Lovecraftian horror 1 Lovecraftian horror Fantasy Media • Anime • Art • Fantastic • Artists • Authors • Comics • Films • Literature • Magazines • Television • Webcomics Genre studies • Contemporary fantasy • Creatures • Fantastic • Fantastique • History • Lovecraftian horror • Magic • Magician • Races • Religious themes • Sources • Tolkien fandom • Tropes and conventions • Worlds Categories • Fantasy • Awards • Subgenres • Television • Tropes • Portal • v • t [1] • e Lovecraftian horror is a sub-genre of horror fiction that emphasizes the cosmic horror of the unknown (and in some cases, unknowable) over gore or other elements of shock, though these may still be present. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Lovecraftian horror 2 Origin Lovecraft refined this style of storytelling into his own mythos that involved a set of supernatural, pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements. His work was inspired by and similar to previous authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism: the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person. Lovecraft's work is also steeped in the insular feel of rural New England, and much of the genre continues to maintain this sense that "that which man was not meant to know" might be closer to the surface of ordinary life outside of the crowded cities of modern civilization. However, Lovecraftian horror is not restricted to the countryside; "The Horror at Red Hook", for instance, is set in a crowded ethnic ghetto. Themes of Lovecraftian horror Several themes found in Lovecraft's writings are considered to be components of a "Lovecraftian" work: • Anti-anthropocentrism, misanthropy in general. Lovecraft's works tend not to focus on characterization of humans, in line with his view of humanity's insignificant place in the universe, and the general Modernist trend of literature at the time of his writings. • Preoccupation with viscerate texture. The horror features of Lovecraft's stories tend to involve semi-gelatinous substances, such as slime, as opposed to standard horror elements such as blood, bones, or corpses. • Antiquarian writing style. Even when dealing with up-to-date technology, Lovecraft tended to use anachronisms as well as old-fashioned words when dealing with such things. For example, he used the term "man of science" rather than the modern word, "scientist" and often spelled "show" as "shew" and "lantern" as "lanthorne." • Detachment. Lovecraftian heroes (both in original writings and in more modern adaptations) tend to be isolated individuals, usually with an academic or scholarly bent. • Helplessness and hopelessness. Although Lovecraftian heroes may occasionally deal a "setback" to malignant forces, their victories are temporary, and they usually pay a price for it. Otherwise, subjects often find themselves completely unable to simply run away, instead driven by some other force to their desperate end. • Unanswered questions. Characters in Lovecraft's stories rarely if ever fully understand what is happening to them, and often go insane if they try. • Sanity's fragility and vulnerability. Characters in many of Lovecraft's stories are unable to cope mentally with the extraordinary and almost unreasonable truths they witness or hear. The strain of trying to cope, as Lovecraft often illustrates, is too impossible to bear and insanity takes hold. • Questionable parentage. Relatives of characters are typically depicted as paranormal or abnormal, whereas intimate relations in general are often represented as foreboding and sinister. Collaborators and followers Much of Lovecraft's influence is secondary, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many authors who would gain fame through their creations. Many of these writers also worked with Lovecraft on jointly-written stories. His more famous friends and collaborators include Robert Bloch, author of Psycho; Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian; and August Derleth, who codified and added to the Cthulhu Mythos. Subsequent horror writers also heavily drew on Lovecraft's work. While many made direct references to elements of Lovecraft's mythos, either to draw on its associations or to acknowledge his influence, many others drew on the feel and tone of his work without specifically referring to mythos elements. Some have said that Lovecraft, along with Edgar Allan Poe, is the most influential author on modern horror. Author Stephen King has said: "Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." Lovecraftian horror 3 By the late 20th century, Lovecraft had become something of a pop-culture icon, resulting in countless reinterpretations of and references to his work. Many of these fall outside the sphere of Lovecraftian horror, but represent Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture. Literature and art Lovecraft's work, mostly published in pulp magazines, never had the same sort of influence on literature as his high-modernist literary contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, his impact is still broadly and deeply felt in some of the most celebrated authors of contemporary fiction. The fantasias of Jorge Luis Borges display a marked resemblance to some of Lovecraft's more dream influenced work. Borges also dedicated his story, "There Are More Things" to Lovecraft, though he also considered Lovecraft "an involuntary parodist of Poe." The controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq has also cited Lovecraft as an influence and has written a lengthy essay on Lovecraft entitled H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life in which he refers to the Cthulhu cycle as "the great texts". Lovecraft's penchant for dreamscapes and for the biologically macabre has also profoundly influenced visual artists such as Jean "Moebius" Giraud and H. R. Giger. Giger's book of paintings which led directly to many of the designs for the film Alien was named Necronomicon, the name of a fictional book in several of Lovecraft's mythos stories. Dan O'Bannon, the original writer of the Alien screenplay, has also mentioned Lovecraft as a major influence on the film. With Ronald Shusett, he would later write Dead & Buried and Hemoglobin, both of which were admitted pastiches of Lovecraft. Comics Lovecraft has cast a long shadow across the comic world. This has included not only adaptations of his stories, such as H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness, Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft[2] and MAX's Haunt of Horror, but also the incorporation of the Mythos into new stories. Alan Moore has touched on Lovecraftian themes, most obviously in his The Courtyard and Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths (and Antony Johnston's spin-off Yuggoth Creatures), but also in his Black Dossier where the story "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?" mixed Lovecraftian horror with Bertie Wooster. Neonomicon posits a world where the Mythos, while existing as fiction written by Lovecraft, is also very real. Gordon Rennie not only used various Lovecraft creations, like Tcho-Tcho, in his Necronauts, but he also included Lovecraft himself as a character, teaming up with an influence of his,[3] Charles Fort, a combination that would occur again in Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained. Necronauts wasn't the first appearance of Lovecraftian horror in 2000 AD as Grant Morrison's Zenith involved the eponymous hero trying to stop the Lloigor, known as the Many-Angled Ones. Entities also called Many-Angled Ones appear in the Marvel Universe in the storyline "Realm of Kings" where they rule an alternate reality. This story line was in their Guardians of the Galaxy comic where an alternate universe invades the main Marvel Universe. The invading universe, dubbed the "Cancerverse" in the comics, is a universe where Lovecraft's Elder Gods triumph over death and conquer the universe. The inspiration for the universe is clearly Lovecraftian as even the words are taken directly from Lovecraft's writings. The most obvious example of this is the word fhtagn. As the story is set in space, fighting alien gods, the only thing stopping the story from being truly a tale of Lovecraftian horror is that the good guys resoundingly win, though they only do so by releasing a galactic mass murderer loose on the other universe as well as theirs. So there is some lasting horror in that. The Marvel Universe also contains a range of Cthulhu Mythos comics, including the Elder Gods. As well as appearing with Fort in two comics stories, Lovecraft has appeared as a character in a number of Lovecraftian comics. He appears in Mac Carter's and Tony Salmons's limited series The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft from Image and in the Arcana children's graphic novel Howard and the Frozen Kingdom from Bruce Brown. A webcomic, Lovecraft is Missing, debuted in 2008 and takes place in 1926, before the publication of "The Call of Cthulhu", and weaves in elements of Lovecraft's earlier stories. Lovecraftian horror 4 Boom! Studios have also run a number of series based on Cthulhu and other characters from the Mythos, including Cthulhu Tales and Fall of Cthulhu. The creator of Hellboy, Mike Mignola, has described the books as being influenced primarily by the works of Lovecraft, in addition to those of Robert E. Howard and the legend of Dracula. This was adapted into the 2004 film Hellboy. His Elseworlds mini-series The Doom That Came to Gotham reimagines Batman in a confrontation with Lovecraftian monsters. The manga artist Junji Ito was heavily influenced by Lovecraft.Wikipedia:Citation needed The third volume of the comic series Atomic Robo, named "Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time" features a Lovecraftian monster as the antagonist, and indeed has an appearance from H.