HP Lovecraft on Screen, a Challenge for Filmmakers (allusions, transposistions, rewritings) (original) (raw)
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H. P. LOVECRAFT ON SCREEN, A CHALLENGE FOR FILMMAKERS (ALLUSIONS, TRANSPOSITIONS, REWRITINGS
This article first delineates the reasons why it is difficult to adapt Lovecraft's fiction to the screen. It then analyses different types of adaptation, either straight or more loose, focusing in particular on the work of Stuart Gordon, one of the main adapters of Lovecraft with films ranging from parody (Herbert West Reanimator) to more serious adaptations which however depart in various ways (especially adding women characters and sex) from their source text (Dagon, The Dreams in the Witch House). Andrew Leman's The Call of Cthulhu, a pastiche of early silent films, provides a good example of straight adaptation. It also proves rewarding to compare two different retellings of the same novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by two directors, Roger Corman (The Haunted Palace) and Dan O'Bannon (The Resurrected). Corman tends to associate Poesque Gothic and Lovecraft while O'Bannon uses film noir conventions, also setting the story in a contemporary context. Lastly this article analyses the presence of Lovecraftian themes and motifs in films that are not adaptations like Alien or the Quatermass trilogy. A case in point is John Carpenter's apocalyptic trilogy that provides a convincing re-appropriation of Lovecraft's fictional universe. 56 resuMen En primer lugar, este artículo describe las razones que hacen difícil adaptar la ficción de Lovecraft a la pantalla. A continuación, se analizan diferentes tipos de adaptación, ya sea estricta o más o menos libre, centrándose en particular en el trabajo de Stuart Gordon, uno de los principales adaptadores de Lovecraft con películas que van desde la parodia (Herbert West Reanimator) hasta versiones más serias, que, sin embargo, toman diversas vías (en especial, agregando personajes femeninos y sexo) a partir de su texto fuente (Dagon, The Dreams in the Witch House). The Call of Cthulhu, de Andrew Leman, un pastiche de las primeras películas mudas, es un buen ejemplo de adaptación estricta. También resulta gratificante comparar las diferentes versiones de la novela El caso de Charles Dexter Ward que realizaron dos directores, Roger Corman (The Haunted Palace) y Dan O'Bannon (The Resurrected). Así, mientras Corman combina la dimensión gótica de Poe con Lovecraft, por su parte, O'Bannon usa las convenciones del cine negro y sitúa la historia en un contexto contemporáneo. Finalmente, este artículo analiza la presencia de temas y motivos de Lovecraft en películas que no son adaptaciones, como ocurre en Alien o en la trilogía de Quatermass. Un ejemplo de ello es la trilogía apocalíptica de John Carpenter, que ofrece una reapropiación convincente del universo ficticio de Lovecraft.
Bachelor's thesis, 2023
This work analyses the influence of the works of H.P. Lovecraft on contemporary horror fiction by comparing two of his short stories – “Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dreams in The Witch-House” and Archive 81 directed by Rebecca Sonnenshine. Chapter 1 outlines the history of the horror genre from the early gothic to the horror fiction inspired by the spiritualist revival of the late nineteenth century. The chapter also characterises the genre of weird fiction, its fathers, and their influence on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Chapter 2 analyses the elements of Lovecraftian aesthetic in the “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H.P. Lovecraft. The first subchapter focuses the author’s philosophy of cosmicism and the way it is reflected in the two stories. The second subchapter addresses the portrayal of occultism in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” Chapter 3 analyses how the elements of Lovecraft’s cosmicism and his portrayal of the occult find their direct parallel in Archive 81 showing that the H.P. Lovecraft continues to influence modern works of horror genre.
Introduction: Adapting Lovecraft in Weird Times
Studies in Gothic Fiction, 2021
In 1974 Angela Carter declared “we live in gothic times” (133). It is perhaps more apposite these days to suggest that we live in weird times. This is not to say that the Weird (as a literary mode) has superseded the Gothic; rather that it comprises a polymorphous outgrowing emanating from and intertwining with it. What does it mean to say we live in weird times? Perhaps it is a pervasive sense of unreality, or a reality that has been fractured. Certainly, the ecological moment is one of ontological shock as widespread extinction and the effects of climate change prompt pleas across the globe for governments to declare an emergency. Meanwhile, the stranger monsters and specters of the gothic mode, in particular the uncanny appendage of the tentacle, have proliferated across cultural media, especially in the West. In his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), writer of weird tales, H. P. Lovecraft suggests that “[t]he appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life” (n.p.). Contrary to Lovecraft, we are surrounded by weird intrusions every day. These are not only to be found in playful and referential cephalopodic literary fiction, including Kraken (2010) by China Miéville, but in a wider range of fictions drawing on multiple cultural narratives, such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series (2015-2018). In popular culture, the weird manifests in unlikely places. In the opening credits of the recent James Bond film, Spectre (2015), for example, the tentacular becomes emblematic for the unseen machinations of conglomerate control. The attraction of the Weird seems then to be anything but “narrow,” and Lovecraft’s creations in particular have proved to be highly adaptable. The monstrous creation, Cthulhu, pervades the high street emblazoned on t-shirts, mugs, mouse-mats, and any other malleable object that can sustain its image. This very reflexivity of the Lovecraftian permeates a host of media, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, from film and television to video and roleplaying games, comics, and graphic novels. The weird emerges at the fringes but also in the mainstream; it is mobilized by top-down media power for profit as well as grassroots, indie productions. In the podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-current), the dulcet tones of Cecil Baldwin reassures listeners that the great cosmic void awaits us all. It is this very popularity of the Weird, which attracts a self-conscious referentiality, to which this special issue is dedicated. The knowing deployment of a Lovecraftian aesthetic is a form of adaptation, which Julie Sanders defines as the “reinterpretation of established (canonical or perhaps just well-known) texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an ‘original’ or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift” (Adaptation and Appropriation 27). This issue interrogates a variety of Lovecraftian and Weird adaptations. What do these remediations offer beyond pastiche or homage? Why has the Lovecraftian become such a “popular” contemporary medium and what does it portend for not only cultural and literary studies but wider ontological framings? In Postmillenial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017), Catherine Spooner suggests that the Gothic comes to permeate a person’s life and influences not only their media consumption, but their aesthetic outlook, the clothes they wear, and the values they hold. Certainly, the Weird, and particularly the Lovecraftian, seems to have followed a similar trend in its spread beyond the cult roots of the initial magazine run of Weird Tales (1922-1940) into mainstream appeal. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points out, Lovecraft owes much to his Gothic predecessors, and his oeuvre represents a sustained engagement with the Gothic as he adapted elements from Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis to name a few (ix). Lovecraft did not deny the connection, despite his dismissal of “bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” (n.p.). If the Weird develops from the Gothic perhaps it does so much like the nameless color central to “The Colour out of Space” (1927), which gestates and ruptures in an inexplicable and indescribable conjuring of a “real” that cannot quite be encapsulated. For the Weird and Lovecraftian is interested in all that is strange, eerie, and unusual, pushing anthropocentrism to its limits and scrutinizing perceived definitions of “reality.” As Benjamin Robertson suggests in None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (2018)—which is reviewed later in this issue—the Weird confronts the very notion of any conceivable “norm” until it is rather the subject’s perception that is brought into question. Such a framework seems uniquely positioned to engage with the ontological terror of our current ecological moment then, where the cracks are beginning to show in the corrosive “reality” that humanity took for granted. As Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman suggest, in a borrowing from Thomas Friedman’s “global weirding,” our climate has perceptively gotten “weird” (7). They argue that such terminology offers a “cognitive frame . . . to refocus our attention on the localities within the totality of the global,” to critically deploy the Weird as a frame to engage with contemporary eco-anxieties or the non-real in which “readers discover they’re entering zones of radical uncertainty: can this be real?” (8, 10, original emphasis). The Weird offers no solution to such uncertainty, but it does offer a means of engagement with it.
Roger Luckhurst, H. P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories. Edited with an Introduction and Notes
Gothic Studies, 2018
This new volume is a welcome addition to the ever-growing scholarship on gothic, horror, and fantasy film and literature, much of it coming from UK and Canadian scholars, many of whom are featured in this book. In Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer, editor Sorcha Ní Fhlainn introduces twelve new essays examining Great Britain's most well-known and prolific horror/ dark fantasy writer and filmmaker. As she notes in her excellent introduction to the bookfollowing a concise yet thorough overview of Barker's varied career-Barker's oeuvre has not received the scholarly attention it assuredly deserves. 'To date, this new collection is the only book that completely dedicates itself to the scholarly analysis of Barker's works since [Gary] Hoppenstand's analysis of the Books of Blood' (16), Barker's collections of short horror stories which first brought him to international acclaim. Ní Fhlainn suggests this may be partly due to Barker's formal and creative promiscuity, his 'desire to focus his works through different media while oscillating between the genres of horror and the fantastique, and publishing for both adult and young adult audiences' (15). Indeed, many critics and fans first who discovered Barker within the realm of 1980s 'body horror'-as exemplified by the Books of Blood (1984-85) and the Hellraiser film franchise (1987-)-were perhaps generically confused when Barker's work moved into the realm of what he himself has termed the 'dark fantastique', the complex fantasy dream worlds depicted in novels like Weaveworld (1987), Imajica (1991), and Coldheart Canyon (2001). And what mere film or literary critic could hope to keep up with Barker's tremendously varied output? Not only is he a writer and filmmaker, he also sketches, paints, and sculpts; he has designed models/toys, theme park attractions, and video games; and he was even a pioneer of 1970s avant-garde theatre (wherein his professional career in the macabre arguably began). To its credit, this new volume engages with much of that varied output, even as it realizes the impossibility of comprehensive analysis. It is, instead, 'an invitation, a Barkerian doorway, a path towards understanding Barker's own place within popular fiction and popular culture, examining the power, the contradictions, and occasional limitations of his own unique brand' (20). Ní Fhlainn's volume is divided into four parts. In the first, 'Origins', Darryl Jones and Kevin Corstorphine explore contemporary and historical influences on the Books of Blood. Jones analyzes the Books alongside and within the publishing trends and cultural politics of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Corstorphine uses William Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea (1819-20) as a jumping off point for a discussion of the Books' indebtedness to visual and literary traditions, including the Grand Guignol and Antonin Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty', as well as H. P. Lovecraft's and China Mieville's reconfigurations of the 'weird tale'. The final essay in this section returns to the contexts of 1980s Britain as they are figured within Weaveworld; in it, author Edward Timothy Wallington expertly outlines how the novel 'transcends the immediate limitations of its genre to provide a thought-provoking and evocative reflection on the times in which it was written' (56). Part Two, 'Screening Barker', contains three essays on Barker's works as they were adapted into visual media. Harvey's O'Brien's chapter examines the last film Barker directed-Lord of Illusions (1996)-finding it a 'joyless' reflection of the mistreatment Barker himself underwent when his auteur project Nightbreed (1990) was mangled by its Hollywood producers. As O'Brien puts it, 'Lord of Illusions is marked by self-deflating irony and skepticism amounting almost to a self-loathing that made it an apt cinematic swansong; a farewell to a medium that seemed to have brought Barker nothing but trouble.' (71) (Such self-reflexive and autobiographical
The Gothic Tradition in H.P. Lovecraft: An Analysis of “The Call of Cthulhu”
2016
Gothic Literature awakened in the eighteenth century. It first appeared in Great Britain as a rebellion against the Neoclassical period, which no longer satisfied the needs of the readers nor the wants of the different writers. The Gothic style arrived to the American continent in the last part of the eighteenth century. It was first rejected due to American pragmatism; however, writers soon began to adjust the Gothic literary characteristics to their own cultural features. One of the most recognized American Gothic authors from the twentieth century was Howard Phillips Lovecraft. His work "The Call of Cthulhu" is a clear exponent of the American Gothic trend. The purpose of this essay is to elaborate a detailed study of the previously mentioned Lovecraft's short story and provide a thorough analysis of the main characteristics by which it is considered a key work of American Gothic literature.
'A Literature of Cosmic Fear': An Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft
Wordsworth Editions Blog, 2022
A blasted heath where nothing grows yet dead trees seem strangely animated; an abandoned well that glows with a colour that has no name; a disastrous expedition to Antarctica written by a survivor only to warn others to stay away; cathedral-sized buildings from before the dawn of mankind where the geometry doesn’t make sense; a pulp writer found dead at his desk, a look of frozen horror on his face; sailors discover a drowned city and half a world away an artist begins to sculpt a hideous figure while an architect goes mad; something not quite human breaks into an academic library to steal an unholy book; human brains are removed and placed in cannisters for transport to other worlds; the dead scream and a doctor vanishes; alien gods, ancient and terrible, dream beneath the sea… Enter, if you dare, the weird world of H.P. Lovecraft. If you know Lovecraft’s fiction, there’s nothing you need from me. In fact, you almost certainly know it better than I do. Devotees of Lovecraft tend to be as encyclopaedic as he was, and several academics have forged successful careers out of interpreting his work, life, and letters. His ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is pored over like a religious text, with references to it in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law and The Satanic Rituals by Anton LaVey and Michael A. Aquino. There are at least half a dozen books in print claiming to be the real Necronomicon of the ‘Mad Arab’ alchemist and necromancer Abdul Alhazred – another of Lovecraft’s inventions. Lovecraft’s influence over 20th century horror, supernatural and science fiction is vast, with symbols from his work spread out across popular culture, from death metal and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Scooby Doo and Gravity Falls. There are currently over 30 films based on his stories, most notably the cult Re-Animator series directed by Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna (who also adapted Lovecraft’s 1920 story ‘From Beyond’), and many more that take their inspiration from him, such as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead saga. In gothic literature, Lovecraft is the equal of Poe, to whom, he wrote, ‘we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state’; he has no other peer. And their collective influence can be felt in the crimson line of great American horror writing that runs from Robert Bloch (who was a friend of Lovecraft’s), through Richard Matheson, to Stephen King. In the Geek Kingdom, if you want to suss out a so-called ‘horror expert’, check out what they have to say about H.P. Lovecraft...
From beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the place of horror
cultural geographies, 2006
The work of the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft offers a valuable opportunity to study the representation of space in literature, but while Lovecraft's biography provides a useful way of making sense of his horror fictions, it also risks obscuring the importance of his represented spaces. Many of these impossible spaces mark a threshold between the known and unknown, and the paper argues that an attention to narrative demonstrates that these thresholds constitute the fulcrum about which his plots move. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin also suggests that Lovecraft's belief that ‘change is the enemy of everything really worth cherishing’ explains why these thresholds are represented as threats rather than progressive engagements with social space.
New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft
2013
Amen 9.4 The Justice League face Starro the Conqueror 9.5 Claustrophobia and psychological breakdown 9.6 Alberto Breccia's Cthulhu, from Los mitos de Cthulhu 9.7 The eerie mood of Lovecraft's stories is captured 9.8 For whom the bell bongs? 9.9 A telepathic attack from beyond the stars? 9.10 Shattered perspectives and contact with the unrepresentable 9.11 Hellboy by Mike Mignola 9.12 Cthulhu Tales and The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft 9.13 At the Mountains of Madness by Ian Culbard 9.14 "The Call of Cthulhu" by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli 9.15 Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows This page intentionally left blank Works Cited
Lovecraft's fiction in 21st century's popular culture
The paper focuses on such phenomenons as media convergence, incorporation, convention, invention etc. and shows how they work in case of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction in 21 st century. It shows how popular culture today may influence Cthulhu Mythos and why popular culture's participators are interested in creating new content connected with it. The paper looks into different branches such as: music, clothing, games, movies, graphics etc. to show that motives created by Lovecraft may be found everywhere. The motives are used by both: professionals and amateurs which shows how universal the motives are. The paper shows that Cthulhu Mythos have been so popular thanks to universality and huge innovations possibilities which allows them to be shown in so many different contexts.