A Guide to Horror - Cosmic and Lovecraftian Horror

[espanolbot]

By me



The intial script ended up growing a bit long, the entire thing can be read here if you're interested.
http://espanolbot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/expanded-guide-fo-cosmic-horror-script.html

In addition, here is a link to the 50 Shades of Green project, in which Lindsay and Nella from Chez Apocalpse crowdsource their own supernatural romance novel, in order to work out what exactly is it that makes the likes of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey so popular.
http://blip.tv/50shadesofgreen#EpisodeArchive

What type of horror should I cover next?

Comments

[icon_uk]

I would also recommend "Shadows over Baker Street" a series of Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes stories including the excellent A Study in Emerald (Link to a PDF of the story from Neil Gaiman's own website, so fair game methinks.

And in a simialr vein Gaiman's Shoggoth's Old Pecuilar which is intended as a Lovecrraftan story as told by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

[espanolbot]

Yeah, that is a good story collection. :)

[fungo_squiggly]

I loved Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, but as a Holmes fan and Lovecraft fan, I remember being seriously disappointed by Shadows Over Baker Street.

It seemed to me that most of the authors went "Holmes/Lovecraft? Whatever," and then just phoned it in.

Incidently, one of my personal favorite Lovecraft mash-ups was a mix of Shadow over Innsmouth and The Big Sleep, called "The Big Fish." Lovecraft meets film noire detective type. Nicely done, too, I thought.

[icon_uk]

Though a fairly nominal link, have you seen "Cast a Deadly Spell"?

[fungo_squiggly]

I did, though I was a young teen when I saw it, and had no knowledge of Lovecraft at the time.

As such, the cosmic horror aspect didn't really register for me at the time. I was taking it more as a film noire/fantasy kind of thing, like the Garrett novels by Glen Cook.

One of these days I've got to go back and watch the movie again.

[donnblake]

Of course, in some interpretations, the second layer of horror is that the even the unimaginably horrible entities aren't in control of the universe- the universe really is cold and uncaring and vaster than imagining, and as the aeons pass, they too will encounter something worse, or simply fade away (most obvious in something like The Shadow Out of Time, where the remarkably pleasant body-stealing aliens from before history are fleeing through time from horrors of their own).

There were also a lot of racist undercurrents to Lovecraft's work (spoiler alert, but in the Shadow Over Innsmouth, the monster at the end of the book is miscegenation), but that's not necessarily endemic to the genre.

[espanolbot]

Yeah, the fear of miscegenation is pretty much something that is a result of Lovecraft's own issues. Like his dad dying in an asylum from syphilis may have impacted on him in the way that mental illness reoccurs within his stories, for example.

As I said though, he did get better in regards to his racism, though not to the extent that his wife (who was Jewish) stayed with him.

[md84]

One of the most depressing and unnerving images in Cosmic Horror: great Cthulhu, dying cold and alone in the oceans' depths.

[skemono]

spoiler alert, but in the Shadow Over Innsmouth, the monster at the end of the book is miscegenation

Hello! *goes off to read that*

[espanolbot]

Actually the monsters are actually human/frog-fish hybrids.

In Medusa's Coils though, the dreaded secret they discover in a character's past is that one of his ancestors was black though.

[skemono]

The cosmic horror of the tragic octoroon? Sweet!

[espanolbot]

The actual twist,
"It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside — the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation — was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman — for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress."

Guy had problems.

[skemono]

So not so much a tragic octoroon as an eldritch horror octoroon?

[pyynk]

And her hair was alive!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Y73sPHKxw

[majingojira]

I don't know why but between mixing various Deep Sea Superheroes with the Deep Ones of Lovecraft, an odd thought occured to me:

What if most of the fish people/hybrids we see in such stories are the Deep One equivalent of the Taliban or Westburough Baptist Church, and that most Deep Ones are like Middle of the Road worshipers of any religion.

"Sure, there's that apocalypse stuff when Cthulhu Awakens, but that's not what worshiping the Dreaming God is all about."

[donnblake]

Interesting idea, but the implication, IIRC, is that Father Dagon and Mother Hydra are both alive, awake, and active in Deep One politics/religion.

[majingojira]

I know, and Dagon/Hydra do push forward the extremist agenda so the idea has it's flaws.

Still, the idea of Deep Ones who act like a Rockwellian ideal family amuses me.

[espanolbot]

I do remember in a short story by Kim Newman, author of Anno Dracula, it had a Deep One that was actually surprisingly pleasant to the children that found it, mostly because they rescued him from a priest that had chained him to a wall to get it to confess to being a demon.

The story took place in the early 1900s, and the priest was a guy who held that evolution was a lie invented to trick people from following the path in the Bible, and even had men roaming the nearly beaches to smash any fossils they found for the same reason... Guy was an asshole., though historically accurate, sadly.

He basically realised that the existance of a Deep One, who could be seen as being the missing link between man and fish, could actually validate evolution as some kind of truth, so he decided to kidnap it until he confessed to being a demon who chose that form just to mess with him..

[leoboiko]

One of the most important characteristics of Lovecraft's fiction for me is technique. He's the major exponent of "unseen horror", leaving the details of the scary things to the imagination. His monsters often are indescribable, incognoscible, beyond logic and understanding, their languages unknowable, etc. The reader is left with a gaping black void of description, with just a few well-placed strokes of terror to hang on.

The same technique is employed, in a positive way, by many fantasy authors, so as to create a sense of mystery & wonder.

[icon_uk]

Stephen King has a couple of memorable examples - In Salem's Lot, the event that starts the descent of the town into vampire infested destruction and horror is a ritual that the villain of the piece inflicts on the body of a little boy he has abducted and killed. All that is said, in a paragraph on it's own, is "It became unspeakable" and that leaves the reader's imagination to fill in whatever horror they themselves view as being past "horrible", "sick" or "disgusting", and is instead "unspeakable". Ick!

Also in King's work the creature in IT, after killing someone, turns into something "quite indescribable", which is another nicely unsettlingly vague term because as soon as you think of what it might be, you realise it can't be that because you've just described it to yourelf, it's sort of eternally cyclic in that sense.

[mrstatham]

I think that's my problem, usually, with adapting cosmic horror or something that features 'indescribable' horror in a visual format; The spider-looking-thing that IT becomes toward the end of the Tim Curry-starring version is just.. Well, a spider. And while I don't like spiders, it isn't particularly shocking or scary or horrific to have this bizarre presence who we know nothing about beyond his tormenting the children as a clown appear as something we can relate to or might see in the everyday world around us.

It might also explain the general lack of big-screen Lovecraft adaptations in general, although I am incredibly curious as to what Del Toro's Mountains adaptation would have been like.

[espanolbot]

I think that King said after the fact that he realise that the spider from the It adaption was going to disappoint people no matter what, because although it's a giant spider, there'd be people who'd think that a slightly larger giant spider would have been scarier.

[crinos]

I like cosmic horror. Also, I just finished watching a lets play of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's requiem. Which was a lot of fun, especially because the insanity effects break the fourth wall.

[fungo_squiggly]

That game was awesome, and has a surprising amount of replay value.

I still play it sometimes.

[majingojira]

Same here!

[crinos]

I kinda skipped over the gamecube, so I never played it myself. And judging from the Two Best friends lets play I doubt I will (Just doesn't seem like m,y kind of thing), but I believe that it will be available on the Wii U virtual console when it goes online in June.

[mrstatham]

TBF's Lets Play's are useful in that sense, sometimes; Case in point, their Silent Hill: Downpour playthrough, which taught me that a Silent Hill game can A - actually not be scary at all, and B - will often be unintentionally hilarious.

[grazzt]

A good collection for fans of the Lovecraftian is "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos". Besides including some of the classics ("Haunter of the Dark", "The Space Eaters", "The Hounds of the Tindalos"), they have a number of more modern stories that share Lovecraftian sensibilities. My favourites of those are Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks", Joanna Russ' "My Boat", and Richard A Lupoff's "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone". That last one combines cosmic horror and speculative future history so perfectly it's amazing.

[richardak]

You left out cosmic horror-comedy. Take an example like Ghostbusters: it's a story about a group of paranormal investigators who stumble upon a plot by an apocalyptic cult to summon an eldritch abomination, one that had visited, been worshiped in, and wreaked horrible destruction upon, our world in the distant past, so as to bring about the end of modern civilization, if not of humanity altogether. Armed only with the weapons of modern science and technology, the investigators save the day, and the whole story is played for laughs. It is, in short, Lovecraftian comedy.

[espanolbot]

Hm, good point. The cartoon actually had two episodes based on the mythos, the first involving some people attempting to raise Cthulhu and the second involving some Soviet paranormal investigators attempting something similar.

I do cover some other examples in the script though. :)

[icon_uk]

My favourites remain "Ragnarok and Roll" and "The Boogieman Cometh"

[crinos]

Yeah, The Ghostbusters cartoon was awesome. It had some really dark and surprisingly scary stuff for a Saturday morning kids show.

[espanolbot]

I even liked Extreme Ghostbusters, though though it became increasingly childish and less complex as the series advanced. Early on it's excellent though.

And Kylie Griffin is awesome.

[fungo_squiggly]

"Ree-kah, rah-kah, firecracker, sis-boom-bah! Old Ones, Old Ones, rah-rah-rah!"

[dr_archeville]

I absolutely love these various Genre Guides. Please, keep them coming!

And, tying to both the theme of this post (Comic/Lovecraftian Horror) and the theme of this community as a whole (superheroes), I leave behind this very nifty thing I found some years ago on RPG.net, filled with ideas on how to twist assorted DC and Marvel characters through a Mythos lens.

[donnblake]

And I suppose separate but often connected to the Cosmic Horror genre is the Cthulhu Mythos, (or more properly, Yog Sothothery) which comprises all the books, cults, places, and names Lovecraft not only sprinkled throughout his work, but also occasionally snuck into that of other peoples' when he revised it. Nowadays, a lot of people draw from the Mythos while writing non-cosmic horror, sci-fi, or fantasy, and you can write cosmic horror without explicitly drawing from the Mythos.