M R James and H. P. Lovecraft
Panel Discussion with Andrew Migliore (moderator), Scott Connors, Robert Lloyd Parry, Richard Stanley
Lovecraft cites James as a great weird writer in several of his letters. What relationship does this master of the ghostly tale have to Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror and the Weird?
Andrew Migliore is the founder and original director of the annual H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon. Andrew is also the co-author of Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft published by Night Shade Books and was founder and producer at Lurker Films where he launched The H. P. Lovecraft Collection, The Weird Tale Collection, and The Edgar Allan Poe Collection on DVD. See his past Founder articles at the Daily Lurker https://medium.com/daily-lurker
Richard Stanley made his feature film directing debut with 1990's acclaimed Hardware, starring Dylan McDermott and Fields of the Nephilim's frontman, Carl McCoy. His second feature, Dust Devil, was an unconventional story of an otherworldly serial killer in South Africa, and has a rabid cult following due to its striking visuals and beautiful landscape photography, plus its decidedly Weird taint. He also has created a number of independent, award-winning documentaries, an adaptation of Clarke Ashton-Smith's "Mother of Toads," and wrote and directed H. P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space feature, produced by Spectrevision, starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, and Q'orianka Kilcher.
Robert Lloyd Parry is an actor and writer who specializes in literary storytelling: theatrical performances based upon texts from the golden age of the short story in English, approx 1880 - 1930. Since 2005 he has been touring the UK with the The M R James Project, a series of solo performances which bring to life the masterpieces of the father of the English Ghost Story. In 2015 he appeared as M R James in Mark Gatiss’s BBC documentary M R James: Ghost Writer. He has himself produced, written and presented two documentaries based on James’s work: “Wits in Felixstowe” and “Dim Presences.” Between 2013 – 16 he toured his adaptation of H G Wells’s The Time Machine around the UK, with the support of Arts Council England. He regularly performs short stories in pubs and libraries throughout the land, works by the likes of H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Saki, Arthur Machen, Kenneth Graham and E F Benson.
Scott Connors is an independent scholar living in northern California who specializes in the life and work of Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and other writers of weird fiction. Recently his five volume edition of Smith's Collected Fantasies was reprinted in trade paperback by Night Shade Books. His latest book, In the Realm of Mystery and Wonder, a collection of Smith's artwork and prose poems, was published this year by Centipede Press. Connors has twice been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award, and he received the Founders Award at the 2015 HPLFF. His work has been translated into both French and German. Les Editions Mnémos, the foremost publisher of fantasy works in France, asked him to write the introductions to their three volume set of Smith's work. His work has been published in Skelos, Lovecraft Annual, Weird Tales, Weird Fiction Review, All Hallows, Studies in Weird Fiction, Publishers Weekly, The Explicator, and academic books published by Rowman and Littlefield and Greenwood Press.
Kenneth Hite has designed, written, or co-authored 100+ roleplaying works, including Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London, The Dracula Dossier, the Delta Green RPG, Night’s Black Agents, The Fall of Delta Green, and Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. His other works include the two-volume Tour de Lovecraft, Cthulhu 101, The Cthulhu Wars for Osprey, the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales, an annotated edition of Chambers’ The King in Yellow, and four Lovecraftian children’s books. Half of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast and an Artistic Associate at Chicago’s WildClaw Theatre, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila.