A dying professor’s bequest to his nephew leads him on a globe-spanning quest to unravel a twisted knot of fear, madness, nameless cults and horrors best left unknown. H.P. Lovecraft’s celebrated tale explodes on the screen as a new silent film—shot in the style of the 1920s, when Lovecraft wrote the story. A young man (Foyer) finds himself in charge of his great-uncle’s estate, and while going through his papers he comes across a box containing files on the “Cthulhu Cult.” He finds newspaper clippings and an account of his great-uncle’s meeting with a young artist suffering from horrific nightmares of strange creatures. The further he investigates his great-uncle’s notes, the more he realizes that there is something greater and very evil at work, involving an ancient race of creatures lying dormant for years deep in the ocean, waiting to be summoned so that they may rule the world. His global investigation casts him back to a gathering of archeologists in 1908, a police raid of a cult ritual in a Louisiana Bayou, and finally the doomed expedition of a group of sailors to an unknown island in the South Pacific. Bit by bit he pieces together the incredible horrors lurking just beyond the fringes of perception, and in a classically Lovecraftian style, it proves more than his sanity can bear.