In November of 2003, we staged a live reading of the script in Portland. At the halftime break, I was approached by a sinister-looking bald man dressed entirely in ornate black antique clothing, with two long, surgically implanted horns under his scalp. He introduced himself as Diabolus Rex, a magister templi in the Church of Satan and a close associate of Anton LaVey, the "Black Pope," before LaVey's death in 1997. Rex was from Astoria, the son of a satanist couple who lived there in the '60s and '70s. He rattled off a dozen uncanny resemblances between Astoria and Lovecraft's fictional Innsmouth, and even unguessed parallels with original elements of our own adaptation: His childhood basement opened onto the series of old tunnels under the town I thought I had invented for the film. Rex said that Lovecraft, though a strict materialist, was a channel for the occult (literally, hidden) world to reveal itself, and that now we too were unwittingly being steered to this purpose.