A couple weeks ago I attended NecronomicCon 2026, the biennial convention celebrating Rhode Island author H.P. Lovecraft and other artists and writers who created weird fiction. This was my fourth time attending and, as always, I had a great time meeting interesting people and learning strange and unusual things. I thought I'd share a few highlights here on the blog.
First, I attended a session about colonial-era witches on film. The horror writers who were on the panel mentioned some of my favorite New England witch movies, like Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015) and that creepy, made-for-TV classic Crowhaven Farm (1970). They also mentioned a couple films that I'm adding to my watch list. One of them, The Sudbury Devil (2023) was filmed in Massachusetts with local actors. The plot focuses on two Puritan soldiers who are sent into the forest to investigate reports of witchcraft. Bad things happen, including some supernatural sex, so perhaps don't watch this one with the kids. The other is The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), which I didn't even know was about witchcraft in Colonial New England. Spoiler alert: it is!
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| A scene from Crowhaven Farm. |
Speaking of witches, I gave a brief talk titled "Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches' Sabbath." Lovecraft read Margaret Murray's seminal book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in the early 1920s and, like many readers, accepted its claims that the people accused of witchcraft were actually members of a secret pagan cult . More importantly, though, the book stirred his imagination as an author. Before reading The Witch-Cult, Lovecraft mentioned witches just twice in his fiction. After reading it, he mentioned witches, witchcraft, or the “witch-cult” in 31 additional stories, and even mentioned Murray’s book directly several times.
Lovecraft was particularly intrigued by the idea of the witches' sabbaths, those midnight, orgiastic gatherings where infants were allegedly sacrificed and the Devil was supposedly worshipped by his followers. He included witches' sabbaths in 19 stories, beginning with 1923’s “The Rats in the Walls” and ending with 1935’s “The Haunter of the Dark,” one of his final pieces of fiction. For Murray, the Sabbath was a purely human, non-supernatural event, but Lovecraft transformed it into a celebration of the non-human, a barrier-breaking festival demonstrating humanity’s insignificance in a cosmos controlled by inimical and uncaring forces.
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| The cover slide from my talk! |
I think my talk was well-received, and hopefully it will be published at some point.
The last thing I want to mention is Strange Magick, a documentary from local director Bill Darmon. The film examines possible connections between Lovecraft, a New Hampshire writer named Myrta Little, and Aleister Crowley, the famous British occultist. Did Lovecraft visit America's Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire? Did Aleister Crowley plot to kill a Harvard professor while vacationing in New England? Did Myrta Little secretly meet Crowley and accept an assignment from him?
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| A still from Strange Magick. |
Strange Magick asks these questions and more. You may or may not accept the answers it provides, but I enjoyed seeing the filmmakers try to connect the dots between various strange, local topics. A couple people I know appear as talking heads, and the movie has good production values for what is obviously a labor of love. It also has great re-enactments, including Crowley performing some magickal feats and scenes from a few Lovecraft tales.
The 90-minute version shown at NecronomiCon was compiled from four separate films Darmon and his colleagues made. It's not publicly available yet, but you can watch the four separate films on YouTube. I highly recommend them for anyone who likes weird New England lore!