t have happened anywhere else.”

You might say the same thing about the filmmakers themselves. Cogswell, a homegrown poet and civic activist, is a longtime champion of audacious, even quixotic, efforts: He wrote an epic poem about Marion Zioncheck, Seattle’s doomed radical congressman in the 1930s; co-organized the monorail initiative that, for a while, set the city on its way toward elevated transit; and, in 2001, ran valiantly for City Council. Gildark was a student at Portland’s Northwest Film Center, one of the largest community-based film arts programs in the country, where Drugstore Cowboy director Gus Van Sant once taught.

Cthulhu emerged from a troubled period for both of them. Cogswell was sleeping on his old friend Gildark’s floor, recovering from a wrenching breakup. “It was a dark time,” he recalls. “The nation had just invaded Iraq, and I felt the only way to break ourselves out of the malaise was through art. Neither of us is a horror aficionado, but we wanted to make a movie with a political message, and this genre works really well for that purpose.”

Cogswell’s mind went straight to the Lovecraft story, which he was rereading—just the thing for a dark time. He penned the screenplay in 10 days and spent the next two years revising it with Gildark. Even when he was writing the script in Portland, Cogswell thought about Seattle. He wrote with specific sites and buildings, many of them friends’ homes, in mind. And Seattle offered other valuable resources: Cogswell’s fundraising network from his activist days, and veteran producers, cinematographers, and other filmmakers who knew their way around Hollywood. “To do the film on the level we wanted to do, we had to come to Seattle,” says Gildark. In Seattle they enlisted local screenwriter and director Robinson Devor as an advisor. Devor put the filmmakers in touch with his agent at the Hollywood powerhouse United Talent Agency (UTA), which led to Spelling accepting the role of a seductress charged with persuading the professor, played by Cottle, to join the mysterious cult.

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