“I’VE GOT A SOFT CTHULHU PLUSH TOY I sleep with upstairs,” confesses Richard Stanley, on the line to SFX from his home in the French Pyrenees. “Somehow we’ve responded to Lovecraft’s terrifying, inhuman cosmic forces by making them cute and quaint, as a way of dealing with them.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got to try and change that.’ We need to reposition the Old Ones as an implacable, potentially extinctive force that one can’t negotiate with. One could say that it was time for the Great Old Ones to have a publicity campaign.”

Key to that promotional strategy for ancient, sanity-crunching horror is . Written and directed by Stanley – his first feature film since the legendarily sour circumstances that removed him from the helm of 1996’s – it’s an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft tale that first saw print in a 1927 issue of.