H P Lovecraft

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Over the office desk, trousers round your ankles. Then the floor opens up to a porthole into the otherworld and you fall for eternity into a galactic sized Sarlacc Pit.

This is why we have friends, to sow bleak but funny horrors.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I've just been contacted by a spokesentity for Yog-Sothoth, who would to make very clear that It has no association whatsoever with Priti Patel.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Anyone on here seen Color Out of Space?

I enjoyed it. It was an interesting one in that you couldn't really say where it was incoherent and senseless by accident and where it was incoherent and senseless by design. The senselessness of what's happening is the whole point, really. I liked how it started jumping around in time and space without an explanation.

Plus points included: Nicolas Cage going mad for good reason, the lurid pink, the glimpse of the inhuman multiverse, the disgusting 2-person hybrid monster, the soundtrack, tommy chong creepily intoning "it's just a colour but it burns"...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You can see why Cthulu is the Lovecraft mascot figure but at the same time he(?)'s one of the least frightening aspects of his stories. A giant octopus headed thing with bat wings. The wings in particular as so ridiculous.
Yeah, he's not scary at all. The aspect of that story that's actually scary is the worldwide network of ancient cults, always there, always ready and waiting for the time when the stars are right again. I think that idea is more relevant today than ever, given the prevalence of conspiracy theories centred on subhuman or inhuman elites and their occult predilections. (And the fact that they're elites, rather than "primitive degenerates" etc., makes it even scarier than what HPL imagined.)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't really find the cult thing scary either, it's the unnameable, unfathomable things that don't give a fuck about us. (I know this is Lovecraft appreciation 101.)

Actually, tbf to Lovecraft it might be that Cthulu isn't actually an octopus headed bat thing, that's just what its followers interpret it as being. He has descriptions like that doesn't he? Where he says that language fails to describe this horrible thing it can only be compared to certain animals.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, well 'scary' is probably the wrong word - I've never found a written story scary as such, in the way that a good horror film is - but effective, let's say. Though that's not to say that written stories can't be creepy or unsettling - Ligotti is really much better at this than Lovecraft, although The Colour Out Of Space is certainly very, very creepy.

Speaking of the film, yeah, it certainly looks and sounds good (or rather, horrible, which of course is the point), and you've got Nic Cage going full Nic Cage in the way that only he can, but it's badly let down by the stupid decision to make the daughter some sort of wiccan occultist, which is completely contrary to the spirit of the story. And her copy of the Necronomicon looks like it came from Amazon and has a front cover that might be the logo of a band that was Marilyn Manson's support act in 1998! I mean, FFS, there are supposed to be about four copies in existence, all of them centuries old and written in mediaeval Latin, roughly the size and mass of a tombstone and bound in human skin. Come on, this basic stuff!
 

version

Well-known member
Stanley's done a couple of interesting looking documentaries as well as Hardware, Dust Devil and the Lovecraft adaptation. He's got one about Otto Rahn, an SS officer on a grail quest, whom I stumbled across researching Gravity's Rainbow and another about mysticism and a "Zone" somewhere in the south of France. One for the Zone discussion in the Tarkovsky thread.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
@Corpsey @Mr. Tea reading back through what you two said about lovecraft and cthulhu not being scary i'm reminded that a friend of mine she said how the big underpinning behind every Lovecraft story is the fear that you are not at the center of the universe, that beyond the stars is some great unknowable literal "alien" being or celestial force that's greater than you in a way that you can't possibly fathom and that you're but a mere spec in the face of them.

For the people who made up much of the ethnic and class groups that he loathed even after he tempered them over time they're consistently reminded that they are not at the center of the universe in many direct and indirect ways that leave them open to cruetly and mistreatment aswell as being blocked out of many structures or assistances that can give them some semblence of protection so this great twist is like "ok what else is new?"

Whereas for him a self sylised out of time 18th century gentleman who grew up in Providence around that time in America when being "blue blooded" was still considered a source of pride, its cataclysmic and sudden.
 
Top