@@fbmb1337 i don't think Junji Ito has any game adaptations, but if he does, then it's probably in the shadows of mediocrity just like many lovecraftian themed games
"Imagine you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape, and above, you can see the vast, dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?" - Jurgen Leitner, The Magnus Archives, #80 (The Magnus Archives is probably my favorite piece of horror media, it explores so many concepts and types of fear and horror)
@skylarsworld9477 diminishing a well respected piece of horror media into "Tumblr slop" just because you prefer another writers works makes me sad to see, Elias Witherow is a decent author but reading his stuff isn't a reason to act superior, his early published works are literally adaptations of his reddit r/NoSleep submissions, practically a Tumblr relative.
I remember there being accounts of Lovecraft coming to show regret over his prejudice in the months before his death, and it kinda saddens me thinking about how he could've improved as both a writer and a person, and the stories we couldve gotten from a more worldly Lovecraft... Man, fuck cancer.
His last few works did not have his racist views and they greatly benefited from them. It does suck we will never see what kind of stories he could create from this new perspective and acceptance of his terrible views.
I have seen a RUclips video where this topic is discussed (I don't remember the channel or the title, though). I think Lovecraft should be remembered as someone who changed their mind about racism, and not as a racist.
He did not improve as a writer throughout his entire life. Lovecraft knew how to write letters and that's it. All of his works are basically epistolary. He was alredy very worldy, considering that he travelled widely along the east coast, quebec and had a very irreligious outlook.
Mountains of Madness however does have this somber reflection on both Elder Things and Humanity. The scientist journeing to avenge their falled crew come to term that the awoken ET was probably terrified being tinkered on like a tool by an unknown species, it killed in self defence and ran away to wherever it fellt was safer, their lost city. I dunno, I got the impression that his moral cogs were already at work, realising that his judgmental view on the "other" was faulty, and reflected that by giving pity to the Elder Things, making them more n more human the deeper you go into the book.
If I'm not incorrect, Lovecraft never actually describes what Cthulhu looks like. The only descriptions we get are of sculptures trying to give shape to the shapeless. When the narrative attempts to describe Cthulhu as an entity, we get "The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled."
Fun Fact! Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated has a Cthulhu-like/lovecraftian being as the series finale and what the show’s narrative had been pointing to the entire time, also there is a minor character called “Hatecraft”
Specifically he's "H.P Hatecraft" if it wasn't on the nose already. He's also voiced by Jeffrey Combs, who notably played Herbert West in the Re-Animator movies.
I remember so many indie games came out all around the same time with Cthulu being the big bad. Turns out that “Call of Cthulu” became public domain just 2 years earlier.
I'm glad someone else remembers DYE - Fantasy. While I used to be huge into Lovecraft as a teenager, nowadays I'm more into both Lovecraft inspired works and the works that inspired Lovecraft himself. I am particularly fond of William Hope Hodgeson with the House on the Borderlands being a personal favorite of mine. One thing I will note though I is I appreciate modern adaptations making the Cthulhu cult less "foreigners with scary religion" and more "old blooded white folk of wealth and privelage in dinky old manors' which I feel appropriate. Beyond that, I really do think Cosmic Horror works best nowadays when it brushes up against Dark Fantasy story. Fear and Hunger and Fear and Hunger Termina really nail that vibe as does Bloodborne. I wouldn't even call Bloodborne "Lovecraft lite' as the endings have you: - Waking from a Nightmare - Becoming forever trapped in a dream as a surrogate child for an eldritch god in an endless hunt - Becoming an Eldritch God yourself by consuming the umbilical cords of tainted offspring...which leaves you as a tentacle slug. Which honestly, only the former is a remotely 'good' ending xD. As for Lovecraft himself, for me personally, I think the one character that best captures the ethos Lovecraft had in terms of his xenophobia and fear of everything and encapsulates both the fear of the other, the fear of progress, and the fear of god being an uncaring malevolent force is Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep being a being of infinite masks and one who is actively malicious means he could be anyone or anything, and further more the being that has the most potential for character. Nyarlathotep is a kid with a magnifying glass and you are just an ant. Sure it isn't "unfathomable" or anything like that, but serves as a shapeless malevolent bogeyman who can be everything he feared from modern amenities (the original story is just terror at Nikola Tesla) to Ancient Egypt to the Haunter in the Darkness and how Nyarlathotep bridges the gap between the liminal space Dweller on the Threshold motif and Faustian Folk Devil with the more unfathomable entities like Yog Sothoth to which I'm honestly surprised Nyarlathotep isn't in more adaptations. He's easy to handle, a good way to bridge the gap between unfathomable and what we know, a good central antagonist figure, and draws on more familiar gothic horror tropes like the Faustian bargain (like when he trolls Randolph Carter by sending him careening into the court of Azathoth) he's a malicious fuck and I can't help but to love him. In a lot of ways, I think the best adaptation of a Nyarlathotep like figure we have is Gaunter O'Dimm from the Witcher 3. O'dimm draws a bit from him as much as he does traditional devil figures in that O'Dimm is as eldritch of force that you get in the Witcher, and is well and truly cosmic in his powers. He's not just a demon, djinn, or something else, but something that if Geralt were to know the true nature of Geralt would meet either a quick end or an even worse fate. He's not *just* a Satan with a cosmology, he's an entity who will 'gore and torment you till the stars expire' and whose mastery of time and space makes him wholly unique in that world. Whose marks and magic cannot be undone even by the strongest magicians or beings in the world that you know. And in the end, you only defeat him because of the rules he sets for himself and even then its a pyrhic victory. He's banished but who knows for how long, with several lives irreparably destroyed in his wake and his spectre still being felt in the next DLC as his leitmotif looms in the background in one of the quests. That is a perfect blending of both Gothic Horror and Cosmic Horror. Beyond that, I'm surprised the faustian-lovecraftian being trope isn't used more or more Nyarlathotep analogues out there. He's really well suited for adaptations of Lovecrafts work.
I personally have a soft spot for all the stories about necromancers or sorcerers. There are a LOT, but I just love how these people all end up building their secret laboratories and all their schemes. I liked the one of the girl who steals the body of a young man. I almost want to try and make a short film about it lol.
@@berilsevvalbekret772 Respectfully, I'd argue it's not a trend. He's dated. Social and scientific development leave his stories out of place in the modern world, and his writing style is nearly extinct in the modern idea of a good writer.
My favorite story from HP Lovecraft will always be The Cats of Ulthar. It is part of his dreamland cycle of short stories. Its the kind of story that is dark and has horror, yet its not cosmic horror in the traditional sense. Its a knowable horror that is committed by two mortal humans who are wicked and cruel towards animals. Even the way the cruel are dealt with is a cosmic yet knowable kind of justice. And part of what sticks out to me about The Cats of Ulthar is it does have an emotional core with a young human boy.
The reason Insanity is so difficult to portray is becuase it's a paradox of reason itself. Looking at insane behavior gives zero insight because it defies logic. However, if you do start to understand the "logic" of insanity, than by definition you are becoming insane because it takes an illogical mind to understand the illogical. This is also why insane people cannot recognize their own insanity. From their perspective, they are normal and the rest of the world is insane. Forcing an audience to question their own logic/reality is the closest you can get to a true perspective of insanity. Any further understanding is unknowable, and that's what makes it scary.
One of the things I find interesting about Lovecraft (and arguably why his works have aged better than you'd think) is that there's a recurring theme of people mating (or being forced to mate) with the Gods or celestial beings, under the pretense they would produce superhuman children, only to instead produce incredibly deformed and dysfunctional offspring that only get more deformed and dysfunctional with each generation. In other words, he accidentally implies trying to breed a 'master race' almost inevitably goes wrong.
@@agramuglia Absolutely, but seeing how his work is about an indifferent universe hostile to humanity itself, it's easy to take the flip side of his racist worldview, and use it to show that no minute difference in the spectrum of human identity can matter in the face of that. Conversely, it's easy to transpose the fear of cults hellbent on the destruction of all that's good about our planet and slot in, say, oil companies where Lovecraft puts tribal cultures. It's certainly not the authorial intent, but in this case the author is triply dead, first physically, then philosophically by roland barthes, and then legally since his work has been in the public domain for 15+ years...Anyway, Lovecrafts base fear, while not personal enough to make great character focused horror, they are also very malleable, and so Lovercraft's work certainly contains the seed of his own subversion.
Digimon of all things has a lot of lovecraft and how I got awoken into the lovecraft fandom. D-reapers were lovecraftean creatures, there’s a literal dagomon and the dark ocean is literally innsmoth. The towns sign says innsmoth. Digimon tamers was written by a guy who heavily includes lovecraft in all his works
@@rvfiascowhen I was young I saw one of those overly sarcastic production videos and watched one of em under the assumption it was talking about a minecraft mod. My child brain was like: "Where's minecraft?"
@@mastegoh7139 can you actually substantiate your claim that Lovecraft was afraid of air conditioning? Are you referring to the story "Cool Air"? How does that story give ypu the idea that Lovecraft was afraid of air conditioning? Do you even know what that story is about?
I want to say this about Lovecraft's character. He did recognize his vial racism as something terrible and holding him back. He did start to become more worldly and challenge his views. Some of his last pieces of work are bereft of his racism and they are much better for it. He died before we could really see what this new Lovecraft could make though. His fear of doctors coming to bite him in the ass since he got cancer. It is extremely hard to portray his work or the cosmic horror genre overall as, well, it is hard to portray something that is beyond our comprehension. The best we can do in visual mediums is show something that makes you go "What the fuck is that?!". John Carpenter's The Thing is a great example of this. We never see what the true form of the alien is...if it even has one. They have some understanding of what it is and can do, but when it reveals itself, it is always so twisted and monstrous that you cannot help but stare and wonder what the hell is it even made up of. The Color Out of Space is another great movie, with the great Nick Cage staring in it no less. A color so weird and strange that it mutates and changes people and things around it...that get exposed to it. Choosing magenta was a great choice since it has no wavelength of light and so our brains kind of make up the color to understand it. Also, the movie itself is really good, so that helps a lot. Dead Space is a great video game that is cosmic horror without really touching upon Lovecraft's work. Just a fantastic horror game where the move you find out, the more questions you end up having. And the fact that the origin of the markers are never really touch upon is fantastic. The best thing for cosmic horror is to never give the answers to the big questions. Leave it a mystery.
@@chrisedwards6663 Most of Lovecraft's letters have been preserved, with some of them suggesting he became less racist as time went on. Specifically, before 1925, he was a big fan of both the German nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan, but started being vocally critical of both around 1936, a year before his death. The fact he became a socialist before his death (he used to be extremely pro-capitalist) and started associating with progressive authors of the time suggests a certain shift in his worldview, though we can never be certain how much those views shifted and how much they would have shifted had he been allowed to live past the age of 47. The important thing to note is that Lovecraft was groomed into his racist worldviews by his family, his auntie and grandfather specifically were extremely racist, arguably even more than Howard ever was, and both of them played an important part in Howard's upbringing. When viewing his racism through those lenses, his views on race actually become a bit tragic, knowing how emotionally abusive his family was.
You know, you mentioned Dracula. I think Stoker's story has also changed in it's impact, but in complete inversion of how Lovecraft's Mythos has changed. That is to say, the ideas in Dracula have become less relevant today, yet the monster is timeless. In a sense I feel like there is some sort of dramatic irony with vampires in movies. For example, with the movie "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" we know not only how it's going to end but we also know to an extent that the monster they are up against is undefeatable. What remains to be played with, given that Stoker left some wiggle room and mystery to describing his monster, is excatly how the vampire is portrayed (i.e A beast vs. A beguiling hunk). The vampire as a concept is so simple yet malleable that it remains fun to see. However, and I say this with the limited knowledge of one college class on gothic english literature and some sporadic comments by content creators, the underlying ideas of Dracula might not hold up so well. In a sense it's also about fear of the unknown monster, but it reads much more like a fear of outsiders (i.e foreigners) that (literally) bring death, disease and "steal yo girl" with a exchange of bodily fluids. And of course, as was custom at the time, there is also a healthy dose of sexism. My proffessor put it like this: Mina is the hero of the story when we now read it, yet the story doesn't giver her the credit and quite frankly relegates her to the pretty lady role, despire her effforts. The irony is that despite the underlying cause of Lovecrafts ideas being rooted in racism and so forth, the broad strokes still appeal to to us. Hence why we tend to talk about lovecraftian horror more so than his actual written stories. Yet for Dracula, the monster and the idea of a vampire lives on and gets more interesting the more we know and build on/change Stoker's mythos. Yet, the themes in Dracula tend to remain a sign of the times it was written in. Richard out!
While Lovecraft was certainly inspired by writers such as Poe and Lord Dunsany, his stories were distinct and unique. A lot of people who don't "get" Lovecraft make the same mistake of either claiming his works to be derivative of previous writers or inferior to modern writers, and part of this, I think, is a somewhat dishonest, subliminal instinct to downplay his genius because of his racism and xenophobia. The problem with that is, there have been quite a few writers, composers, and artists down through the centuries that also harboured some unsavory thoughts and opinions, and are considered geniuses in their own right. To his credit, Lovecraft DID allow himself to grow and change....for example the rejection of his heretofore passionate love of plutocracy to embracing socialism after the Great Depression. His racism and xenophobia came from his family (in particular his maternal grandfather), and I like to think, had he lived longer, he would have also rejected it as he had rejected his plutocratic ideology. But all that aside, Lovecraft's prose, while it may come across a bit archaic by today's standards, nonetheless possesses an ethereal poetry all its own, and has captured the imagination (and love) of not just countless fans around the world, but some extremely famous writers and filmmakers. My personal opinion is that he is one of the greatest writers that ever lived, and certainly one of the greatest that the U.S. has ever produced. But you are correct that adapting his stories are indeed a challenge. Some have suceeded to great degree (The Resurrected, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, From Beyond, the Nicholas Cage Color Out of Space, and the films produced by the Lovecraft Society), while others have been miserable failures (Suitable Flesh). Thankyou for your very in depth analysis of these films. I may not agree with your overall critique of Lovecraft's talent, but I appreciate your scholarly approach.
His prose isn't archaic. It's just a matter of personal taste and some patience. His overly complicated writing style is specifically to give a dream like, almost otherworldly quality to his stories. They really wouldn't feel as effective without the "archaic" prose.
I am rereading LotR and Tolkien sounds very racey to IMO. HP Lovecraft is very overtly racist, but Tolkien is kind of insidiously racist with small comments here and there. Fair hair, bright eyed men good. Dark haired, dark eyed men bad. Slant eyed men from the east bad. I don't hate Tolkien, just that everyone always praises Tolkien as some peaceful dude, while hating on Lovecraft.... When in reality I see Lovecraft as insanely similar to Tolkien. Both dudes loved their homelands, they loved rolling green, trees, Lovecraft loved New England houses and Tolkien loved his country side... Both held their own as being superior and others as inferior monsters. I don't hate them for that. It's just how it is. If anything Lovecraft acknowledges his own racism in his stories I feel like. Like to be fair Lovecraft makes it obvious that he dislikes ALL foreigners he even bad mouthes Germans and northerners. It's just how it is. Some people are very tribal and only like their own kind. Some people like diversity and enjoy the company of different peoples.
That is kind of the downside of having such a unique style of story. Most people won’t understand or TLDR and completely missed the point, like how the neon is just a stand for any, and all spooky black magic books, we could Cthulhu just being the big scary monster at the end of the story. Mentioned decades, upon decades of telephone, muddying the waters of his stories, settings, and characters work, It all gets jumbled into confusing mess and not many people have the time or patience to read through his books
I’m about halfway through the video. I don’t know if this’ll be mentioned but I fully believe Lovecraftian horror works best in audio format. One of my favorite pieces of media ever that achieves this is Malevolent! Also happens to have some very queer themes- nothing too explicit, but there are literally like. 2 or 3 characters who are trans allegories and the main character is very aromatic coded.
I highly recommend people play Still Wakes the Deep. It came out this year, in April and is deffffinitely inspired by Lovecraft. It’s a fantastic horror story, tense and highly….. “Scottish”. I played through it 3 times to max out the achievements.
The problem with adapting Lovecraftian stories into films and shows is that it’s an inherently difficult idea to adapt into that format in my opinion. Lovecraftian stories always work better in games and tabletop style stories. The Sinking City is one you showed and I think it does the concept extremely well. The Call of Cthulhu RPG does a pretty good job handling several Lovecraftian concepts. But even then Lovecraftian horror’s of the indescribable is just extremely hard to do well.
I'm holding out hope that Robert Eggers gets a chance to adapt one of Lovecraft's stories. The Lighthouse is half way to cosmic horror and is a period piece, AND it has tentacles!
Lovecraft lived in fear of most things Wasn't comfortable in public Had few friends Lost mostly everyone he cared about before he passed And died sick and alone, penniless and he probably thought, forgotten. As someone who loves fat chicks of a jungle complexion, Lovecraft probably would have absolutely hated me, but I can't bring myself to feel anything but pity for him and the sad, lonely life he lived. I pour one out for him every now and then, the man who never truly had anything, at least certainly not human companionship, arguably all that matters.
I think people too often assume that Lovecraft was 100% serious about everything and didn't have a sense of humor at all. His personal letters are very self-deprecating, and he was aware that his fears were completely ridiculous, but irrational fears are, by their very definition, irrational. Innsmouth was inspired by his shock at finding out he was part *Welsh,* but rather than being genuinely horrified, he made a genealogy tree of himself and several of his friends being descended from Dagon via his Welsh side (which, again, some fans take as Deep Lore rather than the private in-joke that it was).
AGREED. I think people forget that he was you know... Human... I doubt he was super serious and over the top like everyone claims. Throughout his writing I can see his humor and light heartedness. He put his own cat into his story for gods sake lol. The dude was just having fun I feel like lol. Did he have issues? Totally. I have met no one who doesn't have issues. That being said most of his work has a hint of lightheartedness in it IMO, which is odd when considering the subject.
A movie that I felt gave a sense of mans insignificance in a way that made me feel like it invoked a sense Lovecraft is the 2014 Godzilla movie. It didn't give the sense of dread like horror, but we didn't matter. Nothing we did mattered, or made things worse and the creatures just didn't care, we were insignificant and not much else has given me that feeling. Not even Cloverfield, though that may be because I hated all of the humans it focused on and wanted them to die...
I think Lovecraft and Stephen King have a similar issue when it comes to movie adaptations. A lot of it comes down to the character's reaction to the scare and not the scare itself. When you're getting it in the form of a book, it's much easier to get in the head space of the character. In the written form, it has the means and space to explore the character's reaction. In a visual medium, you lose a lot of that, and so a lot of the scare is just lost. Some scares you can't just show and get the same effect as being in the point of view of someone that is actually scared of it
I sense that one of the most viable ways to capture the inscrutable nature of the old ones would be to make a found footage film, or at least a monster that cannot be displayed on video equipment and is never seen directly. For a potential approach, you could have it start off with people watching back footage of an incident where the monster is censored and then becoming obsessed with finding an unedited copy and learning the truth, a bit like a cosmic horror version of 8MM.
6:58 he was also inspired by Robert W Chambers who wrote The King in Yellow. Which has a very interesting history because Chambers didn’t create the entire concept. That was Ambrose Beirce who wrote An Inhabitant of Carcosa.
Prometheus and Covenant are proof that Ridley Scott drank his own black goo. Garbage. I think he's just angry that James Cameron came into his universe and made a better movie than he ever could.
One of the first stories I ever read of Lovecraft was The Music of Erich Zann, It wasn't what I had expected reading about lovecraft, but it has stuck with me for decades. it's not typically adapted, but captures a feeling I very very rarely see in any modern media
I'm actually gonna add to this because there's a lot missing from discussion of The Shadow over Innsmouth in general, like the focus of the ecological devastation caused by colonialism, paralleled by the story opening saying the military torpedoed a reef, the museum nearby refusing to return a cultural artifact to the people of innsmouth, I think without the assumption that the people of Innsmouth are evil or villainous, which is as the story shows the source of most of the conflicts stem from, you get an anti-racist story. The main character does not fear, but celebrates his heritage at the end
Personally I like when the stories allow for humanity to beat up and defeat the Eldritch. I find it to be a message of hope, where even when humanity is underestimated by the universe where they see us as ants, we can rise above and force them to recognize us as their equal whether they like it or not.
I think the reason why cosmic horror doesn't get as munch is because where there a part of me that makes me wonder and see as cool. Then again this is someone who get easily scared by jumpscared stuff, so i'm not ironclad . Tale foundry goes into why cosmic horror aren't scary to some. Also, space and ocean are themselves eldritch horrors and like to study and learn about those areas.
To me, the idea of something that you can't comprehend and can't fight againt and can't even look at without losing your sanity is somewhat scary but also somewhat infuriating. If there's literally nothing you can do about it what's even the point?
@@PhoebeTheFairy56 Yeah, that's me. I find the derivatives interesting because there's interaction. But juat saying it's unknowable and unstoppable isn't interesting. I'm simplifying but I hope the point comes across.
@@kingofhearts3185 If there's nothing that can be done, you already know how a story where people try to do something about it will go. Plus it gives me the vibes of bad roleplayers who try to make their character do anything they want and defeat everyone they fight regardless of the other roleplayers' desires.
Not quite Lovecraftian, but a good story about humans messing with things they don't really understand is Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It is about a criminal who makes money by recovering and selling alien clarktech beyond human understanding.
You see if I was a famous author I'd just be able to tell everyone "I have no constitution for math" instead if the more normal "I'm shit at math". Like , listen teacher I was paying attention actually. I don't know what happened.
I completly disagree that cosmic horror has ever done better by any other writer than lovecraft. I know besides lovecraft racism, a lot of people think that he is not a good writer... I think this people have clearly no idea what they are talking about.The color out of space is a better horror story than everything King or barker ever wrote in their life time. The only one who is on the same level like lovecraft is juji ito, because he is GOAT.
25:20 In Finland, there's a shop that I walk past every week where you can buy a stuffed Cthulhu (there's a purple Cthulhu plushie in their window, next to a very cute Baphomet). I have considered buying one to make me forget my existential dread.
Hey, I really enjoyed the video! But I wrote my university thesis on the subject of lovecraft adaptations and i think there are a few things you missed. 1. The first Lovecraft adaptation is La marca Del Muerto (1961) and not the 1963 Haunted palace 2. The thing thats stopping hollywood lovecraft adaptations is their stance regarding how much the viewer knows, usually being highly informational and all knowing narratives, while lovecrafts prose works because of the fact that we have limited information on everything. 3. The other thing you bring up partially, is the weird thats very difficult to centralize in a film. Since we accept our reality in film to be one way and then it is very difficult to break down that reality without racionalizing it. Which would in turn invalidate our efforts. 4.I'm not sure making the stories more personal, or human would make them better as adaptations. As lovecraft precisely made his characters unhumanlike because he wanted the monstery and the atmosphere to be central. He even said regarding weird tales: The true hero of a weird tale should be no mere human but rather a set of phenomena. His fiction is trans-humanistic. So not cenraliting the human experience is enhancing the effect rather from detracting from it. Though it could be said that making the characters mental struggles the central element in the story up until the comfrontation would make them better and more believeable, but i believe it should only be used in service of the horror. Other than that I really enjoyed your essay and the part regarding lovecraft fan culture and its effects was very well handled and explained. I'm happy to see other people are interested in the adaptations of lovecraft as well and produce such scolarly work.
What I find incredible especially for authors or directors is that their names especially last names always fit their narrative. No that might be because we associate their name with that kind of narrative, but Lovecraft is such a unique but very fitting last name. Like we could be calling is Simthing instead of Lovecrafting which just roles off the tongue better
1:10 Pickmens model actually got a very good live action adaptation as a part of Del Toros “Cabinet of curiosities” It’s one Netflix and has Crispen Glover who brings his odd but mysterious presents to the role of Richard Pickmen. And Ben Barns as the main character.
it's an episode that had very good moments and others that made me groan for how cliche and obvious they were... The stuff about the paintings were pretty great because they was a layer of unreality there that allowed you to imagine something scarier lying behind out of sight, but the most dramatic moments of the episode felt really cheapened by how gleefully grotesque they were, sometimes to the point of cliché. A very mixed result IMO.
One of my favourite lovecraft inspired manga's is Magu-Chan: God of destruction. Where the old gods a little pet creatures that are trying to understand humanity. It also has the funny and horrifying idea of what if one of these reality warping creatures stans humanity
I very much enjoyed the adaptation of The Colour Out of Space with Nic Cage. I thought using magenta to represent the Colour on film was brilliant, since magenta "doesn't exist". It's what our brains fill in for colours that human eyes can't perceive.
Um - that's not true at all. A colour that your eyes can't perceive would be nothing, would be darkness, the absence of light. Magenta is an extra-spectral colour, produced by a combination of other colours, but that doesn't make it a fill-in. It's a response to specific wavelengths.
@@TheHopperUK Magenta doesn't exist in the sense that it has no specific wavelength unlike other colors. It is perceived only when our short and long cone cells pick up pure red and pure blue light (both extremes of the visible light spectrum). Our brains create the color, it is not on the visible light wave spectrum.
I don't really find most lovecraftian horror very scary. I don't find the idea of being an ant compared to another living being scary. I've grown up in a super religious household all my life. I've always been taught that I am dust compared to my God, and if you know anything about space you know that it's too incomprehensibly big for the human mind to understand. Being an ant compared to a being who can speak and destroy the universe isn't horror to me, that's just my reality. Life goes on.
I think the idea of cosmic horror isn't necessary that gods are big and all powerful. The horror is more related to something being intangible, to things existing that you cannot understand, and being confronted with the existence of these things breaks you to the point you die/ cease to live.
"We are just ants compared to eldrich being" is a very diluted explaination to lovecraftian horror tho. The idea of eldrich horror is *not* that they're so powerful and incomprehensible that you can do nothing about it, the idea is that those beings are unfathomably different and could do something that are even beyond your imagination. It's not about us being insignificant to them, it's about the incomprehensible of those beings. On the other hand, religious gods are very much comprehensible and have understandable relation to human. If one understand eldrich horror enough, they'd see that the differences between religious gods and eldrich gods are really bign
I don't find Lovecraft scary at all, but I do find it interesting. I am trying to remember if any of his stories unnerved me at all and I just can't think of anything.... Don't get me wrong if I was actually IN one of these stories I would be freaking out, but reading these stories I never really got scared or unnerved. I was more interested in learning about Lovecrafts unique world. You got the elder things an ancient Alien race that seemed cool. You got the Mi Go from Pluto who somehow fought the Elder Things and won. You got the Deep ones, Ghouls, all the crazy creatures of the dream world, you got a cat god and intelligent cats, you got mummy man beast hybrids, you got shoggoths, you got all the different gods. Lovecrafts world is CRAZY.
My favorite Lovecraft story is "A Whisperer in Darkness." It's told through the letters of a hermit who is witnessing an alien invasion. The scenes in where he keeps buying guarddogs, hearing their fights with the somethings outside, and witnessing the afrermath.
Sure, depending on the nature of the crises (and the specific situation) people do sometimes crumble at mundane horrors, but people also format it into a series of problems to be solved and don't respond to anything emotionally until the crises is over. Be that taking things step by step on a disastrous train journey with cancellations and delay after cancellation and delay because focusing on anything but 'how do I solve this' was going to lead to a panic attack due to Things Have Gone Wrong, or a parent conspicuously Not Panicking about the grievous head wound their kid has while getting the kid to the hospital, at which point the crises is over and they experience relief at the fact the kid is going to be ok. The way I see it - If someone encounters certain proof of the Supernatural - a monster stalking their college dormitory or whatever - both of those responses feel just as likely. But also... Things are bigger and we have no control over what's happening? That's the sensation I get whenever I look at the news. Scaling it up to an eldritch abomination who we are nothing in the face of. "Oh, ok. Sure. Well, nothing I can do about that, may as well keep carrying on." seems like the most human response to it - Compartmentalism is something humans are _really_ good at. Possibly too good at it. (I do wonder if some of the problem of Lovecraft adaptations is trying to bring them to visual media, and if some of the stories might work better as audio dramas if you're going to adapt them at all.) As for the horror of having Impure Blood in you - Apparently, he wrote Shadows over Innsmouth about 30 years after he learnt of his Welsh ancestry, so it probably wasn't a _direct_ response to that as sometimes stated.
I read a good portion of Lovecraft's work. My dad got me a book which was a collection and it was a chronological collection which was interesting as I found myself really not liking a few of his early works but almost saw him grow into what he was known for. He isn't perfect, as a person and as a writer and I think he has inspired greater works and themes then he himself ever personally contributed too. My favorite 'Lovecraftian' thing I was exposed to recently, was Sherlock Holmes the Awakened remake. Having Sherlock Holmes be forced to encounter a real Lovecraft like scenario and possibly implying Sherlock isn't just a messed up person because of his 'super massive brain' but that he is just a smart guy who got through a Lovecraft scenario alive without throwing himself off a bridge is a interesting mash up.
That is actually the first canonical introduction to The King in Yellow and Hastur existing in the mythos. Actually in my short film that I’m going to be completing this weekend. It’s called Yellow Fever it’s about The King in Yellow all that stuff. But one of the characters at the end who has fully gone insane refers to the Kings influence as “A whisper in Darkness” as reference to novel. Not saying Hastur is the Whisperer in Darkness unless he is I never read the book. But it’s ment to be a nod.
@@friendlycatwife I named it Yellow fever as it’s a viral disease of typically short duration. In most cases, symptoms include fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains-particularly in the back-and headaches It’s drawing comparisons to how the Kings Book and influence spreads like a disease. I tried other names but they didn’t stick. Besides the context of the story will drive comparisons.
@@friendlycatwife its all about context. what is my film about? And I can assure you nobody is going to draw comparisons to the other definition, especially because it shares a name with a real-world disease.
I find it humourous that Lovecraft despised the uneducated, while the core theme of his horror was the "un-knowable". Seemingly embracing willful ignorance, rejecting knowledge that challenges his perspective as madness. True cowardice. Film adaptations lack the fun overwrought descipive language he used. Reading that always put me in a mood the fims can't seem to capture visually.
Perhaps he only valued education in "proper" things like good manners and good New England architecture. Not things like math, philosophy, science, etc.
The problem is that most people's idea of "cosmic horror" is just "big scary monster with tentacles" which is why I roll my eyes whenever people claim that SCP is "cosmic horror"
SCP definitely has cosmic horror entries. SCP-3812 for example definitely dips into it, but there are a lot of examples, especially with stories where the SCP object itself isn't the actually scary part, but its implications. An excerpt that I think gives cosmic horror vibes from SCP-3812. "So then, what would truly constitute a God? This entity would have to totally supersede our reality, to be able to look over our reality not like we would look over ants, but like we would look over our thoughts and ideas. A being so totally separate from our reality that we may as well be words on a page to it. This entity, a true author of creation, could be considered a God."
_In the Mouth of Madness_ is the best Lovecraft film, despite not actually being a Lovecraft story. My personal favorite Lovecraft stories are his Dreamlands stores, particularly _Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath_ and the sort stories that presage it and exist in the same world, like "Pickman's Model". I'd have to disagree with "The Outsider" not being characteristic of Lovecraft, since it's basically autobiographical. He believed that he had a particularly unpleasant appearance (thanks to his mentally ill mother). He also spent much of his early life isolated, so he never developed much in the way of social abilities, and was extremely uncomfortable in social situations for much of the rest of his life as a result of both of those factors.
When the people who worked on Chaosium tell the story, they say they helped pull Lovecraft and the mythos out of obscurity. From how they describe it, Lovecraft was a niche author of weird pulp until the RPG release in '81.
A weird realization that has permanently scarred my mind is learning that the writer of "In the mouth of Madness" wrote the much maligned episode of Star Trek: Voyager: Treshold, because it made realize that it made me realize that it's the same as Bloodborne rebirth ending.
edit: the biggest problem about adapting Lovecraft's work is that, ultimately he was a scared man. A scared man who's fears stemmed from how he knew about something, but didn't understand. The air conditioning story, the color out of space. Both are stories based on things Lovecraft heard about, but didn't understand. He thought air conditioning could make dead people live beyond their death, because you put stuff in a fridge to preserve perishable foods. The color out of space? It stemmed from the discovery of the color spectrum. He didn't understand what the color spectrum is, so he wrote a story about a color that is outside of the spectrum of light. The new movie about this story uses magenta, because technically magenta doesn't exist. Magenta is combination of two different wavelengths, but it's still a color. Because we see it and can describe it. There is no color out of the spectrum, beyond infra and ultra the wavelength become something else. He was a scared man, describing how he was scared. There's plenty to love about the works of H.P. despite the views he had until the deathbed. But, making all of reality a dream of an all powerful being, and then calling that god an idiot. And some people just fit the guy's archetype? It's so good.
Ummmm you DO know the whole reality is a dream of Azatoth is not a thing right? Archetype is a bit more complicated than that😅 Also I like colour out of space by the simple fact that 'that we know of at the moment' type of story
Lovecraft horror is hard to adapt because visual alone doesn't give the insight the narration has that is apparently breaking under the experience. I do think it is only going to work in a visual medium is if it breaks the medium, the sort of visuak distortions found more in video games, and found footage styles stuff. The sort of thing in a more first person perspective, but less accepted in what is supposed to be a more neutral perspective like a lot of movies. It might never work in a movie if it cannot portray through visuals that Cthulhu is more than a giant octopus dragon. My memory of the story, I think there is something Cthulhu being something felt mostly through dreams for most of the story, characters see an idol and can explain the appearance, but it means very little compared to actually seeing him in person. I think it was the sailors saw him starting to wake up knew just by doing so that if they did not do anything, the world as they knew it would be over. His presence though can be felt through just dreams, and I think often left out of the Cthulhu mythos is that there is the Dreamlands, which can have a very different tone to the rest of the mythos. I have previously thrown some story ideas in my head, where silly dream stuff couldbe the window to eldritch horror in comparison. Like someone being able to manipulate their dreams, and then what if something had that exact power but what we consider reality.
Hey there, Lovers of dark horror and cosmic wonder! I know it's hard to find good cosmic horror out there, or lovecraft-inspired stories, but if you enjoy books, I'd recommend: Carter and Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard. I'd also recommend another dark comedy fantasy series by the same author: Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer, which also explores the dreamlands and other supernatural/eldritch elements in his dark comedy. And if you like podcasts, I'd recommend the creatively designed "Malevolent" by Harlan Guthrie, which sets a mystery based (at least originally) in a familiar setting.
Of all the Lovecraft stuff I have had experienced, The one that I believe is the closest you can realistic get to the feeling of a Lovecraft story is the video game: World Of Horror. I’m not just saying that because the big lovable squid creature is (technically) in the game, but because it adds to the smallness that Lovecraft’s works often have. You play as just regular people who are trying to postpone the apocalypse from the various gods in the game.
The thing about the "maddening knowledge" trope is that human minds are great at compartimentalization Sure, you'd be pretty fucked up for a bit if you realized some greater cosmic insignificance. But as long as that didn't really change your life in any significant way you might as well never have learned It's terrifying to discover that that week you spent having recurring nightmares about a weird sunken city and chanting voices is a shared experience with a bunch of people, but when three weeks later nothing further happened you'd probably just dismiss it as some weird happenig or strange coincidence
I don't know about that. I think as humans that we think we're great at compartmentalization. But in reality? Actual reality? People don't actually just *get over* trauma like that. They certainly try to, but it doesn't... actually work. So I think the idea is that you aren't just finding out a piece of information that is inconvenient for your world view, you know? Lovecraft started writing this stuff only in the aftermath of World War I, when "shell shock" was a thing people knew existed but not exactly why? That people could come out of a situation somehow damaged even if they weren't actually the ones who got shot or blown up? It does seem related.
I always thought Alien had a lot of Lovecraft influence. Not the sequels, but the first movie felt very Lovecraftian to me, which Dan O'Bannon loved pulp sci fi and I believe he loved Lovecraft.
Loved the video and conversation you two had! And yes, Cthulhu is very cute and if I ever come across them, I’ll adopt them and raise them as my own child
In Indie Horror Game Signalis, dead enemy androids have a static effect around their bodies, almost like your Android protagonist can't or won't see them properly. It's subtle, but is my favorite version of unknowable horror in a game
My favorite Lovecraftian story lately is the Twenty Days of Turin. I would recommend looking this up because it very much portrays an eldrich horror that is wholly human-generated -- I first heard about it in discussions of how 4chan (and more broadly, mass-anonymity in the Internet) has affected human discourse. I won't spoil anything, but it's one of those stories where the characters try all they can mid-story to not confront the horror, and even in translation from Italian to English you can feel the averted gazes, the need to just keep things under wraps.
Great video Anthony, I absolutely love when you have a guest(s) that you can bounce off of. One thing about my personal favorite Lovecraft stories are those that are somewhat disconnected from the horror then are faced more personally at the very end. Stories like The Whisperer in the Dark or The Colour Out of Space where it’s told through the perspective of a professor exchanging letters with a hermit and a surveyor respectively. If I could make my own recommendations. I believe its BBC Radio produced a show called LoveCraft investigations that adapted his stories in a true crime podcast connected storyline. The first season adapts The Case Charles Dexter Ward. I saw someone mention Malevolent, but also check out The Magnus Archives which isn’t always wholly cosmic in its horror shares a lot of similarities I think and is worth a mention and maybe worth a video someday👁️👀
4:55 At the Mountains of Madness* is only Lovecraft's third longest story at 40,881. His longest, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, comes in at a respectable 51,112. Right between them at 42,589 words is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
I feel like I need to go to bat for Lovecraft Country the show, because it was only mentioned briefly, but oh my GOD it is worth a watch. Not only does it show how maybe the 'outsiders' are not so scary, but the real horror is the things humans do to each other. Even in the presence of unknowable horrors, the most terrifying sequence is one where a cop is abusing his power to commit a hate crime.
The Outsider is my favorite! I didn't know there was a show based on it but just knowing its a change of medium kinda ruins it. I think Lovecraft's work is better in our theatre of mind, rather than having someone else show you what you should see.
I think if I saw Dracula or a ghost, the full horror of it would only really register after the encounter was over. I suspect a lot of people’s brains work this way as a sort of defense mechanism
I'm not sure if you talk about it in this video, but one of my favorite takes on Lovecraft is in Magic the Gathering. There's a plane (basically a world) called Innistrad that is themed around 16th/17th century people fighting for survival against werewolves, vampires, zombies, and all kinds of gothic horror beasties, and in a set where we return to the plane stuff is a bit, weird. Angels are corrupted and going mad, wild animals are fusing with people, symbols of their protector god are melting and inverting on their own, and nobody knows what is going on or what's causing it, until its revealed that a giant entity from the game's history was flung across the cosmos to save another world, but ended up here and has started to devour it. Very cool set, the eldritch creature gets sealed inside the moon at the end of the story because she cant be killed. Magic the Gathering is a vey cool game.
When you two started talking about how shocking and upsetting seeing a vampire or ghost would be in real life and how it would cause someone to throw up, all I could think of was: "My life is nothing I thought it should be and everything I was worried it would become because for 50 seconds, I thought there was monsters on the world."
Gotta love an Overly Sarcastic Productions shout-out. Also, 'Cthuhlu gets Ursula-ed' is a very funny sentence. I highly recommend the book Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys; it's a 'what if the Innsmouth residents were being oppressed?' narrative, with a ton of thought and care put into it. The discussion near the end of the video made me wonder, what things will we learn in the future, that would completely blow the minds of people today? What knowledge or information that we take as solid, unshakable facts about the universe in the present, will turn out to be incomplete, or outright wrong? There's always more to learn, always more discoveries to be made, and our position as a species reevaluated again and again.
When Stephen King said his favorite Lovecraft story is the Color out of space I squealed a little. 28:00 This is the exact reason why the Color out of space conveys cosmic horror better than The call of Cthulhu ever could. Cthulu's humanoid figure makes it too tangible.
I have a quick but some what stupid question. Ok I was watching Salem's Lot (the new one) and becauae the priest was questioning his faith in god the cross didn't work. So here is my somewhat stupid question if the power of the use of the cross is solely base on your faith does that mean anything you have faith in have power against vampires? Like if you were a kid and your parents got you a Cthulhu plushy and they told you he would protect you from monsters and you truly believe it does that mean if a vampire tried to feed off you that you could stop them with your Cthulhu?
In a Lovecraft story, either would be a powerless edifice of man. World of Darkness from White Wolf (Vampire etc) has human True Faith that can manifest in nebulous ways. But there its not the doll but a humans faith itself doing it.
@@stephennootens916 True Faith in Vampire was not entirely defined. It could be the characters inner conviction and will, it could be some external source acting through the devout character. Either way, the character has faith in the Torah or paganism or sun worship etc that lets them ward off monsters and their powers. In Ars Magica, God has 100% magic resistance. The closer something is to God, the less partial its resistance is. Bread and wine transmuted to the blood and flesh of the Son, in a church, on a sunday, would be neatly impossible to toss a spell on. They toyed with the idea that one of the auras covering the world was the faith.
Something that not a lot of people know is that Lovecraft was fine with people taking some of his ideas and creations and doing their own thing with it. Heck, I've come across a few Lovecraft inspired stories from the time he was still active that are pretty good. A recent example I found is a story called 'In His Own Handwriting' by S.T. Joshi, which is about Lovecraft on his death bed, and all he can think about is that he's a fraud who had been stealing stories from a notebook given to him by a mysterious man that only he could see.
I think Amnesia the dark descent is a really good lovecraftian work, even if it's reduced to freaky enemies following you nowadays. Another absolutely amazing lovecraftian work is the music video to Fantasy by DyE. That was the first time I saw the word eldritch horror mentioned (english isnt my first language) and my obsession with cosmic/eldritch horror went from there Ps: bloodborne is the best lovecraftian horror game- Edit: NYARLATHATOP MENTIONED (I find this story incredibly underappreciated Edit 2: another cosmic horror movie I recommend is of course Annihilation- oh he just mentioned it LOL Edit 3: I didn't think he'd actually mention Fantasy by DyE. My god you're so based.
I beg to differ in the "turns you crazy" thing. I think it's not exactly that, if you know about things nobody could believe you're gonna be marked as crazy and being crazy would be better because that would mean that that powerful thing/being/whatever would be only a figment of your imagination. Anyways good points
I love Lovecraft mainly for the potential his works created to expand upon. So many excellent new stories spawned from his original creations. I also adore Culbert's, Tanabe's and Baranger's comic adaptions, highly recommend. And give Goomi's Unspeakable Vault Of Doom a read for a good laugh! It's a huge playground anyone can add to. Also, 'ti's the season, so please have a very, very scary solstice and put on some of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent and hilarious Christmas Carol's 🐙❤
Cthulhu walked so Junji Ito could turn the racetrack into an infinite spiral
Every email address.....has a spiral @
@@mosquitopyjamas9048 How dare
And now they can BOTH get cheap adaptations that fail to capture the feeling of their works (outside of games, those tend to do better).
@@fbmb1337 i don't think Junji Ito has any game adaptations, but if he does, then it's probably in the shadows of mediocrity just like many lovecraftian themed games
absolutely right
"Imagine you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape, and above, you can see the vast, dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?"
- Jurgen Leitner, The Magnus Archives, #80 (The Magnus Archives is probably my favorite piece of horror media, it explores so many concepts and types of fear and horror)
From the first 5 words I knew what this would be, love the Magnus Archives!!
Is that a Magnus Archives refere--
Yeah, the bad thing is...
Alot of my macrophile (giant monster and giant lover) friends would call that a good time.
Ew, tumblr slop. Elias Witherow’s stories are where it’s at people, get some taste
@skylarsworld9477 diminishing a well respected piece of horror media into "Tumblr slop" just because you prefer another writers works makes me sad to see, Elias Witherow is a decent author but reading his stuff isn't a reason to act superior, his early published works are literally adaptations of his reddit r/NoSleep submissions, practically a Tumblr relative.
I remember there being accounts of Lovecraft coming to show regret over his prejudice in the months before his death, and it kinda saddens me thinking about how he could've improved as both a writer and a person, and the stories we couldve gotten from a more worldly Lovecraft...
Man, fuck cancer.
His last few works did not have his racist views and they greatly benefited from them. It does suck we will never see what kind of stories he could create from this new perspective and acceptance of his terrible views.
I have seen a RUclips video where this topic is discussed (I don't remember the channel or the title, though). I think Lovecraft should be remembered as someone who changed their mind about racism, and not as a racist.
To use the common phrase, Lovecraft was Complicated, as are we all.
He did not improve as a writer throughout his entire life. Lovecraft knew how to write letters and that's it. All of his works are basically epistolary. He was alredy very worldy, considering that he travelled widely along the east coast, quebec and had a very irreligious outlook.
Mountains of Madness however does have this somber reflection on both Elder Things and Humanity.
The scientist journeing to avenge their falled crew come to term that the awoken ET was probably terrified being tinkered on like a tool by an unknown species, it killed in self defence and ran away to wherever it fellt was safer, their lost city.
I dunno, I got the impression that his moral cogs were already at work, realising that his judgmental view on the "other" was faulty, and reflected that by giving pity to the Elder Things, making them more n more human the deeper you go into the book.
If I'm not incorrect, Lovecraft never actually describes what Cthulhu looks like. The only descriptions we get are of sculptures trying to give shape to the shapeless. When the narrative attempts to describe Cthulhu as an entity, we get "The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled."
Yeah, I remember no real description of Cthulu..
Fun Fact! Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated has a Cthulhu-like/lovecraftian being as the series finale and what the show’s narrative had been pointing to the entire time, also there is a minor character called “Hatecraft”
Specifically he's "H.P Hatecraft" if it wasn't on the nose already. He's also voiced by Jeffrey Combs, who notably played Herbert West in the Re-Animator movies.
H.P. Hatecraft is introduced in the same episode as the would-be rival of Harlan Ellison. The actual Harlan Ellison, who plays himself.
I remember so many indie games came out all around the same time with Cthulu being the big bad.
Turns out that “Call of Cthulu” became public domain just 2 years earlier.
I'm glad someone else remembers DYE - Fantasy. While I used to be huge into Lovecraft as a teenager, nowadays I'm more into both Lovecraft inspired works and the works that inspired Lovecraft himself. I am particularly fond of William Hope Hodgeson with the House on the Borderlands being a personal favorite of mine. One thing I will note though I is I appreciate modern adaptations making the Cthulhu cult less "foreigners with scary religion" and more "old blooded white folk of wealth and privelage in dinky old manors' which I feel appropriate.
Beyond that, I really do think Cosmic Horror works best nowadays when it brushes up against Dark Fantasy story. Fear and Hunger and Fear and Hunger Termina really nail that vibe as does Bloodborne. I wouldn't even call Bloodborne "Lovecraft lite' as the endings have you:
- Waking from a Nightmare
- Becoming forever trapped in a dream as a surrogate child for an eldritch god in an endless hunt
- Becoming an Eldritch God yourself by consuming the umbilical cords of tainted offspring...which leaves you as a tentacle slug.
Which honestly, only the former is a remotely 'good' ending xD.
As for Lovecraft himself, for me personally, I think the one character that best captures the ethos Lovecraft had in terms of his xenophobia and fear of everything and encapsulates both the fear of the other, the fear of progress, and the fear of god being an uncaring malevolent force is Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep being a being of infinite masks and one who is actively malicious means he could be anyone or anything, and further more the being that has the most potential for character. Nyarlathotep is a kid with a magnifying glass and you are just an ant. Sure it isn't "unfathomable" or anything like that, but serves as a shapeless malevolent bogeyman who can be everything he feared from modern amenities (the original story is just terror at Nikola Tesla) to Ancient Egypt to the Haunter in the Darkness and how Nyarlathotep bridges the gap between the liminal space Dweller on the Threshold motif and Faustian Folk Devil with the more unfathomable entities like Yog Sothoth to which I'm honestly surprised Nyarlathotep isn't in more adaptations. He's easy to handle, a good way to bridge the gap between unfathomable and what we know, a good central antagonist figure, and draws on more familiar gothic horror tropes like the Faustian bargain (like when he trolls Randolph Carter by sending him careening into the court of Azathoth) he's a malicious fuck and I can't help but to love him.
In a lot of ways, I think the best adaptation of a Nyarlathotep like figure we have is Gaunter O'Dimm from the Witcher 3. O'dimm draws a bit from him as much as he does traditional devil figures in that O'Dimm is as eldritch of force that you get in the Witcher, and is well and truly cosmic in his powers. He's not just a demon, djinn, or something else, but something that if Geralt were to know the true nature of Geralt would meet either a quick end or an even worse fate. He's not *just* a Satan with a cosmology, he's an entity who will 'gore and torment you till the stars expire' and whose mastery of time and space makes him wholly unique in that world. Whose marks and magic cannot be undone even by the strongest magicians or beings in the world that you know. And in the end, you only defeat him because of the rules he sets for himself and even then its a pyrhic victory. He's banished but who knows for how long, with several lives irreparably destroyed in his wake and his spectre still being felt in the next DLC as his leitmotif looms in the background in one of the quests. That is a perfect blending of both Gothic Horror and Cosmic Horror.
Beyond that, I'm surprised the faustian-lovecraftian being trope isn't used more or more Nyarlathotep analogues out there. He's really well suited for adaptations of Lovecrafts work.
=) This is a great comment.
I remember DYE
Who else is still holding out for the day when Del Toro makes that Into The Mountains of Madness movie?
This guy.
The colour out of space is probably his most unsettling tale.
But the dreamlands of kadeth are underrated.
DQoUK is great, but it is a very long story that has no dialogue in it
@@AvvieLanche No dialogue, huh? I know a certain Genndy that can animate such a story. Too bad he's busy with his other projects.
I personally have a soft spot for all the stories about necromancers or sorcerers. There are a LOT, but I just love how these people all end up building their secret laboratories and all their schemes. I liked the one of the girl who steals the body of a young man. I almost want to try and make a short film about it lol.
Yea, Lovecraft was crazy but it did make a staring point for better writers to come in. Great video btw.
His works are really good actually. But hating lovecraft or consider his work 'bad' is the new trend for the past few years
@@berilsevvalbekret772 Respectfully, I'd argue it's not a trend. He's dated. Social and scientific development leave his stories out of place in the modern world, and his writing style is nearly extinct in the modern idea of a good writer.
My favorite story from HP Lovecraft will always be The Cats of Ulthar. It is part of his dreamland cycle of short stories. Its the kind of story that is dark and has horror, yet its not cosmic horror in the traditional sense. Its a knowable horror that is committed by two mortal humans who are wicked and cruel towards animals. Even the way the cruel are dealt with is a cosmic yet knowable kind of justice.
And part of what sticks out to me about The Cats of Ulthar is it does have an emotional core with a young human boy.
He loved his cats man....
The reason Insanity is so difficult to portray is becuase it's a paradox of reason itself. Looking at insane behavior gives zero insight because it defies logic. However, if you do start to understand the "logic" of insanity, than by definition you are becoming insane because it takes an illogical mind to understand the illogical. This is also why insane people cannot recognize their own insanity. From their perspective, they are normal and the rest of the world is insane. Forcing an audience to question their own logic/reality is the closest you can get to a true perspective of insanity. Any further understanding is unknowable, and that's what makes it scary.
One of the things I find interesting about Lovecraft (and arguably why his works have aged better than you'd think) is that there's a recurring theme of people mating (or being forced to mate) with the Gods or celestial beings, under the pretense they would produce superhuman children, only to instead produce incredibly deformed and dysfunctional offspring that only get more deformed and dysfunctional with each generation. In other words, he accidentally implies trying to breed a 'master race' almost inevitably goes wrong.
I mean, that's one reading of it. My interpretation was he was talking about blood purity, and what happens if you muddle "good breeding."
@@agramuglia Absolutely, but seeing how his work is about an indifferent universe hostile to humanity itself, it's easy to take the flip side of his racist worldview, and use it to show that no minute difference in the spectrum of human identity can matter in the face of that.
Conversely, it's easy to transpose the fear of cults hellbent on the destruction of all that's good about our planet and slot in, say, oil companies where Lovecraft puts tribal cultures.
It's certainly not the authorial intent, but in this case the author is triply dead, first physically, then philosophically by roland barthes, and then legally since his work has been in the public domain for 15+ years...Anyway, Lovecrafts base fear, while not personal enough to make great character focused horror, they are also very malleable, and so Lovercraft's work certainly contains the seed of his own subversion.
Lovecraft is great in the audiobook format. Especially the old tape cassette ones.
Completely changes that sense of him being static, imo.
Ian Gordon does a pretty good job of reading Lovecraft on his RUclips channel "Horror Babble" also.
Digimon of all things has a lot of lovecraft and how I got awoken into the lovecraft fandom. D-reapers were lovecraftean creatures, there’s a literal dagomon and the dark ocean is literally innsmoth. The towns sign says innsmoth. Digimon tamers was written by a guy who heavily includes lovecraft in all his works
Tamers was written by chiaki konaka, an author that is heavy into Lovecraft stuff.
@ oh yeah he was heavily involved in cthulu mythos. Also worked on serial experiment lain not related just fun
The Gou Tanabe manga adaptations are masterpieces of art. All Lovecraft fans should check them out.
They are amazing.
YESSS!!!! Just bought the Dark Horse HC Deluxe Edition of At the Mountains of Madness and it's f*ckin rad 🤘
Sorry...gonna be that guy...
At the mountains of madness
Not in
Thank you for coming to my ted talk
When I first heard of Lovecraft I genuinely shit you not thought it was a minecraft mod.
Bwahaha! Understandable
@@rvfiascowhen I was young I saw one of those overly sarcastic production videos and watched one of em under the assumption it was talking about a minecraft mod.
My child brain was like:
"Where's minecraft?"
I'd say being mentally ill to the point of being afraid of ACs is a more accurate characterization of Lovecraft than just saying he was racist
@@mastegoh7139 can you actually substantiate your claim that Lovecraft was afraid of air conditioning? Are you referring to the story "Cool Air"? How does that story give ypu the idea that Lovecraft was afraid of air conditioning? Do you even know what that story is about?
Being racist is not a mental illness
I want to say this about Lovecraft's character. He did recognize his vial racism as something terrible and holding him back. He did start to become more worldly and challenge his views. Some of his last pieces of work are bereft of his racism and they are much better for it. He died before we could really see what this new Lovecraft could make though. His fear of doctors coming to bite him in the ass since he got cancer.
It is extremely hard to portray his work or the cosmic horror genre overall as, well, it is hard to portray something that is beyond our comprehension. The best we can do in visual mediums is show something that makes you go "What the fuck is that?!". John Carpenter's The Thing is a great example of this. We never see what the true form of the alien is...if it even has one. They have some understanding of what it is and can do, but when it reveals itself, it is always so twisted and monstrous that you cannot help but stare and wonder what the hell is it even made up of.
The Color Out of Space is another great movie, with the great Nick Cage staring in it no less. A color so weird and strange that it mutates and changes people and things around it...that get exposed to it. Choosing magenta was a great choice since it has no wavelength of light and so our brains kind of make up the color to understand it. Also, the movie itself is really good, so that helps a lot.
Dead Space is a great video game that is cosmic horror without really touching upon Lovecraft's work. Just a fantastic horror game where the move you find out, the more questions you end up having. And the fact that the origin of the markers are never really touch upon is fantastic. The best thing for cosmic horror is to never give the answers to the big questions. Leave it a mystery.
People keep saying that Lovecraft became less racist over time and keep not having convincing proof of that
@@chrisedwards6663 Most of Lovecraft's letters have been preserved, with some of them suggesting he became less racist as time went on. Specifically, before 1925, he was a big fan of both the German nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan, but started being vocally critical of both around 1936, a year before his death. The fact he became a socialist before his death (he used to be extremely pro-capitalist) and started associating with progressive authors of the time suggests a certain shift in his worldview, though we can never be certain how much those views shifted and how much they would have shifted had he been allowed to live past the age of 47.
The important thing to note is that Lovecraft was groomed into his racist worldviews by his family, his auntie and grandfather specifically were extremely racist, arguably even more than Howard ever was, and both of them played an important part in Howard's upbringing. When viewing his racism through those lenses, his views on race actually become a bit tragic, knowing how emotionally abusive his family was.
You know, you mentioned Dracula.
I think Stoker's story has also changed in it's impact, but in complete inversion of how Lovecraft's Mythos has changed. That is to say, the ideas in Dracula have become less relevant today, yet the monster is timeless.
In a sense I feel like there is some sort of dramatic irony with vampires in movies. For example, with the movie "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" we know not only how it's going to end but we also know to an extent that the monster they are up against is undefeatable. What remains to be played with, given that Stoker left some wiggle room and mystery to describing his monster, is excatly how the vampire is portrayed (i.e A beast vs. A beguiling hunk). The vampire as a concept is so simple yet malleable that it remains fun to see.
However, and I say this with the limited knowledge of one college class on gothic english literature and some sporadic comments by content creators, the underlying ideas of Dracula might not hold up so well. In a sense it's also about fear of the unknown monster, but it reads much more like a fear of outsiders (i.e foreigners) that (literally) bring death, disease and "steal yo girl" with a exchange of bodily fluids. And of course, as was custom at the time, there is also a healthy dose of sexism. My proffessor put it like this: Mina is the hero of the story when we now read it, yet the story doesn't giver her the credit and quite frankly relegates her to the pretty lady role, despire her effforts.
The irony is that despite the underlying cause of Lovecrafts ideas being rooted in racism and so forth, the broad strokes still appeal to to us. Hence why we tend to talk about lovecraftian horror more so than his actual written stories.
Yet for Dracula, the monster and the idea of a vampire lives on and gets more interesting the more we know and build on/change Stoker's mythos. Yet, the themes in Dracula tend to remain a sign of the times it was written in.
Richard out!
While Lovecraft was certainly inspired by writers such as Poe and Lord Dunsany, his stories were distinct and unique. A lot of people who don't "get" Lovecraft make the same mistake of either claiming his works to be derivative of previous writers or inferior to modern writers, and part of this, I think, is a somewhat dishonest, subliminal instinct to downplay his genius because of his racism and xenophobia. The problem with that is, there have been quite a few writers, composers, and artists down through the centuries that also harboured some unsavory thoughts and opinions, and are considered geniuses in their own right. To his credit, Lovecraft DID allow himself to grow and change....for example the rejection of his heretofore passionate love of plutocracy to embracing socialism after the Great Depression. His racism and xenophobia came from his family (in particular his maternal grandfather), and I like to think, had he lived longer, he would have also rejected it as he had rejected his plutocratic ideology. But all that aside, Lovecraft's prose, while it may come across a bit archaic by today's standards, nonetheless possesses an ethereal poetry all its own, and has captured the imagination (and love) of not just countless fans around the world, but some extremely famous writers and filmmakers. My personal opinion is that he is one of the greatest writers that ever lived, and certainly one of the greatest that the U.S. has ever produced. But you are correct that adapting his stories are indeed a challenge. Some have suceeded to great degree (The Resurrected, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, From Beyond, the Nicholas Cage Color Out of Space, and the films produced by the Lovecraft Society), while others have been miserable failures (Suitable Flesh). Thankyou for your very in depth analysis of these films. I may not agree with your overall critique of Lovecraft's talent, but I appreciate your scholarly approach.
His prose isn't archaic. It's just a matter of personal taste and some patience. His overly complicated writing style is specifically to give a dream like, almost otherworldly quality to his stories. They really wouldn't feel as effective without the "archaic" prose.
@saisameer8771 Clearly you "get" The Maestro. Yes, his style of writing is a major part of the brilliance of his stories.
I am rereading LotR and Tolkien sounds very racey to IMO.
HP Lovecraft is very overtly racist, but Tolkien is kind of insidiously racist with small comments here and there.
Fair hair, bright eyed men good. Dark haired, dark eyed men bad. Slant eyed men from the east bad.
I don't hate Tolkien, just that everyone always praises Tolkien as some peaceful dude, while hating on Lovecraft.... When in reality I see Lovecraft as insanely similar to Tolkien.
Both dudes loved their homelands, they loved rolling green, trees, Lovecraft loved New England houses and Tolkien loved his country side...
Both held their own as being superior and others as inferior monsters.
I don't hate them for that. It's just how it is. If anything Lovecraft acknowledges his own racism in his stories I feel like. Like to be fair Lovecraft makes it obvious that he dislikes ALL foreigners he even bad mouthes Germans and northerners.
It's just how it is. Some people are very tribal and only like their own kind. Some people like diversity and enjoy the company of different peoples.
That is kind of the downside of having such a unique style of story.
Most people won’t understand or TLDR and completely missed the point, like how the neon is just a stand for any, and all spooky black magic books, we could Cthulhu just being the big scary monster at the end of the story.
Mentioned decades, upon decades of telephone, muddying the waters of his stories, settings, and characters work, It all gets jumbled into confusing mess and not many people have the time or patience to read through his books
I’m about halfway through the video. I don’t know if this’ll be mentioned but I fully believe Lovecraftian horror works best in audio format. One of my favorite pieces of media ever that achieves this is Malevolent! Also happens to have some very queer themes- nothing too explicit, but there are literally like. 2 or 3 characters who are trans allegories and the main character is very aromatic coded.
I highly recommend people play Still Wakes the Deep. It came out this year, in April and is deffffinitely inspired by Lovecraft. It’s a fantastic horror story, tense and highly….. “Scottish”.
I played through it 3 times to max out the achievements.
The problem with adapting Lovecraftian stories into films and shows is that it’s an inherently difficult idea to adapt into that format in my opinion. Lovecraftian stories always work better in games and tabletop style stories. The Sinking City is one you showed and I think it does the concept extremely well. The Call of Cthulhu RPG does a pretty good job handling several Lovecraftian concepts. But even then Lovecraftian horror’s of the indescribable is just extremely hard to do well.
I think in the mouth of madness was the closest to capture Hp lovecraft tone and atmosphere and that's not even a adaptation!
Have you’ve seen Pickmens model of Netflix it’s great
I'm holding out hope that Robert Eggers gets a chance to adapt one of Lovecraft's stories. The Lighthouse is half way to cosmic horror and is a period piece, AND it has tentacles!
Lovecraft lived in fear of most things
Wasn't comfortable in public
Had few friends
Lost mostly everyone he cared about before he passed
And died sick and alone, penniless and he probably thought, forgotten.
As someone who loves fat chicks of a jungle complexion, Lovecraft probably would have absolutely hated me, but I can't bring myself to feel anything but pity for him and the sad, lonely life he lived. I pour one out for him every now and then, the man who never truly had anything, at least certainly not human companionship, arguably all that matters.
He has his correspondence. All these pulp authors seems to correspond to and from.
I think people too often assume that Lovecraft was 100% serious about everything and didn't have a sense of humor at all. His personal letters are very self-deprecating, and he was aware that his fears were completely ridiculous, but irrational fears are, by their very definition, irrational. Innsmouth was inspired by his shock at finding out he was part *Welsh,* but rather than being genuinely horrified, he made a genealogy tree of himself and several of his friends being descended from Dagon via his Welsh side (which, again, some fans take as Deep Lore rather than the private in-joke that it was).
AGREED. I think people forget that he was you know... Human...
I doubt he was super serious and over the top like everyone claims.
Throughout his writing I can see his humor and light heartedness. He put his own cat into his story for gods sake lol. The dude was just having fun I feel like lol. Did he have issues? Totally. I have met no one who doesn't have issues. That being said most of his work has a hint of lightheartedness in it IMO, which is odd when considering the subject.
King's right. Call of Cthulhu kinda sucks. The Color Out Of Space is where he did it right.
(Supposedly Lovecraft himself said it was his best story)
A movie that I felt gave a sense of mans insignificance in a way that made me feel like it invoked a sense Lovecraft is the 2014 Godzilla movie. It didn't give the sense of dread like horror, but we didn't matter. Nothing we did mattered, or made things worse and the creatures just didn't care, we were insignificant and not much else has given me that feeling. Not even Cloverfield, though that may be because I hated all of the humans it focused on and wanted them to die...
I think Lovecraft and Stephen King have a similar issue when it comes to movie adaptations. A lot of it comes down to the character's reaction to the scare and not the scare itself. When you're getting it in the form of a book, it's much easier to get in the head space of the character. In the written form, it has the means and space to explore the character's reaction. In a visual medium, you lose a lot of that, and so a lot of the scare is just lost. Some scares you can't just show and get the same effect as being in the point of view of someone that is actually scared of it
I sense that one of the most viable ways to capture the inscrutable nature of the old ones would be to make a found footage film, or at least a monster that cannot be displayed on video equipment and is never seen directly.
For a potential approach, you could have it start off with people watching back footage of an incident where the monster is censored and then becoming obsessed with finding an unedited copy and learning the truth, a bit like a cosmic horror version of 8MM.
So like a reverse of The Ring? Sounds like a good idea.
6:58 he was also inspired by Robert W Chambers who wrote The King in Yellow. Which has a very interesting history because Chambers didn’t create the entire concept. That was Ambrose Beirce who wrote An Inhabitant of Carcosa.
Prometheus and Covenant are proof that Ridley Scott drank his own black goo. Garbage.
I think he's just angry that James Cameron came into his universe and made a better movie than he ever could.
One of the first stories I ever read of Lovecraft was The Music of Erich Zann, It wasn't what I had expected reading about lovecraft, but it has stuck with me for decades. it's not typically adapted, but captures a feeling I very very rarely see in any modern media
I really love that one. Always sticks with me.
I'm actually gonna add to this because there's a lot missing from discussion of The Shadow over Innsmouth in general, like the focus of the ecological devastation caused by colonialism, paralleled by the story opening saying the military torpedoed a reef, the museum nearby refusing to return a cultural artifact to the people of innsmouth, I think without the assumption that the people of Innsmouth are evil or villainous, which is as the story shows the source of most of the conflicts stem from, you get an anti-racist story. The main character does not fear, but celebrates his heritage at the end
Personally I like when the stories allow for humanity to beat up and defeat the Eldritch. I find it to be a message of hope, where even when humanity is underestimated by the universe where they see us as ants, we can rise above and force them to recognize us as their equal whether they like it or not.
Probably why outside of Junji ito, a lot of japanese media is all about beating gods
It's also just more interesting when there's something to be done, for lack of a better phrase.
Thanks again for having me on. I had a lot of fun! ❤
You are welcome here any time!
@ LOVE YOU TOO!!!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝
I think the reason why cosmic horror doesn't get as munch is because where there a part of me that makes me wonder and see as cool. Then again this is someone who get easily scared by jumpscared stuff, so i'm not ironclad . Tale foundry goes into why cosmic horror aren't scary to some.
Also, space and ocean are themselves eldritch horrors and like to study and learn about those areas.
To me, the idea of something that you can't comprehend and can't fight againt and can't even look at without losing your sanity is somewhat scary but also somewhat infuriating. If there's literally nothing you can do about it what's even the point?
@@PhoebeTheFairy56 Yeah, that's me. I find the derivatives interesting because there's interaction. But juat saying it's unknowable and unstoppable isn't interesting. I'm simplifying but I hope the point comes across.
@@kingofhearts3185 If there's nothing that can be done, you already know how a story where people try to do something about it will go. Plus it gives me the vibes of bad roleplayers who try to make their character do anything they want and defeat everyone they fight regardless of the other roleplayers' desires.
Not quite Lovecraftian, but a good story about humans messing with things they don't really understand is Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It is about a criminal who makes money by recovering and selling alien clarktech beyond human understanding.
You see if I was a famous author I'd just be able to tell everyone "I have no constitution for math" instead if the more normal "I'm shit at math".
Like , listen teacher I was paying attention actually. I don't know what happened.
I completly disagree that cosmic horror has ever done better by any other writer than lovecraft. I know besides lovecraft racism, a lot of people think that he is not a good writer... I think this people have clearly no idea what they are talking about.The color out of space is a better horror story than everything King or barker ever wrote in their life time. The only one who is on the same level like lovecraft is juji ito, because he is GOAT.
25:20 In Finland, there's a shop that I walk past every week where you can buy a stuffed Cthulhu (there's a purple Cthulhu plushie in their window, next to a very cute Baphomet). I have considered buying one to make me forget my existential dread.
Hey, I really enjoyed the video! But I wrote my university thesis on the subject of lovecraft adaptations and i think there are a few things you missed.
1. The first Lovecraft adaptation is La marca Del Muerto (1961) and not the 1963 Haunted palace
2. The thing thats stopping hollywood lovecraft adaptations is their stance regarding how much the viewer knows, usually being highly informational and all knowing narratives, while lovecrafts prose works because of the fact that we have limited information on everything.
3. The other thing you bring up partially, is the weird thats very difficult to centralize in a film. Since we accept our reality in film to be one way and then it is very difficult to break down that reality without racionalizing it. Which would in turn invalidate our efforts.
4.I'm not sure making the stories more personal, or human would make them better as adaptations. As lovecraft precisely made his characters unhumanlike because he wanted the monstery and the atmosphere to be central. He even said regarding weird tales: The true hero of a weird tale should be no mere human but rather a set of phenomena. His fiction is trans-humanistic. So not cenraliting the human experience is enhancing the effect rather from detracting from it. Though it could be said that making the characters mental struggles the central element in the story up until the comfrontation would make them better and more believeable, but i believe it should only be used in service of the horror.
Other than that I really enjoyed your essay and the part regarding lovecraft fan culture and its effects was very well handled and explained. I'm happy to see other people are interested in the adaptations of lovecraft as well and produce such scolarly work.
What I find incredible especially for authors or directors is that their names especially last names always fit their narrative. No that might be because we associate their name with that kind of narrative, but Lovecraft is such a unique but very fitting last name.
Like we could be calling is Simthing instead of Lovecrafting which just roles off the tongue better
1:10 Pickmens model actually got a very good live action adaptation as a part of Del Toros “Cabinet of curiosities”
It’s one Netflix and has Crispen Glover who brings his odd but mysterious presents to the role of Richard Pickmen. And Ben Barns as the main character.
it's an episode that had very good moments and others that made me groan for how cliche and obvious they were...
The stuff about the paintings were pretty great because they was a layer of unreality there that allowed you to imagine something scarier lying behind out of sight, but the most dramatic moments of the episode felt really cheapened by how gleefully grotesque they were, sometimes to the point of cliché.
A very mixed result IMO.
One of my favourite lovecraft inspired manga's is Magu-Chan: God of destruction. Where the old gods a little pet creatures that are trying to understand humanity. It also has the funny and horrifying idea of what if one of these reality warping creatures stans humanity
I very much enjoyed the adaptation of The Colour Out of Space with Nic Cage. I thought using magenta to represent the Colour on film was brilliant, since magenta "doesn't exist". It's what our brains fill in for colours that human eyes can't perceive.
Um - that's not true at all. A colour that your eyes can't perceive would be nothing, would be darkness, the absence of light. Magenta is an extra-spectral colour, produced by a combination of other colours, but that doesn't make it a fill-in. It's a response to specific wavelengths.
@@TheHopperUK Magenta doesn't exist in the sense that it has no specific wavelength unlike other colors. It is perceived only when our short and long cone cells pick up pure red and pure blue light (both extremes of the visible light spectrum). Our brains create the color, it is not on the visible light wave spectrum.
@@boianko Yes but that is also true of other colours on the purple line and off it, as well as white.
@@TheHopperUK White and black aren't colours they're hues, while purple(violet) does have a visible light spectrum wavelength.
I don't really find most lovecraftian horror very scary. I don't find the idea of being an ant compared to another living being scary. I've grown up in a super religious household all my life. I've always been taught that I am dust compared to my God, and if you know anything about space you know that it's too incomprehensibly big for the human mind to understand. Being an ant compared to a being who can speak and destroy the universe isn't horror to me, that's just my reality. Life goes on.
I think the idea of cosmic horror isn't necessary that gods are big and all powerful. The horror is more related to something being intangible, to things existing that you cannot understand, and being confronted with the existence of these things breaks you to the point you die/ cease to live.
"We are just ants compared to eldrich being" is a very diluted explaination to lovecraftian horror tho. The idea of eldrich horror is *not* that they're so powerful and incomprehensible that you can do nothing about it, the idea is that those beings are unfathomably different and could do something that are even beyond your imagination. It's not about us being insignificant to them, it's about the incomprehensible of those beings. On the other hand, religious gods are very much comprehensible and have understandable relation to human. If one understand eldrich horror enough, they'd see that the differences between religious gods and eldrich gods are really bign
I don't find Lovecraft scary at all, but I do find it interesting. I am trying to remember if any of his stories unnerved me at all and I just can't think of anything....
Don't get me wrong if I was actually IN one of these stories I would be freaking out, but reading these stories I never really got scared or unnerved. I was more interested in learning about Lovecrafts unique world.
You got the elder things an ancient Alien race that seemed cool. You got the Mi Go from Pluto who somehow fought the Elder Things and won. You got the Deep ones, Ghouls, all the crazy creatures of the dream world, you got a cat god and intelligent cats, you got mummy man beast hybrids, you got shoggoths, you got all the different gods. Lovecrafts world is CRAZY.
My favorite Lovecraft story is "A Whisperer in Darkness." It's told through the letters of a hermit who is witnessing an alien invasion. The scenes in where he keeps buying guarddogs, hearing their fights with the somethings outside, and witnessing the afrermath.
Sure, depending on the nature of the crises (and the specific situation) people do sometimes crumble at mundane horrors, but people also format it into a series of problems to be solved and don't respond to anything emotionally until the crises is over. Be that taking things step by step on a disastrous train journey with cancellations and delay after cancellation and delay because focusing on anything but 'how do I solve this' was going to lead to a panic attack due to Things Have Gone Wrong, or a parent conspicuously Not Panicking about the grievous head wound their kid has while getting the kid to the hospital, at which point the crises is over and they experience relief at the fact the kid is going to be ok. The way I see it - If someone encounters certain proof of the Supernatural - a monster stalking their college dormitory or whatever - both of those responses feel just as likely.
But also... Things are bigger and we have no control over what's happening? That's the sensation I get whenever I look at the news. Scaling it up to an eldritch abomination who we are nothing in the face of. "Oh, ok. Sure. Well, nothing I can do about that, may as well keep carrying on." seems like the most human response to it - Compartmentalism is something humans are _really_ good at. Possibly too good at it.
(I do wonder if some of the problem of Lovecraft adaptations is trying to bring them to visual media, and if some of the stories might work better as audio dramas if you're going to adapt them at all.)
As for the horror of having Impure Blood in you - Apparently, he wrote Shadows over Innsmouth about 30 years after he learnt of his Welsh ancestry, so it probably wasn't a _direct_ response to that as sometimes stated.
I read a good portion of Lovecraft's work. My dad got me a book which was a collection and it was a chronological collection which was interesting as I found myself really not liking a few of his early works but almost saw him grow into what he was known for. He isn't perfect, as a person and as a writer and I think he has inspired greater works and themes then he himself ever personally contributed too. My favorite 'Lovecraftian' thing I was exposed to recently, was Sherlock Holmes the Awakened remake. Having Sherlock Holmes be forced to encounter a real Lovecraft like scenario and possibly implying Sherlock isn't just a messed up person because of his 'super massive brain' but that he is just a smart guy who got through a Lovecraft scenario alive without throwing himself off a bridge is a interesting mash up.
For the record, my favorite Lovecraft story is Whisperer in Darkness 😉
That is actually the first canonical introduction to The King in Yellow and Hastur existing in the mythos.
Actually in my short film that I’m going to be completing this weekend. It’s called Yellow Fever it’s about The King in Yellow all that stuff.
But one of the characters at the end who has fully gone insane refers to the Kings influence as “A whisper in Darkness” as reference to novel. Not saying Hastur is the Whisperer in Darkness unless he is I never read the book. But it’s ment to be a nod.
@@AnvilPicturesI’m not sure I’d call it “Yellow Fever,” but it sounds interesting!
@@friendlycatwife I named it Yellow fever as it’s a viral disease of typically short duration. In most cases, symptoms include fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains-particularly in the back-and headaches
It’s drawing comparisons to how the Kings Book and influence spreads like a disease. I tried other names but they didn’t stick. Besides the context of the story will drive comparisons.
@@AnvilPictures I feel that. It’s just “Yellow Fever” is also like an old racist saying towards asian people. Just be careful is what I’m saying.
@@friendlycatwife its all about context. what is my film about? And I can assure you nobody is going to draw comparisons to the other definition, especially because it shares a name with a real-world disease.
I find it humourous that Lovecraft despised the uneducated, while the core theme of his horror was the "un-knowable". Seemingly embracing willful ignorance, rejecting knowledge that challenges his perspective as madness. True cowardice.
Film adaptations lack the fun overwrought descipive language he used. Reading that always put me in a mood the fims can't seem to capture visually.
Perhaps he only valued education in "proper" things like good manners and good New England architecture.
Not things like math, philosophy, science, etc.
The problem is that most people's idea of "cosmic horror" is just "big scary monster with tentacles" which is why I roll my eyes whenever people claim that SCP is "cosmic horror"
You know the song “Just Glue Some Gears On It And Call It Steampunk”? Now we have “Just Glue Some Tentacles On It And Call It Eldritch”.
SCP definitely has cosmic horror entries. SCP-3812 for example definitely dips into it, but there are a lot of examples, especially with stories where the SCP object itself isn't the actually scary part, but its implications.
An excerpt that I think gives cosmic horror vibes from SCP-3812.
"So then, what would truly constitute a God? This entity would have to totally supersede our reality, to be able to look over our reality not like we would look over ants, but like we would look over our thoughts and ideas. A being so totally separate from our reality that we may as well be words on a page to it. This entity, a true author of creation, could be considered a God."
REANIMATOR MENTIONED \o/
i was hoping 😭
_In the Mouth of Madness_ is the best Lovecraft film, despite not actually being a Lovecraft story.
My personal favorite Lovecraft stories are his Dreamlands stores, particularly _Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath_ and the sort stories that presage it and exist in the same world, like "Pickman's Model".
I'd have to disagree with "The Outsider" not being characteristic of Lovecraft, since it's basically autobiographical. He believed that he had a particularly unpleasant appearance (thanks to his mentally ill mother). He also spent much of his early life isolated, so he never developed much in the way of social abilities, and was extremely uncomfortable in social situations for much of the rest of his life as a result of both of those factors.
Great video! So glad I found your channel :)
When the people who worked on Chaosium tell the story, they say they helped pull Lovecraft and the mythos out of obscurity. From how they describe it, Lovecraft was a niche author of weird pulp until the RPG release in '81.
Oh so that explains all the tentacle talk.
Dude I just wanna say that i love your channel
A weird realization that has permanently scarred my mind is learning that the writer of "In the mouth of Madness" wrote the much maligned episode of Star Trek: Voyager: Treshold, because it made realize that it made me realize that it's the same as Bloodborne rebirth ending.
Eternal darkness is a great love craftian story.
edit: the biggest problem about adapting Lovecraft's work is that, ultimately he was a scared man. A scared man who's fears stemmed from how he knew about something, but didn't understand. The air conditioning story, the color out of space. Both are stories based on things Lovecraft heard about, but didn't understand. He thought air conditioning could make dead people live beyond their death, because you put stuff in a fridge to preserve perishable foods. The color out of space? It stemmed from the discovery of the color spectrum. He didn't understand what the color spectrum is, so he wrote a story about a color that is outside of the spectrum of light. The new movie about this story uses magenta, because technically magenta doesn't exist. Magenta is combination of two different wavelengths, but it's still a color. Because we see it and can describe it. There is no color out of the spectrum, beyond infra and ultra the wavelength become something else. He was a scared man, describing how he was scared.
There's plenty to love about the works of H.P. despite the views he had until the deathbed. But, making all of reality a dream of an all powerful being, and then calling that god an idiot. And some people just fit the guy's archetype? It's so good.
Ummmm you DO know the whole reality is a dream of Azatoth is not a thing right? Archetype is a bit more complicated than that😅
Also I like colour out of space by the simple fact that 'that we know of at the moment' type of story
Excited for this as a life long Lovecraft fan 🙏
Lovecraft horror is hard to adapt because visual alone doesn't give the insight the narration has that is apparently breaking under the experience. I do think it is only going to work in a visual medium is if it breaks the medium, the sort of visuak distortions found more in video games, and found footage styles stuff. The sort of thing in a more first person perspective, but less accepted in what is supposed to be a more neutral perspective like a lot of movies.
It might never work in a movie if it cannot portray through visuals that Cthulhu is more than a giant octopus dragon. My memory of the story, I think there is something Cthulhu being something felt mostly through dreams for most of the story, characters see an idol and can explain the appearance, but it means very little compared to actually seeing him in person. I think it was the sailors saw him starting to wake up knew just by doing so that if they did not do anything, the world as they knew it would be over.
His presence though can be felt through just dreams, and I think often left out of the Cthulhu mythos is that there is the Dreamlands, which can have a very different tone to the rest of the mythos. I have previously thrown some story ideas in my head, where silly dream stuff couldbe the window to eldritch horror in comparison. Like someone being able to manipulate their dreams, and then what if something had that exact power but what we consider reality.
Hey there, Lovers of dark horror and cosmic wonder!
I know it's hard to find good cosmic horror out there, or lovecraft-inspired stories, but if you enjoy books, I'd recommend:
Carter and Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard.
I'd also recommend another dark comedy fantasy series by the same author: Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer, which also explores the dreamlands and other supernatural/eldritch elements in his dark comedy.
And if you like podcasts, I'd recommend the creatively designed "Malevolent" by Harlan Guthrie, which sets a mystery based (at least originally) in a familiar setting.
Of all the Lovecraft stuff I have had experienced, The one that I believe is the closest you can realistic get to the feeling of a Lovecraft story is the video game: World Of Horror.
I’m not just saying that because the big lovable squid creature is (technically) in the game, but because it adds to the smallness that Lovecraft’s works often have. You play as just regular people who are trying to postpone the apocalypse from the various gods in the game.
Hell yeah, World of Horror mention!! So glad to see other fans of the game
The Outsider feels like a self-insert character; Lovecraft writing about his own self-esteem issues and personal fears.
The thing about the "maddening knowledge" trope is that human minds are great at compartimentalization
Sure, you'd be pretty fucked up for a bit if you realized some greater cosmic insignificance. But as long as that didn't really change your life in any significant way you might as well never have learned
It's terrifying to discover that that week you spent having recurring nightmares about a weird sunken city and chanting voices is a shared experience with a bunch of people, but when three weeks later nothing further happened you'd probably just dismiss it as some weird happenig or strange coincidence
I don't know about that. I think as humans that we think we're great at compartmentalization. But in reality? Actual reality? People don't actually just *get over* trauma like that. They certainly try to, but it doesn't... actually work. So I think the idea is that you aren't just finding out a piece of information that is inconvenient for your world view, you know? Lovecraft started writing this stuff only in the aftermath of World War I, when "shell shock" was a thing people knew existed but not exactly why? That people could come out of a situation somehow damaged even if they weren't actually the ones who got shot or blown up? It does seem related.
You've given me so many new things to watch in the course of this video.
I know nothing of Lovecraft and I generally don’t care about horror, in general. But I love Ant so we’re learning about Lovecraft today!
Thanks for bringing up Annihilation! Great connection and recommendation!
By far one of the best Lovecraftian works in modern times? The game 'Bloodborne'.
Bloodborne and Amnesia the Dark Descent are such good lovecraftian horror games!
Fear and hunger also
I always thought Alien had a lot of Lovecraft influence. Not the sequels, but the first movie felt very Lovecraftian to me, which Dan O'Bannon loved pulp sci fi and I believe he loved Lovecraft.
Loved the video and conversation you two had! And yes, Cthulhu is very cute and if I ever come across them, I’ll adopt them and raise them as my own child
Such a brilliant video topic idea 🦑 💚
In Indie Horror Game Signalis, dead enemy androids have a static effect around their bodies, almost like your Android protagonist can't or won't see them properly. It's subtle, but is my favorite version of unknowable horror in a game
My favorite Joke depiction of Cuthullu is in Pop Team Epic.
He just fits the vibe of the show!
My favorite Lovecraftian story lately is the Twenty Days of Turin. I would recommend looking this up because it very much portrays an eldrich horror that is wholly human-generated -- I first heard about it in discussions of how 4chan (and more broadly, mass-anonymity in the Internet) has affected human discourse. I won't spoil anything, but it's one of those stories where the characters try all they can mid-story to not confront the horror, and even in translation from Italian to English you can feel the averted gazes, the need to just keep things under wraps.
Great video Anthony, I absolutely love when you have a guest(s) that you can bounce off of.
One thing about my personal favorite Lovecraft stories are those that are somewhat disconnected from the horror then are faced more personally at the very end.
Stories like The Whisperer in the Dark or The Colour Out of Space where it’s told through the perspective of a professor exchanging letters with a hermit and a surveyor respectively.
If I could make my own recommendations. I believe its BBC Radio produced a show called LoveCraft investigations that adapted his stories in a true crime podcast connected storyline. The first season adapts The Case Charles Dexter Ward.
I saw someone mention Malevolent, but also check out The Magnus Archives which isn’t always wholly cosmic in its horror shares a lot of similarities I think and is worth a mention and maybe worth a video someday👁️👀
Oooooh hello fellow Malevolent fan 👀
I like the idea of embracing the unknown. Technological advancement can be scary but I like that sort of view.
4:55 At the Mountains of Madness* is only Lovecraft's third longest story at 40,881. His longest, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, comes in at a respectable 51,112. Right between them at 42,589 words is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
I feel like I need to go to bat for Lovecraft Country the show, because it was only mentioned briefly, but oh my GOD it is worth a watch. Not only does it show how maybe the 'outsiders' are not so scary, but the real horror is the things humans do to each other. Even in the presence of unknowable horrors, the most terrifying sequence is one where a cop is abusing his power to commit a hate crime.
The Outsider is my favorite! I didn't know there was a show based on it but just knowing its a change of medium kinda ruins it. I think Lovecraft's work is better in our theatre of mind, rather than having someone else show you what you should see.
Twitter. That’s the one thing. Twitter.
Also, glad you mentioned Underwater.
I think if I saw Dracula or a ghost, the full horror of it would only really register after the encounter was over. I suspect a lot of people’s brains work this way as a sort of defense mechanism
I'm not sure if you talk about it in this video, but one of my favorite takes on Lovecraft is in Magic the Gathering. There's a plane (basically a world) called Innistrad that is themed around 16th/17th century people fighting for survival against werewolves, vampires, zombies, and all kinds of gothic horror beasties, and in a set where we return to the plane stuff is a bit, weird. Angels are corrupted and going mad, wild animals are fusing with people, symbols of their protector god are melting and inverting on their own, and nobody knows what is going on or what's causing it, until its revealed that a giant entity from the game's history was flung across the cosmos to save another world, but ended up here and has started to devour it. Very cool set, the eldritch creature gets sealed inside the moon at the end of the story because she cant be killed. Magic the Gathering is a vey cool game.
When you two started talking about how shocking and upsetting seeing a vampire or ghost would be in real life and how it would cause someone to throw up, all I could think of was:
"My life is nothing I thought it should be and everything I was worried it would become because for 50 seconds, I thought there was monsters on the world."
You're relieved you don't have to go to work tomorrow because you're gonna get eaten?
I've always appreciated the creatures of the Cthulu Mythos.
Gotta love an Overly Sarcastic Productions shout-out. Also, 'Cthuhlu gets Ursula-ed' is a very funny sentence. I highly recommend the book Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys; it's a 'what if the Innsmouth residents were being oppressed?' narrative, with a ton of thought and care put into it. The discussion near the end of the video made me wonder, what things will we learn in the future, that would completely blow the minds of people today? What knowledge or information that we take as solid, unshakable facts about the universe in the present, will turn out to be incomplete, or outright wrong? There's always more to learn, always more discoveries to be made, and our position as a species reevaluated again and again.
My favorite is the black-and-white version 💿 with Cthulhu! 🐙
When Stephen King said his favorite Lovecraft story is the Color out of space I squealed a little.
28:00 This is the exact reason why the Color out of space conveys cosmic horror better than The call of Cthulhu ever could. Cthulu's humanoid figure makes it too tangible.
I have a quick but some what stupid question. Ok I was watching Salem's Lot (the new one) and becauae the priest was questioning his faith in god the cross didn't work. So here is my somewhat stupid question if the power of the use of the cross is solely base on your faith does that mean anything you have faith in have power against vampires? Like if you were a kid and your parents got you a Cthulhu plushy and they told you he would protect you from monsters and you truly believe it does that mean if a vampire tried to feed off you that you could stop them with your Cthulhu?
In a Lovecraft story, either would be a powerless edifice of man.
World of Darkness from White Wolf (Vampire etc) has human True Faith that can manifest in nebulous ways. But there its not the doll but a humans faith itself doing it.
@SusCalvin cool. Thank you. I been thinking about the question for weeks.
@@stephennootens916 True Faith in Vampire was not entirely defined. It could be the characters inner conviction and will, it could be some external source acting through the devout character. Either way, the character has faith in the Torah or paganism or sun worship etc that lets them ward off monsters and their powers.
In Ars Magica, God has 100% magic resistance. The closer something is to God, the less partial its resistance is. Bread and wine transmuted to the blood and flesh of the Son, in a church, on a sunday, would be neatly impossible to toss a spell on. They toyed with the idea that one of the auras covering the world was the faith.
Something that not a lot of people know is that Lovecraft was fine with people taking some of his ideas and creations and doing their own thing with it. Heck, I've come across a few Lovecraft inspired stories from the time he was still active that are pretty good.
A recent example I found is a story called 'In His Own Handwriting' by S.T. Joshi, which is about Lovecraft on his death bed, and all he can think about is that he's a fraud who had been stealing stories from a notebook given to him by a mysterious man that only he could see.
I think Amnesia the dark descent is a really good lovecraftian work, even if it's reduced to freaky enemies following you nowadays.
Another absolutely amazing lovecraftian work is the music video to Fantasy by DyE. That was the first time I saw the word eldritch horror mentioned (english isnt my first language) and my obsession with cosmic/eldritch horror went from there
Ps: bloodborne is the best lovecraftian horror game-
Edit: NYARLATHATOP MENTIONED (I find this story incredibly underappreciated
Edit 2: another cosmic horror movie I recommend is of course Annihilation- oh he just mentioned it LOL
Edit 3: I didn't think he'd actually mention Fantasy by DyE. My god you're so based.
Lovecraft in Brooklyn by The Mountain Goats is running through my head for the course of this whole video
Also love the Red OSP jumpscare
I beg to differ in the "turns you crazy" thing. I think it's not exactly that, if you know about things nobody could believe you're gonna be marked as crazy and being crazy would be better because that would mean that that powerful thing/being/whatever would be only a figment of your imagination. Anyways good points
Housing Complex C: the perfect Lovecraftian content in visual media till date.
I love Lovecraft mainly for the potential his works created to expand upon. So many excellent new stories spawned from his original creations.
I also adore Culbert's, Tanabe's and Baranger's comic adaptions, highly recommend.
And give Goomi's Unspeakable Vault Of Doom a read for a good laugh!
It's a huge playground anyone can add to.
Also, 'ti's the season, so please have a very, very scary solstice and put on some of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent and hilarious Christmas Carol's 🐙❤
A really good short story thats lovecraft like but actually has good human characters is the 1907 The Voice In The Night.