Guests
The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival is about way more than watching movies. We'll also be featuring readings by some of today's most important Mythos authors, and presentations by other Lovecraftian creators. Below is a partial list of the guests you'll meet at the festival!
Guests
Christian Matzke is an author, prop builder and filmmaker from Maine (just south of the Chesuncook Shoggoth Pit). He founded the website Propping Up the Mythos in the mid-Nineties after a high fever compelled him to sculpt his first Cthulhu statue.
"Nyarlathotep" was his first short film, and has been followed by ten more in the years since. Christian is married to special FX artist Sarah Matzke, and together they are raising two young cultists in their 18th century haunted house near the ocean. Christian is hard at work writing the Necronomicon through his site patreon.com/Proppingupthemythos
Henrik Möller is a Swedish underground filmmaker with over a hundred satirical short films to his credit. In the world of horror films he is mostly known for the Philip K Dick film festival winner "Inviting the Demon" and the H.P. Lovecraft film festival best feature winner "Feed the Light".
Named by the AV Club as one of 10 female horror directors Blumhouse should hire, Izzy Lee is a writer and twice-nominated Rondo Award filmmaker. She has written for several fiction anthologies, as well as Birth.Movies.Death., Rue Morgue, Fangoria, Dread Central, and Diabolique, and is an editor for ScreenAnarchy.
After spending his first decade of adult life alternately working and bumming around the world, from Phnom Penh to Ouagadougou, Jesse Keller decided he wanted to be a filmmaker. He got his MFA at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and then made his first feature film, Blood Will Have Blood, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime. His short films have also played at festivals around the USA. When not shooting, he teaches filmmaking at San Diego Mesa College.
Jon Dearnley is a Maine native, Philadelphia-based Director of Photography who has worked on everything from short films to network TV, music videos and features. He and Christian Matzke have collaborated for over 20 years on Lovecraftian and sci-fi short film projects.
Malcolm Mills is a NYC-based filmmaker, actor, and songwriter. "You were really creepy!" is the most common compliment he received from years of theater. He plays a necromancer opposite Betty Gabriel (Get Out) in an upcoming feature, The Spine of Night, directed by the screenwriter of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots, Phil Gelatt. Horror novelist Laird Barron tweeted of his performance in the film They Remain, "If it were possible, I'd have a rider in every adaptation that he gets to play one of the villains." VR Food is Mills' directorial debut, in which he also served as its producer, writer, editor, and soundtrack composer. He loves cats.
After having studied cinema in Paris, Matthias Couquet has dedicated himself to the craft of filmmaking, while teaching screenwriting in workshops. He released his first non-student short film in 2018 with "The Summoned," a macabre tale which draws both from his strong leaning towards the fantastic genre and his interest in modern history and historical fiction. He is working on several movie projects and writing scripts for others, while continuing his own directorial plans. Matthias aims to pursue what he started with "The Summoned" and to keep bringing "weird fiction" to the screen.
Michael Shlain knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Born in Odessa, Ukraine, he is a writer-director and partner at Butcher Bird Studios, an award-winning creative media company in Los Angeles. Trained as an actor, he began his career as a literary agent before heeding the persistent cries of his soul and returning to his roots as a filmmaker. Recently, Shlain’s multi-format TV horror anthology IN A FOREIGN TOWN was an official selection at the 2019 MIPTV “In Development" forum at the Canneseries festival. He’s directed commercial and narrative content for clients including Twitch, Nat Geo, BBC America and Merck. He also dances Argentine Tango and can mix one hell of a Manhattan.
Passionate about cinema since childhood, Thomas Mercillon studied cinema in a Parisian film school in order to materialize this passion. During his studies in Paris, he met his friend Matthias Couquet, with whom he co-authored and co-directed his first short film, and wrote his first full length screenplay. Since then, Thomas Mercillon has written several short films, including "The Summoned," and is developping concepts and scripts for television series and more feature films.