S. T. Joshi points to "Berkeley Square", a 1933 fantasy film, as an inspiration for "The Shadow Out of Time": "Lovecraft saw this film four times in late 1933; its portrayal of a man of the 20th century who somehow merges his personality with that of his 18th-century ancestor was clearly something that fired Lovecraft's imagination, since he had written a story on this very theme himself--the then unpublished "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (1927)." Lovecraft called the film "the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods and pseudo-memories that I have ever seen--for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age and insane jazz age into the sane reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780." Lovecraft noted some conceptual problems in "Berkeley Square"'s depiction of time travel, and felt that he had resolved these flaws in his novella.