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I mean... it's basically exactly all the plot points of the color out of space story. Besides being set in a more modern time it's exactly that story put to film with a few extra lovecraftian body horror elements. It's just not one of lovecrafts stories that deal with gods or ancient history and so is less of a cosmic horror and more of look at this isolated incident story.

You would get about the same thing out of a film adaptation of The Other.

To that extent I think it's a very good lovecraft movie. It's just not a Cthulhu or Yog Sothoth or Azatoth movie.

 Lance845 wrote:
I mean... it's basically exactly all the plot points of the color out of space story. Besides being set in a more modern time it's exactly that story put to film with a few extra lovecraftian body horror elements. It's just not one of lovecrafts stories that deal with gods or ancient history and so is less of a cosmic horror and more of look at this isolated incident story.

I mean more in the tone department. It's a very campy movie, and not particularly scary as a result, but it does work as movie. To quote myself from the thread we had on the movie:

I am probably bad at assessing that. No movie has ever really "scared" me. I enjoy scary and horror movies because I get what they are but none of them have ever gotten my pulse pumping or anything.

Mouth of Madness, Alien (which I first saw when I was 8), Sunshine (underrated imo), Dark City (has some lovecraft elements to it), Event Horizon. Great movies. Clearly horror. Never been scary for me. Just entertaining.

If you guys want a good Lovecraft movie, there's a little known one by Dan O'Bannon (wrote Alien, Return of the Living Dead) called The Resurrected (though it had a different name when I original saw it, but I forget what it was). It's basically The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and I thought it was probably the closest I've seen to a good Lovecraft adaptation.

I'll shill for Sinister till I die. It's not quite existential, but it's got all the other parts: hard hit writer struggling with money, ancient cult deity, fate worse than death. And it's actually scary.

I liked sinister. Never saw the sequel. Always struck me as just a ghost story more than anything Lovecraft though.

The sequel is awful. Never watch it and do yourself the favor XD

 Sqorgar wrote:
If you guys want a good Lovecraft movie, there's a little known one by Dan O'Bannon (wrote Alien, Return of the Living Dead) called The Resurrected (though it had a different name when I original saw it, but I forget what it was). It's basically The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and I thought it was probably the closest I've seen to a good Lovecraft adaptation.

You're talking about "The Resurrected." That was a solid adaptation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhRIFwpVxkQ

Muhahaha..... Click if you dare....

 Sqorgar wrote:
If you guys want a good Lovecraft movie, there's a little known one by Dan O'Bannon (wrote Alien, Return of the Living Dead) called The Resurrected (though it had a different name when I original saw it, but I forget what it was). It's basically The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and I thought it was probably the closest I've seen to a good Lovecraft adaptation.

Watched it this weekend - pretty great flick! I'm incredibly glad it was low budget enough to not quite fall into the black hole of cinematic suspension of disbelief that is 1990s era CGI effects.

Another one for a good lovecraftian film that I watched recently was The Ritual. Not directly inspired by any of Lovecraft's stories, but it does a good job with the framework of ancient cosmic deity - group of worshippers using it to do impossible things, and like most of my favorite horror films, it identifies a good real-world creepy feeling and uses it to great effect. In this case, that's the incredible disorientation of being in a large forest of thin pines without a trail.

Not Lovecraft but one of his inspirations, Season 1 of True Detective is a King in Yellow story. And a GREAT one at that. It really manage to rail home that the general threat isn't an amorphous blob or a tentacle monster, or tons of other monsters you can see.. it's the cultists. The regular people who hide in plain sight.

One of the best "lovecraftian" pieces of media out there.

 Lance845 wrote:
Not Lovecraft but one of his inspirations, Season 1 of True Detective is a King in Yellow story. And a GREAT one at that. It really manage to rail home that the general threat isn't an amorphous blob or a tentacle monster, or tons of other monsters you can see.. it's the cultists. The regular people who hide in plain sight.

One of the best "lovecraftian" pieces of media out there.

I don't know about that. It references the King in Yellow, but it is mostly used as a red herring to imply a supernatural subtext to long meandering shots of things that are ultimately unrelated. I was actually kind of upset at the end, because I felt like I was sold a different show than it ultimately turned out to be. The show really felt like someone read about the Bohemian Grove, got high as a kite, and just went all stream of consciousness on a laptop.

Now, the Bohemian Grove. Who knew Lovecraft wrote documentaries?

You follow an unreliable narrator (Rusty) who may be seeing real stuff or may not be. A cult that follows a man who may be in contact with the true King in Yellow or may not be. The girls Journal says when she closes her eyes she can see the Yellow King walking through the forest. Is she talking about the man they are looking for or the supernatural entity?

The show perfectly uses Rustys unreliable narratorness to leave it vague as to weather it's real or not. But there are enough sources outside of Rusty to show there could be the real Carcosa.

The old woman ("You're in Carcosa too? Death is not the end.."). The fact that the guy they arrest never calls himself the Yellow King only other people imply that he is. The talk of the circle from too many different people. The birds (which could just be Rusty seeing gak).

 Lance845 wrote:
You follow an unreliable narrator (Rusty) who may be seeing real stuff or may not be.

I felt like the unreliable one was the writer of the show.

I do not begrudge anybody who enjoys the show. I can see that there is something there to like, and I think expectations might play a major role in whether one likes it or not. I wouldn't recommend it on the strength of its King in Yellow connections specifically. I don't think it sets up the right expectations for the show - it's why I watched it, and why I was ultimately disappointed with it.

Recommending things based on a Lovercraftian nature can be difficult. Like, you get something like Re-Animator - a great movie that I adore, but even though it is literally based on a Lovecraft story, isn't particularly Lovecraftian in tone. And then you might get something like the German series Dark, which is fairly Lovecraftian in tone, but lacks the more concrete elements that one associates with Lovecraft. I think Alien might be the movie that comes the closest to the full package. Maybe a few of the Creepshow stories (the moss meteor and the infamous roach segment).

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
You follow an unreliable narrator (Rusty) who may be seeing real stuff or may not be.

I felt like the unreliable one was the writer of the show.

I do not begrudge anybody who enjoys the show. I can see that there is something there to like, and I think expectations might play a major role in whether one likes it or not. I wouldn't recommend it on the strength of its King in Yellow connections specifically. I don't think it sets up the right expectations for the show - it's why I watched it, and why I was ultimately disappointed with it.

Recommending things based on a Lovercraftian nature can be difficult. Like, you get something like Re-Animator - a great movie that I adore, but even though it is literally based on a Lovecraft story, isn't particularly Lovecraftian in tone. And then you might get something like the German series Dark, which is fairly Lovecraftian in tone, but lacks the more concrete elements that one associates with Lovecraft. I think Alien might be the movie that comes the closest to the full package. Maybe a few of the Creepshow stories (the moss meteor and the infamous roach segment).

I watched True Detective specifically for the King in Yellow aspect and still enjoyed it even though the fantastical elements were very much ambiguous. The interactions between Rust and Marty alone make the show enjoyable.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
You follow an unreliable narrator (Rusty) who may be seeing real stuff or may not be.

I felt like the unreliable one was the writer of the show.

I do not begrudge anybody who enjoys the show. I can see that there is something there to like, and I think expectations might play a major role in whether one likes it or not. I wouldn't recommend it on the strength of its King in Yellow connections specifically. I don't think it sets up the right expectations for the show - it's why I watched it, and why I was ultimately disappointed with it.

Recommending things based on a Lovercraftian nature can be difficult. Like, you get something like Re-Animator - a great movie that I adore, but even though it is literally based on a Lovecraft story, isn't particularly Lovecraftian in tone. And then you might get something like the German series Dark, which is fairly Lovecraftian in tone, but lacks the more concrete elements that one associates with Lovecraft. I think Alien might be the movie that comes the closest to the full package. Maybe a few of the Creepshow stories (the moss meteor and the infamous roach segment).

Huh, that's interesting. Other than the overall tone of the worldbuilding set up in Alien, it's never seemed to be particularly lovecraftian to me. Honestly, and I know this movie makes people mad, but I would consider Prometheus to be a much more lovecraftian film than alien. You have much more of the protagonists who think they know what they're getting into, the more insidious nature of the threat, the fact that many of the characters get kind of eaten from within and turned into something inhuman rather than simply getting taken out by the creature.

The section from the beginning of the movie to the chestburster scene I'd say fits that mold alright, expecially that wonderful scene aboard the alien ship.

Alien gets more Lovecraftian with every installment- but I think it may have hit its peak with Resurrection. Ripley's partially Alien, the aliens are no longer mindless killing machines, but creatures which could coexist with a hybrid race- though they remain utterly uncaring of humans.It's what early Innsmouth was probably like, when there was just one family of froglike folk.

Leviathan hits many of the wonderful Lovecraft notes- which makes sense, it's basically 'The Thing' at the bottom of the ocean, and Lovecraft loved (loathed?) the ocean.

Mysterious wreckage or ruins, smart people who did not fit in with society trying to solve a mystery from old writings in a mysterious language and a powerful, horrific creature which may or may not still be human-ish.

the_scotsman wrote:
The section from the beginning of the movie to the chestburster scene I'd say fits that mold alright, expecially that wonderful scene aboard the alien ship.

I think the beginning when they find the derelict spaceship to be the closest thing I've seen to At the Mountains of Madness - descending into an entirely alien, abandoned landscape filled with unfamiliar architecture and a foreboding sense of mystery and danger. The HR Geiger designs create something truly inhuman and unfamiliar. They basically find the corpse of an eldritch god (the sequels retcon the navigator into a smooth human with recognizable motivations, but the original implication of this literal giant, physically built into the structure, watching the stars is left unsaid). Since Dan O'Bannon ended up doing a Lovecraft movie later (one of the only good ones), I don't think it is out of the question that he might have been directly influenced by Lovecraft in this part.

The later parts of the movie do descend into a more slasher-movie mold, but even then, the xenomorph is (wisely) kept off screen, with only the briefest glimpses to inform the audience of its appearance. This leads to a monster that is indescribable initially, a mish mash of different tendrils, claws, and barbs, glistening black, and with no face or expression. Like, here's how Lovecraft described the night gaunts from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath:

Night Gaunts wrote:"Shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be."

I don't think it is completely out of line to suggest that the xenomorph is perhaps the most lovecraftian monster in film (though I'll also accept John Carpenter's The Thing). Most of all, it never looks silly or embarrassing like the monsters from Mouth of Madness. Well, until the pink piece of crap in the fourth movie.

It's kind of a shame what happened to the Alien franchise. It's like each movie is literally worse than the previous one. I like Aliens more than Alien, but I think it owes too much to the original Alien for it to stand alone as an objectively better movie.

Yeah, I kind of agree but I think it's also pretty inevitable with any kind of horror franchise. Horror relies on the unknown. If you make a sequel, then you know, going in, what you're getting.

Aliens is the perfect way to make a sequel to a horror film: Don't make it a horror film. If you really want to see some monster you liked come back for another go, your two options seem to be A, make it actiony and fun, or B, make it campy and funny. Trying to make something that is "Scary, Again" just fails to understand what makes something scary in the first place.

In terms of cinematic "monsters"...yeah, i think I agree. I almost wouldn't call The Thing a "movie monster" because it doesn't have any kind of recognizable "look" to it, it's not one thing. If you want to talk about something lovecraftian that has a recognizable single image that you envision when you think of it, I don't think you can top the xenomorph.

Really, the only flaw is that in the grand scheme of things, a single xenomorph isn't really impossible to kill, and because it kind of adheres to the "figure out its rules, then use those rules to successfully defeat it" formula that is extremely good and satisfying narratively in a horror movie but which is kind of the antithesis of lovecraft.

the_scotsman wrote:
Aliens is the perfect way to make a sequel to a horror film: Don't make it a horror film. If you really want to see some monster you liked come back for another go, your two options seem to be A, make it actiony and fun, or B, make it campy and funny. Trying to make something that is "Scary, Again" just fails to understand what makes something scary in the first place.

Or you could just endlessly retcon to build new mysteries, solve them, ruin them, then pretend they never happened. The original Halloween movie is the only movie in the franchise that is canon across every film. Some of the sequels are decent, but they all inevitably collapse due to the weight of having a canon in the first place.

I’m trying to think of good horror sequels, and I can only think of Scream 2 right now - but it succeeds by returning the mystery of who is behind the mask.

If you want to talk about something lovecraftian that has a recognizable single image that you envision when you think of it, I don't think you can top the xenomorph.

It’s weird because every Lovecraft monster that is given an artistic look - for instance in the Chaosium RPG, Arkham Horror, or even the Cthulhu faction in Dust 1947 - looks silly. The xenomorphs are basically horror roaches, which taps into a primitive phobia that flailing random tentacles don’t.

Really, the only flaw is that in the grand scheme of things, a single xenomorph isn't really impossible to kill, and because it kind of adheres to the "figure out its rules, then use those rules to successfully defeat it" formula that is extremely good and satisfying narratively in a horror movie but which is kind of the antithesis of lovecraft.

Some of Lovecraft heroes do actually engage with monsters and win (Innsmouth, for one). And it’s been a while since I read it, but isn’t the end of The Dunwhich Horror an epic battle against the monster? ... It’s been too long since I read this stuff. I can remember a lot of the stories in great detail, but not how they end. Like, I remember the protagonist fleeing the monster in Mountains of Madness, but I can’t remember what happens afterwards. I need to go back and reread it all again.

I mean, certain horror movies' sequels are better than the originals because they figured out what they actually wanted to do in the sequel and are often given a way bigger budget to do it. The Purge and Friday the 13th spring to mind.

Pretty much any monster that works off of a natural human phobia works better than random tentacles and fangs and such (it's why I have never liked Tyranid creature designs particularly much and find the GSC monsters much more interesting due to their uncanny valley humanity)

I have seen some surprisingly effective horror films that basically just designed what you're supposed to be scared of based on a relatable, simple human scare.

You ever walked downstairs in the dark and seen a hat and a coat hung on the wall and your heart SLAMS into high gear telling you there's a murderer in your house and you have to fight them RIGHT NOW? Well, here's The Babbadook. We took that scare and we made it into a thing in a movie.

It is true that Lovecraft often has his protagonists engage with the monsters, but rarely do they ever stop, study the monster, and find some kind of calculated solution to fight them (and then that solution works). Typically, they either wildly attack (or flee from) the monster and manage to overpower and get away from it (Innsmouth, Cthuhu, etc) or they do try to come up with some reasoned solution to face them, and fail (whatever the name of the one with the Hounds of Tindalos is called comes to mind here).

“Lovecraftian” has come to be a practically useless adjective.

Yeah. The only things I associate it with is the phrase "things man was not meant to know" and trauma so severe it mentally breaks the protagonist.

 Manchu wrote:
“Lovecraftian” has come to be a practically useless adjective.

I feel like I'd pin that more on the Chthulhu plushie doll, knit cap and funko pop doll crowd more so than people discussing which movies do or do not give them the same feelings they associate with the author's stories.

 Sqorgar wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Aliens is the perfect way to make a sequel to a horror film: Don't make it a horror film. If you really want to see some monster you liked come back for another go, your two options seem to be A, make it actiony and fun, or B, make it campy and funny. Trying to make something that is "Scary, Again" just fails to understand what makes something scary in the first place.

Or you could just endlessly retcon to build new mysteries, solve them, ruin them, then pretend they never happened. The original Halloween movie is the only movie in the franchise that is canon across every film. Some of the sequels are decent, but they all inevitably collapse due to the weight of having a canon in the first place.

I’m trying to think of good horror sequels, and I can only think of Scream 2 right now - but it succeeds by returning the mystery of who is behind the mask.

If you want to talk about something lovecraftian that has a recognizable single image that you envision when you think of it, I don't think you can top the xenomorph.

It’s weird because every Lovecraft monster that is given an artistic look - for instance in the Chaosium RPG, Arkham Horror, or even the Cthulhu faction in Dust 1947 - looks silly. The xenomorphs are basically horror roaches, which taps into a primitive phobia that flailing random tentacles don’t.

Really, the only flaw is that in the grand scheme of things, a single xenomorph isn't really impossible to kill, and because it kind of adheres to the "figure out its rules, then use those rules to successfully defeat it" formula that is extremely good and satisfying narratively in a horror movie but which is kind of the antithesis of lovecraft.

Some of Lovecraft heroes do actually engage with monsters and win (Innsmouth, for one). And it’s been a while since I read it, but isn’t the end of The Dunwhich Horror an epic battle against the monster? ... It’s been too long since I read this stuff. I can remember a lot of the stories in great detail, but not how they end. Like, I remember the protagonist fleeing the monster in Mountains of Madness, but I can’t remember what happens afterwards. I need to go back and reread it all again.

I feel like Adrian Smith's designs for "Cthulhu Death May Die" are ofen inspired by H. R. Giger's style, and I think it works for a modern interpretation of Lovecraft. To be fair, Lovecraft's work is so much older than Body Horror in general that it can't help but be a very 'inaccurate' way to portray them, but I think it works on a level that most silly Mythos monsters do not.

I agree that it is very hard to come by a satisfying sequel to a horror film without making it no longer horror (as the Alien series does).



But for Lovecraft to the modern gaming audience- I think he's at least as much comedy as horror now. Part of this is the fact that the mythos have been used so much in gaming, and any game is at least partly comedy (if you're doing horror, you're doing horror comedy). I actually think it helps that Kingdom Death writes in its own jokes, because if it didn't, we'd probably be making jokes of our own when things got most intense.

- I have been told that there are pacing reasons to include a little bit of comedy in horror films/books/etc. SImply, the audience gets fatigued by a never ending escalation of horror, so relieving that tension once in a while allows you to build it up once more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
I mean... it's basically exactly all the plot points of the color out of space story. Besides being set in a more modern time it's exactly that story put to film with a few extra lovecraftian body horror elements. It's just not one of lovecrafts stories that deal with gods or ancient history and so is less of a cosmic horror and more of look at this isolated incident story.

You would get about the same thing out of a film adaptation of The Other.

To that extent I think it's a very good lovecraft movie. It's just not a Cthulhu or Yog Sothoth or Azatoth movie.

That's a thing that strikes me as a very big difference between Lovecraft's actual works and his repuration.

Most of his stories are isolated incidents like this (off the top of my head, Rats in the Walls, Lurker at the Threshold, Picture in the House, Pickman's Model, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Silver Key, and of course, the Color Out of Space). A few of them deal with a cosmic entity- like Dunwich Horror, Dagon, the Call of Cthulhu or The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but most do not, and the stories treat them all in kind of the same ways.

But if you just read Shadow Over Innsmouth, it really is not clear that Dagon and Cthulhu are not two titles for the same entity (since the Esoteric Order of Dagon use Cthulhu chants). I'm not completely sure that Lovecraft always separated them out.



I think it is very telling that there is absolutely no description of Shubniggurath in any of Lovecraft's works, but she is worshiped by creatures and cultists in MANY of his stories (she might be the most worshiped of the gods).


But fans have read lots of Lovecraft- we've connected the dots, or had Sandy Peterson and August Derlith connect the dots for us. So when something references Hastur, Cthulhu, Azathoth or Shubniggurath in passing. So that's really what we're hoping to see when we read one of the books or watch an adaptation, but the format of those stories usually doesn't work very well without the element of mystery that we're all sadly unable to experience.

If you're talking about a modern gaming audience, I'm not sure you can create a game with a better lovecraftian feel to it than the recent Pathologic 2. And while there are some things you can laugh at and a few moments of fourth wall breaking that are fairly funny if you notice them (At one point, a character tells you that all your choices are meaningless and then you get to choose between two dialogue options that say basically the exact same thing phrased two different ways, things like that) it doesn't have to lean in to humor very often in order to work.

Because the thing they got right was taking the feelings present in Lovecraft and stripping them away from familiar touchstones. You will never go "ah, this is the Mi-Go, I know now what their whole plan is and what is going on" everything is designed from the ground up to disorient you and confuse you. The best you can do for context is doing a lot of reading up on yugoslavian brutalist architecture philosophy and russian folklore tropes to explain why certain characters are presented the way they are.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
“Lovecraftian” has come to be a practically useless adjective.

I feel like I'd pin that more on the Chthulhu plushie doll, knit cap and funko pop doll crowd more so than people discussing which movies do or do not give them the same feelings they associate with the author's stories.

I blame Shuggoths Old Peculiar for curing my HP curiosity, although like ive said before the Providence comic is an interesting spin not quite squamous but easily eldritch

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
“Lovecraftian” has come to be a practically useless adjective.

I feel like I'd pin that more on the Chthulhu plushie doll, knit cap and funko pop doll crowd more so than people discussing which movies do or do not give them the same feelings they associate with the author's stories.

I blame Shuggoths Old Peculiar for curing my HP curiosity, although like ive said before the Providence comic is an interesting spin not quite squamous but easily eldritch

Fair enough. Gaiman expresses some things that a lot of writers think about Lovecraft's writing (always use the obscure word rather a properly descriptive one). Sometimes, just being aware of this criticism makes Lovecraft unintentionally comical during a lot of the moments where he intends to be most intense.


The truth is, turning Lovecraft into comedy seems like a really short road. In part, this is because much of Lovecraft relies on the idea that simply seeing images of the creatures he describes is supposed to drive a person insane- but when they're actually depicted, they mostly look kind of silly.

Like the Great Race of Yith- no one has ever come close to making a picture of one that doesn't look very silly.

oh aye its just that story tickled me due to the Pete and Dud cultists and living not that far from a town that could pass as british Innsmouth

and being the Neil fanboy i am i liked his mythos/holmes homage, Study in Emerald , where the gribblys had already won and the world hadnt changed that much

Gaiman did another short story about Innsmouth as well. The protagonist was a werewolf who was investigating the town.

He used the same werewolf in a poetic retelling of Beowulf set on a Baywatch style beach. It was all very Gaiman.