Facing the Monsters: Otherness in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Hellboy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ), Sydney, 29 June – 1 July, 2016, pp. 79-87. ISBN: 978-0-473-38284-1. © 2016 This paper surveys select aspects of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, a model developed in his now-iconic work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and compares it with the weird fiction of author H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. Throughout, it is argued that Lovecraft’s writing shares superficial similarities with the monomyth, ostensibly or actually mirroring certain stages, yet Lovecraft’s work is ultimately subversive of this model. The only triumph in Lovecraft’s work is the continuance of the loathsome entities encountered within his stories. It is argued that Lovecraft’s portrayal of the monstrous can be viewed as an outworking of what Campbell terms ‘horrendous Divine Comedy’. Accounting for this type of storytelling, Lovecraft’s recurrent portrayals of annihilation, the monstrous and cosmic horror could be illustrative of the metanarratives of his own life. In this sense they reflect his experiences and evolving beliefs in early-twentieth century North America. Despite the personalized anxieties of these works, they have endured, continuing to appeal to present-day audiences.
Cthulhu Mythos: History of H.P. Lovecraft’s Monstrous Presence in Popular Culture
Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis. Literatura i Kultura Popularna, 2024
The aim of this paper is to analyse various forms of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos and describe specifi c shifts in reception and refl exion of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy in contemporary culture. The opening part of the paper introduces H.P. Lovecraft as the author of weird fi ction, cosmic horror and the philosophy of cosmicism, and corrects common misconceptions regarding the Cthulhu Mythos. Then, the semiotic versioning of three versions of the Cthulhu Mythos is explained and all three versions are further analysed. Version 1.0 of the Mythos includes Lovecraft's legacy, works of the authors from the Lovecraft Circle, but also August Derleth's interpretations of cosmic horror and works of the next generation of authors that emerged after Lovecraft's death or were discovered and guided by Derleth. It's a complex set of terminology, ideas, philosophies, plot devices and narratological specifi cations that is, as is further explained, wrongly interpreted as a fi ctional mythology. Version 2.0 includes all the works created under the label of 'Lovecraftian' or 'cosmic' horror, all transmedia adaptations, infl uences, and pop cultural additions where the infl uence of the original Mythos can be traced and is either explicitly admitted or just implied. Finally, Cthulhu Mythos 3.0 is a version of the Mythos that acknowledges the existence of the previous versions, yet approaches them through a specifi c self-refl ective, self-critical lens and is more focused on intertextual play and metacommentaries on these previous versions than on expanding them.
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.
HP Lovecraft on Screen, a Challenge for Filmmakers (allusions, transposistions, rewritings)
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019
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.
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
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.
'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...
The alien entities of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
2022
(1890-1937) have often been compared, the differences are nonetheless striking. Whereas Poe exploits the recesses of the human soul, including obsessions and deliriums, Lovecraft suggests a real existence of worlds existing next to ours. Many phantasy authors have evoked another world, either paradisiac or infernal, but Lovecraft emphasizes the intrinsic connection between those worlds and ours. Vague memories of civilizations long gone by, of forgotten languages and horrid life forms, still haunt humankind, at least its more sensitive members. Lovecraft uses several ways to forge that connection. Not all ways will be agreeable to our modern mind and some may even be as repulsive as the alien creatures he evokes. Biographical data can clarify his tendency to resort to racial theories. However, let us first make an inventory of the devices Lovecraft exploits to underline the genuine existence of his alien creatures, differing as they do from the products of a psychological deep drilling, although the element of fear is undoubtedly common to both. First Lovecraft stresses the force of hereditary characteristics. Although our rational faculty would make us believe that we are masters of our own destiny, the call of blood and race reduces human beings to a toy of fate. Then there are these stories of the past, relating the life of gods, heroes and monsters, nowadays mainly acknowledged as pre-scientific, mythological attempts to account for fearful events, such as earthquakes, storm, fire and diseases. Hence, these mythologies from a remote past have lost their ontological status for modern human beings. There are exceptions: in Germany of the beginning of the 20 th century, a theory has been developed tributary to Romanticism, in which the gods of bygone mythology were supposed to have a genuine existence, as long as there are people who believe in them. A poet like Hölderlin addresses the heroes and gods of Greek mythology as his contemporaries, alive and vibrant. Lovecraft traces these gods to alien creatures, still alive and with access to our world, which can be proven by devoted scholarly research, performed by idiosyncratic and somewhat otherworldly professors. Archaeology, philological studies of ancient languages as well as inscriptions in long abandoned caves may reveal strange mythologies as a living reality, claiming its toll from modern society. A third element may surprise the reader, except those readers who will remember Mary Shelley's Monster of Frankenstein.1 Lovecraft does not place modern science and the forgotten world of alien creatures squarely opposite each other, but claims that modern science itself may reveal that other world. Scientists who have not yet discovered that faculty are so to say somewhat superficial and prejudiced by unproven dogmas, whereas the sensitive scientist will discover those horrid worlds by exploiting his theories to the full. 1 Note how the young scientist Frankenstein, persuaded by the power of science, creates his monster. 8 Lovecraft was well aware of the dozens Gothic and horror novels preceding him in Britain. He wrote a solid overview of this literature: Supernatural horror in literature.