H P Lovecraft

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Documentary is fairly cheesy in places (and is that what Lovecraft is supposed to have sounded like? Cos that guy sounds ridiculous) but has some clever people talking about Lovecraft in it, and as someone who doesn't know much about Lovecraft's life it was dashed educational to boot.

Really hammers home the inability of artists to capture what makes Lovecraft's creatures sinister. A giant octopus headed God wading towards shore just looks kind of hokey.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Really hammers home the inability of artists to capture what makes Lovecraft's creatures sinister. A giant octopus headed God wading towards shore just looks kind of hokey.

Have you seen the HPL Historical Society Call of Cthulhu film? I don't know if it's 'scary' as such, but it's pretty effective, I thought. It's done using a technique they called 'Mythoscope', which is intended to mimic the special effects that would have been available in the 1920s (i.e. it's stop-motion based, no CGI) and is also a silent movie, with a music soundtrack and text screens to represent the (scarce) dialogue.

The same guys did a 'talkie' a few years later, based on 'The Whisperer in Darkness', which was okaaay, although they greatly extended the story and made the narrator character a bit more of an 'action man' (not very Lovecraftian) and also caved in and use CGI, which was a bit of a cop-out, I thought.

There's meant to be a very effective German adaptation of 'The Colour out of Space', titled simply Die Farbe, though I've not seen it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The Colour Out of Space I can see being done well, because you don't really see anything but the effect of the aliens, right?

I've heard of those films but not seen them.

I read a bit of the Alan Moore comic based on Lovecraft and found it extremely disturbing and nasty. More so than Lovecraft's own stories, actually.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Does anyone else automatically picture Guillermo Del Toro wasting his ample sarcasm on a nonplussed Bart Simpson any time they see a photo/footage of him?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So has anyone here listened to this yet? Really excellent Radio 4 adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a modern-day setting, in ten parts, framed as episodes from an investigative podcast:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w

The premise involves a man (British) and a woman (American), based in the UK, who do a weekly podcast called 'Mystery Machine', and who start out taking a suitably skeptical view (as is the Lovecraftian convention) about the mysterious disapparition of Ward from a locked asylum cell following a visit from his old psychiatrist and the revelation that he was secretly the descendent of a notorious occultist named Joseph Curwen. The story in this version only takes that as a starting point, however, and considerably extends the narrative reach, taking in both elements of the Cthulhu mythos not featured in the original novel and real-world historical facts, such as actual 20th-century cult figures (Crowley, Manson, LaVey) and the occult origins of Nazism in the Thule and Vril societies, and blends them seamlessly in exactly the same way Lovecraft did, casually mentioning Abdul Alhazred in the same breath as John Dee.

[SPOILERS]

The liberties taken with the story work well, as a rule. Ward is no longer a distant descendent of Curwen, but his grandson, and only a couple of decades separate the former's death (or rather disappearance) and the latter's birth. Curwen himself is no longer the main agent of sorcery but merely one of a large number of vessels of the soul of an ancient Mesopotamian wizard; there is no intimation that he is corporeally resurrected by Ward and the plot point of Ward happening to be Curwen's exact physical double (perhaps the silliest non-explicitly-supernatural bit in the original) is absent, as is Curwen's preternatural longevity. The way the documentary team's role gradually moves from merely investigative to playing an active part in the ongoing story unfolding across two continents is well handled, and some parts are genuinely tense, even scary. The inclusion of elements from other HPL stories doesn't seem gratuitous but fits well with the overall narrative - in particular, the ancient world-spanning secret cult is straight out of 'The Call of Cthulhu', which I find to be the most effective and scary aspect of that story, much more so than the slightly silly monster that Cthulhu himself turns out to be.

[END SPOILERS]

The only bad thing I have to say about it is that the voice acting is a little over-done at points and, this being a BBC production with American characters, some of them are clearly voiced by British actors who haven't quite nailed the accent. But these are fairly minor quibbles. Highly recommended.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There was possibily fairly low-budget/art-house German version made some years ago, just titled Die Farbe, which I'd like to see too. Apparently it's all in B&W except for the Colour itself, which sounds like a neat trick for representing the idea of 'impossible colours'.
 

luka

Well-known member
Land has speculated about both an AI and the Necronomicon from the future meddling in our current world. But this researcher can't help but think of a more chilling scenario: What if it is the Great Old Ones themselves who are melding in the present from the future. And what if accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment are one such bid to harness capitalism and technology towards one obvious end: their own creation and a distinctly post-human future. Are Lovecraft's demonic space gods then our own future when a tendril-faced elite final sever all ties to humanity and Earth as a whole? Certainly, I suspect such a notion has passed through Land's mind. And he may well be okay with such an outcome.

But the real question is, are men like Epstein and Thiel concerned with such an endgame? Based on circumstantial evidence, such a possibility can not be dismissed. And that is something that is truly horrifying to contemplate. This is why, as I've suggested before, that Epstein's child sex trafficking is not the darkest abyss. Rather, it is what the funds from this endeavor were being used to sponsor. And that may well be the birth of the Great Old Ones.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
A subplot of The Invisibles was that the Archons were using Lady Diana to give birth to a monstrous abomination, IIRC. I reckon it's all true.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps

At the height of the Ccru days, Land began heavily abusing "the sacred substance amphetamine" and subsisting on little to no sleep. During his final days at Warwick, he became known for amphetamine-addled lectures, which at times Land delivered while laying on the floor and accompanied by a jungle soundtrack. Eventually, he came to believe that he was being inhabited by various entities, which he dubbed "Cur," "Vauung," and "Can Sah."

:crylarf:
 
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