Our judges, despite (or rather because of) their highly refined esthetic sensibilities and their extensive savvy on what makes a good Lovecraftian film (besides the bottomless popcorn tub), have finally made their agonizing decision at to this year’s winning screenplay. That’s the truth: it was no easy matter. There were so many fine submissions, the decision came close to being a coin toss. Close, but not quite.

Jeffrey Blake Palmer’s nightmare parade “The Sleeping Deep” rose to the top, very, very narrowly followed by Faisal A. Qureshi’s eerie “In Bright Darkness,” Patrick Shiffrar and Eric Miller’s incredibly ingenious “The Unnamables,” Brock Chandler’s seemingly eyewitness account of “The Colour out of Space,” Marc Pilvinsky’s perfect updating of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “Reborn,” David Prior’s unsettling version of “The Lurking Fear,” Tony Contento’s effective genre-spanning “The Reliquary of Ness,” Nathan Shelton’s hilarious “The Unspeakables,” and David W. Bertoni’s apocalyptic mystery, “The Stunning Box.” Truly, all would have been fit for the award. It was an embarrassment of riches!

The adaptations of Lovecraft’s own tales were boldly creative, deconstructing the originals to make explicit some matters that had been implicit, and never failing to deliver a stomach-full of authentic horror. All our authors dealt delicately and maturely with the elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, leaving certain things in the shadows of subtlety. The combination of Lovecraftian horror with elements of detective fiction, epic fantasy, and even broad comedy all worked amazingly well. Each screenplay looked like the sure winner—until you read the next!

Your judges, Robert M. Price, Joseph S. Pulver, Brian Lumley, and Andrew Migliore are putting their occult will power together to cause all of these screenplays to reach the screen. Together, there is a real threat they will end civilization (or at least cinema) as we know it. And who’s complaining?