By recording the short digitally, Vanek gives it a mood that not only supports the feel of the genre but subtly reinforces that it is inspired by a tale more than 100 years old. It is in that sense that the production could be seen as rising to the level of an impressionistic art house film. It also comes with both 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby sound and includes in its bonuses two audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and parts of Snowberger's audition.
There are other less directly related bonuses. The DVD contains two foreign-made shorts as well as a short documentary on Chambers by an individual who has studied the author's work.
The longer of the shorts, "Tupilak," is a French work by and starring David Leroy. It is not related to Chambers but has a tangential connection to Lovecraft and, in fact, won the short award at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. It uses a slightly different approach to what might be called a monster tale. Two men who leave their Inuit guide to die in the polar wilderness are cursed by him to be pursued by a Tupilak, a creature of Inuit mythology that is sent by its maker to do harm to an enemy. Representations of the Tupilak have appeared in films based on Lovecraft's 1928 short story, "The Call of the Cthulhu." Leroy accomplishes his goal of "mak[ing] a classical monster movie without a monster in it." As we never see the Tupilak, we are left to wonder about the exact source and nature of the revenge sought by the guide.
There is also the even shorter Italian short, "The King in Yellow." The first in a planned series exploring Chambers' work, it is an almost hallucinatory tale of a young woman who goes to an antique shop to buy a book for a friend in hospital but who ends up in a nightmarish world where she is to meet the King in Yellow.
The Yellow Sign certainly isn't for all tastes and, in fact, may not be for all so-called horror fans. Both the tales and the films are phantasmagorical to the point of at times being abstract. At the same time, movie studios that produce so-called blockbuster horror films could learn a lot from the approach toward these stories, both in terms of style and production.
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