All language subtitles for H.P.Lovecraft.Schatten.aus.der.Zeit.1975.German.AC3.DVDRiP.x264-CRiMiNAL.mkv

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

by George Moorse

based on a story
by H.P. Lovecraft

I cannot guarantee that
what I believe I found

on the night of July
17th to 18th, 1974

in Western Australia
corresponds to the truth.

There is reasonable hope

that my experience was wholly
or partly a hallucination.

Nevertheless, the memory of it
is so horrifyingly realistic

that at times I lose all hope.

If it really happened to me,
then humanity must prepare itself

to accept concepts of the cosmos
whose mere mention is paralysing.

It must also be on guard
against a lurking danger

that could bring unthinkable
horrors to the entire planet.

For this reason, I
urge with all my might

for the total abandonment
of all attempts

to excavate these fragments
of unknown primordial masonry.

It was a terrible
confirmation of everything

I had tried to relegate to
the realm of myth and dream.

Strictly speaking,
there is no proof.

I, Nikolaus Wilfried Petersen, am
the son of Johann and Anna Petersen,

both from Göttingen.

I was born and raised in Göttingen,

went to school and university there.

In 1951, I came to Munich
as a professor of economics.

For five years, my life
followed a normal course.

Never did I have the slightest interest
in occultism or abnormal psychology.

It happened on Thursday, May 14th, 1957,

that a strange amnesia overtook me.

My head hurt.

I had the feeling that
something foreign was trying

to take possession of my thoughts.

The collapse came at 10:20 a.m. while
I was talking with some students.

My unconsciousness lasted
28 hours and 40 minutes.

On May 15th at 3:00 in the
afternoon, I began to speak.

The doctor and my wife
were deeply shocked

by my completely altered voice and
the strange expression on my face.

It quickly became clear that I had
no memory of my identity or past.

However, I seemed to be making an
effort to hide this memory gap.

My speech was oddly
clumsy and tentative.

My diction was strangely stylized,

as if I had learned the German
language only from books.

It quickly became clear
to me that the attempt

to cover up my memory
loss was failing.

And I now openly
admitted the amnesia.

I seemed to have lost interest in my
old personality at the very moment.

I realised that the doctors had
accepted my case of amnesia.

Over the years, I began to gather
information of all kinds...

on history, natural sciences,
language, art, and folklore.

Things every child
knows I had to relearn.

At the same time,

I inexplicably mastered
almost unexplored areas of knowledge.

I mentioned events from
times beyond our history.

Whenever I was questioned about it,

I tried to dismiss it as
intellectual playfulness.

I also had a way of
speaking about the future,

that frightened those around me.

But soon I managed to adapt to the
language and customs of the time.

Like a traveller from a
distant, foreign land.

My thirst for knowledge
seemed inexhaustible.

I met many academics,

as my case had gained some fame
among the psychologists of the time.

But I rarely found friendship.

My outlook and my manner of speech

seemed to cause discomfort
in everyone I met.

From the moment I awoke, my wife
looked at me with fear and disgust.

She felt that something utterly foreign
had taken possession of my body.

In 1958, she divorced me.

She never wanted to see me again.

The small fortune at my disposal,

I began to spend
slowly and carefully,

travelling and studying at
various centres of science.

My research journeys took me
to far-off, remote places.

My academic stays
at various universities

were marked by my
abnormally rapid comprehension.

As if my second self
possessed an intelligence

far superior to my own.

I seemed to have the power to influence
the thoughts and actions of others.

But I tried to hide this ability.

There were rumours that I was in contact

with leaders of occult
groups and secret sects.

In fact, I must have intensely
studied occult literature,

as I later found marginal notes in my
handwriting in many relevant works.

In the summer of 1962,

I began to show signs of
boredom and waning interest.

I hinted that changes
would soon occur.

I spoke of recurring memories
from my previous life.

On the evening of the
26th of September,

I gave the housekeeper
and the maids the evening off.

The lights in the house
stayed on late into the night.

The doctor found me
unconscious in the living room.

At 11:15 a.m.
on the 27th of September,

I stirred violently.

My face began to show
signs of expression.

Not those of my second
personality, but of my normal self.

At 11:30, I uttered strange sounds.

It seemed as if I had to
struggle against something.

Then I began to speak and
continued the conversation.

I had started five years
earlier with my students.

After five years, four
months, and 13 days,

Nikolaus Wilfried Petersen had returned.

A mind, whose sense of time

was still fixed on that
Thursday morning in 1957.

My reintegration into normal life
was a painful and difficult process.

But I tried to look at the matter
as philosophically as possible.

I began working at the university again

and managed to keep it up for a year.

During the last semester, Karin
Schmidt became my assistant

and remained my companion
through the difficult times to come.

Vague dreams and ideas
constantly haunted me.

My sense of time,
my ability to distinguish

between sequential and
simultaneous events, was impaired.

I was obsessed with the
feeling that my amnesia

had caused some kind of unholy exchange.

That my second self had, in reality,

been an intruder from the unknown
and had displaced my own personality.

The question of where my true self
might have resided during the years

in which another occupied my
body became ever more tormenting.

Feverishly, I searched for information

about the studies and
research travels of that "other"

during the lost five years.

I spoke of my research only with Karin
Schmidt and a few trusted psychologists.

Over time, I began to concern
myself with other cases of amnesia,

but only those with
comparable experiences.

These cases could be traced,

scattered across the centuries,
back to the beginnings of humanity.

In three cases there was
mention of an unknown machine,

like the one that
had stood in my house

shortly before my
second transformation.

Had something from an abyss of nature
blindly stumbled through time and space?

Were these cases monstrous
experiments by unknown powers?

When the dreams and visions began,
I believed I was going insane.

Was there perhaps a special
form of self-deception

that affects amnesia victims?

Efforts by the subconscious to
fill the void with pseudo-memories.

I seemed to be a prisoner, and fear
brooded over everything that I saw.

At first, I tried to dismiss
these dreams as something natural.

Images and things I had read,

arranged into fantastic new forms
by the uncontrollable whims of sleep.

Some visions merely reflected
standard textbook knowledge

of the primitive world
from 150 million years ago.

But as the months went by,
I found it harder and harder

to escape the feeling of fear.

Now the dreams had taken on
the character of memories.

At this point, I deepened my study
of other cases of amnesia in the hope

that by doing so I might distance
myself from my own problems

and free myself from
their emotional grip.

The exact opposite occurred.

In old books, I kept coming
across descriptions of visions

that in detail matched my own.

Together with Karin,
I studied medical,

historical, and
anthropological records.

Karin discovered in my library
a series of books unknown to me,

which my other self had
apparently acquired.

They were works of
forbidden teachings.

The pages were full of
scribbled marginal notes.

One note in von Juntz's
Nameless Cults

consisted of curvilinear hieroglyphs

that followed no recognisable,
known human pattern.

They were the hieroglyphs I saw
again and again in my dreams.

Signs whose meaning I
sometimes thought I knew.

They were written in the same ink

as the German corrections
in my own handwriting.

After we had compiled the
various reports, old and modern,

anthropological and medical,

a consistent mixture of myth
and hallucination emerged,

which shook our world-view.

Here, ancient myth and
modern speculation converged.

Humanity is only one,
and perhaps the last,

of the highly developed
and dominant species

in the long history of this planet.

Things of unimaginable form
had built towers into the sky

and wrested every secret from nature,

long before the
amphibian ancestor of man

had crawled from the seething
sea 300 million years ago.

Some had come down from the stars.

Some were as old as
the cosmos itself.

Most legends spoke of a race

that had lived only 150 million
years before the rise of humankind.

They alone had succeeded
in conquering time.

They had learned everything ever
known or ever to be known on Earth.

Their powerful
consciousness projected itself

into the past and future
across millions of years.

In their vast archives they hoarded
volumes of texts and images,

storing the knowledge of
the world, past and future.

The history and
achievements of all species

that ever were or ever would be.

This race was called
the Great Old Ones.

They had come from a dying
planet in another galaxy.

The Great Old Ones could project
their consciousness into the future.

In every era, they
would select a specimen

of the highest life form
and possess its body.

Thus, without attracting attention, they
could study other epochs and life forms.

Meanwhile, the
consciousness of the victim

was taken to the age
of the Great Old Ones.

Only when all its knowledge had
been stored in their archives

was it allowed to
return to its own time.

Its memory of the stay with the Great
Old Ones was erased from its mind.

Strange machines were used to send
the consciousness of the Great Old Ones,

along with their stored knowledge, back.

In our time, tradition said,

nothing remained of the
Great Old Ones but ruins.

Yet the Great Old Ones
did not always succeed

in completely erasing memory
from their victims' minds.

This fragmentary
knowledge entered into legend

and was preserved by occult
sects throughout the ages.

The Necronomicon and
von Junzt's Nameless Cults

hint at the existence of such a sect.

When I had brought my research into
a coherent form in the year 1967,

the fear seemed to fade from me.

I believed I had found
a convincing explanation

for all the phenomena
that had disturbed me.

During my amnesia, I had
read the forbidden legends

and made contact with
members of occult sects.

That alone had provided
the material for my dreams.

As for the hieroglyphs, I had
undoubtedly modelled them

on descriptions in ancient legends
and woven them into my dreams.

The more I thought about it, the more
convincing my own argument seemed.

A large number of
psychologists shared this view.

If I saw strange
things in my dreams,

they were merely echoes of myths I
had absorbed during my second state.

I noted almost calmly that my visions
became more frequent and more detailed.

I continued to record my dreams
as psychological documents.

And then I saw the
living things themselves.

In my dreams I always avoided
looking down at myself.

But then, one night,

I could no longer resist
the morbid temptation.

It took me weeks to get used to the
visions of my monstrous dream-body.

I now physically moved
among the other beings

and read terrible books from the shelves
and wrote for hours with a quill,

held by the tentacles
that hung from my head.

There were records of beings that had
inhabited the Earth in a forgotten past,

and terrifying chronicles of
intelligences with grotesque bodies

that would populate Earth millions of
years after the death of the last human.

I read utterly forgotten
chapters of human history.

I learned that the beings around
me were the Great Old Ones

and that my consciousness had
been abducted from the distant future.

The whole time, I seemed to be
writing the history of my own era.

Yes, I was writing a book.

A book in which I poured out
all my knowledge of our time.

There were others too,
who wrote their books.

They had been abducted from all corners
of time history and the solar system.

I awoke each morning in a fever.

Sometimes I desperately
tried to verify information.

Traditionally accepted facts
took on new and dubious aspects.

I shuddered at the thought of the
secrets that the past might be hiding

and trembled at the threat
that the future might still bring.

And what post-human beings
hinted about humanity's fate

is too terrible to speak of.

Meanwhile, in my dreams,

I kept writing endlessly
this story of my own era,

which I was preparing for the central
archive of the Great Old Ones.

The archive was housed in
an underground structure.

It was meant to outlast the
Great Old Ones themselves.

I came to know it well, because I
often worked there and consulted books.

The books were stored
in metal containers.

My own history book was assigned
a place on the lowest level.

In my dreams I found myself in an
era about 150 million years ago.

The Great Old Ones seemed to be a
highly developed organic species,

related to both plants and animals.

They seemed to form a single
loosely connected nation or league,

sharing major institutions.

The most important resources
were rationally distributed.

Power was delegated to
a small governing group,

elected by all who had passed certain
educational and psychological tests.

An army was kept on constant alert.

For reasons that
were never spoken of.

But which were obviously
connected to the constant fear

of the great sealed trapdoors
in the underground corridors.

This fear concerned
a terrible older race

of gelatinous, completely alien beings.

They dwelled in mighty basalt
structures of windowless towers.

It was like this when the Great Old Ones

rushed to our planet
through time and space.

For the Great Old Ones it was easy

to subjugate the cruel beings and drive
them down into the caves of the Earth.

After that, the Great Old Ones
sealed the caves

and left the beings to their fate.

But as time passed, signs increased

that the beings were growing stronger
and more numerous inside the Earth.

At their first escape attempt,

they destroyed one of the
cities of the Great Old Ones.

Stronger precautions were then ordered,

and most of the gates leading into the
Earth's interior were sealed forever.

The Great Old Ones were afraid.

One day, the older beings
would break out for good.

All the research of the Great Old Ones

on past and future times
served only one purpose...

to find a safe refuge for
their endangered race.

And always the shadow of nameless
fear hung over the sealed trapdoors

and the dark, windowless
towers of the older beings.

In the years 1971 and 1972,

in the Journal of the German
Psychological Society,

a series of articles appeared

in which I summarized my
experiences and conclusions.

In July of 1973,

a letter from the Psychological
Society was forwarded to me,

which began the most
terrifying phase of my life.

The letter had the postmark
of Pilbara, Western Australia,

and bore the signature of a man

who, as I found out
through inquiries,

was a mining engineer of
considerable prominence.

Enclosed were some
strange photographs.

The engineer, a certain
Mr. McKenzie, wrote

that he had discovered some monoliths

and evidently very
old ruins in the desert,

near the gold mines his
company was working.

He wrote that the Australian aboriginals

associated these ruins
with some of their legends.

They spoke of large, dark caves
within the earth and of icy winds

that drove away anyone who
dared approach the ruins.

McKenzie regarded the stories of the
aboriginals as superstitious fantasies,

but the huge stones they spoke of...

they existed.

And they bore a remarkable
resemblance to the monoliths

I had seen in my dreams and described

for the Journal of the
German Psychological Society.

McKenzie proposed that I accompany him
to visit the still unexplored ruins.

They were not far from the gold mines

and I could count on
any assistance from him

that I needed for my research.

Once we overcame the initial shock,

we began to make
plans and decisions.

Then we got to work.

We contacted the Archaeological
Department of the University of Munich.

We had decided that I
would fly ahead alone,

and Karin would follow
in about three weeks.

She still had important work
to complete at the university.

On July 1st, 1974, we said
our goodbyes at Munich Airport.

McKenzie picked me up from
the airport in Sydney.

An exceptionally competent
and personable young man.

July 11th.

I can't describe the
feelings that gripped me

when I actually touched
one of those stone blocks

that I knew from my dreams.

A faint trace of engraved
markings was still preserved.

My hands trembled as I recognised
part of the curved hieroglyphs

that had made years of my life
hell in tormenting nightmares.

July 12th.

I have inspected a
total of 1,250 stones.

McKenzie, a good geologist and
somewhat of an archaeologist as well,

is startled by the immeasurable
age of the fragments.

Toward the north-west,
there are many more blocks.

I will inspect them tomorrow.

July 13th.

Everything seems terribly familiar.

I feel horror and curiosity.

But more than all of that, this
persistent illusion of memory.

Now I also suffer from insomnia.

Strange impulses pull
me toward the north-west.

July 15th.

As I wandered by moonlight,
a stone caught my attention

that seemed different from
the others I had seen before.

It appeared to be distinct.

My flight was impulsive
and irrational.

And only when I returned to camp

did I realise what I had fled from.

The dark stone was something I
had dreamed of and read about.

It had appeared again and again

with apocalyptic prophecies
from prehistoric legends.

July 17th.

I cannot sleep.

Again the strange feeling
pulling me toward the north-west.

How is it that I can find my
way so well in these corridors?

How do I know the path downward?

I know this city,
the way it once was.

What happened to
it since that time?

Is the way to the central
archive still open?

The shelves.

My book.

The trapdoors!

They are open!

The book!

Where is the book?

On July 17th, 1974,
Prof. N.W. Petersen,

who was in Australia for
archaeological research,

disappeared without a trace.

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

by George Moorse

based on a story
by H.P. Lovecraft