“I shall never permit anything bearing my signature to be banalised and vulgarised into the flat infantile twaddle which passes for ‘horror tales’ amongst radio and cinema audiences!” So wrote H. P. Lovecraft (1895–1937) in a 1933 letter. In celebration of his 125. birthday we honor him with a film retrospective. Truth is stranger than fiction. H. P. Lovecraft’s stories were published in pulp magazines during his lifetime. In 1939 friends founded Arkham House to revive his literary legacy. Today H. P. Lovecraft is known as the man who led fantastic literature into the modern era. The horror comes from the depths of time and space to shatter our existence. Mankind is no longer the center of the universe. “No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.” In the face of digitization Lovecraft’s fiction is more relevant than ever. Our film selection underlines this point. Cthulhu fhtagn. Clemens Williges