Poll of the Day > New trailer for HBO's Lovecraft Country

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://youtu.be/EMvSgQDpAY8

Its supposedly kinda like Supernatural except set in the 50s in the deep south. And the brothers are black. And they deal with monsters and racism

Is it Lovecraft in name only?
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Revelation34 posted...

Is it Lovecraft in name only?

If it's set outside of New England, the main characters are black, and the show is anti-racism, it's definitely not Lovecraftian.
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its loosely based on his ideas. He would never have black heroes. But I think the creatures they fight are from his ideas. I'm hoping we get to see at least one cosmic horror or great old one. The trailers I have seen haven't shown much of the monsters yet though

Motherfucker would directly say black people were a subhuman race, saying "would never have black heroes" is a bit of a polite stretch.

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Zikten posted...

I'm hoping we get to see at least one cosmic horror or great old one.

we wouldnt be able to comprehend what was on the screen

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Mead posted...

we wouldnt be able to comprehend what was on the screen

speak for yourself ty

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shadowsword87 posted...

Motherfucker would directly say black people were a subhuman race, saying "would never have black heroes" is a bit of a polite stretch.

true. You are right. He very much hated black people. In most of his stories he had black people depicted as savages that worshipped the Great Old Ones. And it was always civilized white people usually of Anglo Saxon origin that were the heroes.

I think they specifically chose to do this show for that ironic factor.

Zikten posted...

But I think the creatures they fight are from his ideas.

Fighting creatures also isn't very Lovecraftian.

In his philosophy, the true horror of things like Cthulhu isn't that they're monsters that want to destroy us, as much as it is that we're utterly insignificant to them. They can slay thousands of us without even realizing we're there, because we're not important to them in any way. Like how humans never worry (or even really notice or think about) about how many ants we kill when we build a house or dig out a hole for an in-ground pool.

To Lovecraft, humans are essentially powerless and doomed. And the more knowledge we gain, the more we learn how the universe truly works, the more terrified and insane we'll be, because we'd realize just how helpless we really are and how meaningless every facet of our existence is. We can't fight something like Cthulhu any more than a single ant can murder you and tear your entire house down. All you can really do is live in denial and hope you don't accidentally run into something that tears you apart on the molecular level from another dimension.

Most of the bullshit about using magical Elder Signs to fight cultists or otherwise giving characters anything resembling a hope of victory or success isn't actually Lovecraft - it's August Derleth's fanfiction versions of Lovecraft's stories. Most of what people think of as "The Cthulhu Mythos" was never actually written by Lovecraft.

An accurate Lovecraft TV show would probably be incredibly depressing to modern audiences.
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Mead posted...

we wouldnt be able to comprehend what was on the screen

If they could somehow make a show that would literally drive anyone watching it insane from cosmic horror, I'd respect them so much more.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

because we're realize just

HE MADE A MISTAKE

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helIy posted...

HE MADE A MISTAKE

I make typos all the time. I've never claimed to be perfect. It probably says more about you than it does me if you've never noticed them before.

I've actually made more than I used to since I started typing posts on my current laptop, because it occasionally screws things up on me even aside from the things I screw up myself from writing nearly every post stream-of-consciousness style. But I usually try to reread a post after I've posted it to see if anything blatant leaps out at me (and if it does, I edit it).
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

An accurate Lovecraft TV show would probably be incredibly depressing to modern audiences.

Imagine a true adaption of A Colour Out of Space.
Where after making a bunch of buildup, the main character very reasonably moves away.

People would hate it.

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shadowsword87 posted...

Imagine a true adaption of A Colour Out of Space.
Where after making a bunch of buildup, the main character very reasonably moves away.

People would hate it.

I'm trying to remember, but I can't recall if this is from that story or if I'm confusing it for another one, but doesn't that story end with the river being dammed and the whole area getting turned into a reservoir, implying that all of the locals are potentially drinking tainted space water? Or was it another story that ended that way?
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I could have sworn it ended with him just saying "fuck this shit I'm out" and moving away.
But looking it up on wikipedia, I'm straight up wrong, whoops.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

We can't fight something like Cthulhu any more than a single ant can murder you and tear your entire house down.

You mean aside from the time a dude rams Cthulhu with a boat and puts him back to sleep?
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GanonsSpirit posted...

You mean aside from the time a dude rams Cthulhu with a boat and puts him back to sleep?

That's not really what happens in that story.

He starts to wake up because "the stars are right", and he goes back to sleep because they shift again. It's the cosmic equivalent of him hitting the snooze alarm.

It's made pretty clear that the boat doesn't really do much to him at all. And the real threat of the story isn't Cthulhu himself, as much as the cult (which can be thwarted, and which is probably going to kill the narrator after the story ends). When Cthulhu actually wakes up for good, everybody's pretty much fucked.

The narrator escapes Cthulhu. That's about the most you can hope for.
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Zikten posted...

its loosely based on his ideas. He would never have black heroes. But I think the creatures they fight are from his ideas. I'm hoping we get to see at least one cosmic horror or great old one. The trailers I have seen haven't shown much of the monsters yet though

No, the show (and book) is built more around a contemporary criticism of Lovecraft -- which has been a part of #CancelCulture -- because of some of his overtly racist work and the fact that, despite his racism was no great secret, he's still revered as an author and a tremendous influence in horror.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Fighting creatures also isn't very Lovecraftian.

In his philosophy, the true horror of things like Cthulhu isn't that they're monsters that want to destroy us, as much as it is that we're utterly insignificant to them. They can slay thousands of us without even realizing we're there, because we're not important to them in any way. Like how humans never worry (or even really notice or think about) about how many ants we kill when we build a house or dig out a hole for an in-ground pool.

And the inescapable, insurmountable "horror" in this series is ultimately racism.

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As an author I'm not entirely in agreement. They were interesting at the start and at the end, and that was about it. He was interesting because he used a lot of non-standard words, and was consistent with the non-standard words. Maybe it's because he died young, but his actual writing style never really grew past that.

His *ideas* were interesting and great, but that's about it.

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It's more than just ideas, he was an incredible storyteller and part of that was his strong prose. I can understand that his work isn't necessarily as accessible because of his choice of words, allusions, references, etc, at times, but I hardly consider that a fault and I daresay that many of today's tremendously accessible authors who keep their work at a lower reading level will eventually lose at least part of their accessibility when their fleeting, contemporary pop culture references fade into obscurity (Stephen King, for example) even if the plain language and short sentences will continue to be easy enough to follow.

I will say that I'm no fan of his poetry and, considering the trouble one particular poem has got him into it, he may have been the better to have stuck with prose.

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Zeus posted...

I can understand that his work isn't necessarily as accessible because of his choice of words, allusions, references, etc, at times

I'd argue it's more a case of changing culture. He was writing in a style that would have been extremely appreciated and unsettling in its era, but in a case of "Seinfeld is Unfunny", so many writers since have copied his style, things like the Twilight Zone happened, and movies and horror games in general have so desensitized us to suspense-driven creepiness that it's very hard to read anything he wrote as a modern reader and get as much out of it as you would have if you were reading it in the 30s.

It's not just his assumptions about race or fear that science would ultimately kill us all or drive us insane that are kind of dissonant to modern audiences, it's that most of his stories just aren't scary for us now. But that's not really his fault or the fault of the work, it's the fact that we're not the same people we were 100 years ago.
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Lovecraft is just schizo nihilism that edgelords love. Eventually they graduate to Chuck Palahniuk.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

most of his stories just aren't scary for us now

That being said, Whisperer in the Dark is terrifying.
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GanonsSpirit posted...

That being said, Whisperer in the Dark is terrifying.

Ehh.

The problem with a lot of Lovecraft is that you know there's usually a twist coming, and it usually becomes kind of obvious what the twist is going to be, so you wind up defusing a lot of the tension because you know where the story is going, and don't necessarily care all that much about the main characters that their inevitable doom is going to have all that much impact on you.

Though if I had to pick my top stories, I might go Rats in the Walls and Dreams in the Witch House. Though my absolute favorite story he ever wrote is and has always been The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Though if I had to pick my top stories, I might go Rats in the Walls and Dreams in the Witch House. Though my absolute favorite story he ever wrote is and has always been The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

My favorite is The Cats of Ulthar, mostly because the cats eat the asshole cat killers tbh.

KnoxKorner posted...

Lovecraft is just schizo nihilism that edgelords love. Eventually they graduate to Chuck Palahniuk.

Probably the most ridiculous thing I've read all week, given that Lovecraft's work isn't edgy and bears little in common with Chuck's stuff. In fact, the only edgy thing is any comment that tries to link the two because even when Chuck is trying to inspire himself by reading Lovecraft's work, he's just one of countless authors to be inspired by the sublime surrealist and Chuck's writing style -- and everything else -- is a lot closer to Dean Koontz.

And Fight Club was an alright movie, but I was never able to get into the book.

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ChaosAzeroth posted...

My favorite is The Cats of Ulthar, mostly because the cats eat the asshole cat killers tbh.

I could never get into it, because I dislike cats.

Lovecraft's fondness for them is just more proof that he was a terrible person!
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Zeus posted...

Probably the most ridiculous thing I've read all week, given that Lovecraft's work isn't edgy and bears little in common with Chuck's stuff. In fact, the only edgy thing is any comment that tries to link the two because even when Chuck is trying to inspire himself by reading Lovecraft's work, he's just one of countless authors to be inspired by the sublime surrealist and Chuck's writing style -- and everything else -- is a lot closer to Dean Koontz.

And Fight Club was an alright movie, but I was never able to get into the book.

This comment went so far over your head it's on a trajectory to the ISS.

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I've been trying to write a Lovecraft TV script, with kinda a mish-mash of Lovecraft horror themes and the occasional direct reference to one of his stories. The challenge is definitely conveying unspeakable horror (with mostly never showing it), a sense of looming dread and doom, while trying to make actual characters who care about (something Lovecraft's work never does), while dabbling a bit with the "Mythos", Arkham Horror lore (aka, the heroes can kinda fight back or use magic or whatever).

It's been a pet project of mine to see if I can make it work.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Lovecraft's fondness for them is just more proof that he was a terrible person!

I must be the devil incarnate then.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

while trying to make actual characters who care about (something Lovecraft's work never does)

He was pretty much the opposite of a people-person, and was definitely misanthropic in general, so it's not entirely surprising that he couldn't really convey that sort of sociability and charisma in his characters.

Basically, he didn't really care about his characters as anything other than plot devices to tell the story (and most of the time, he didn't really care about the story as anything other than an excuse to write 27 pages worth of adjectives like cyclopean or eldritch with 1-2 pages of story thrown in to justify it all).

If anything, it's kind of surprising that he was sociable enough to maintain such a robust letter-writing circle in spite of his personality tendencies. But let's be honest, he was pretty much the archetypal Internet message board poster, just eight decades too early.
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he created the big spooky genre

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Mead posted...

he created the big spooky genre

Ironically, he didn't - his early influences were Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Victorian Era Gothic Horror in general:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Plunkett,_18th_Baron_of_Dunsany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Machen

Dunsany's the one who tended to influence Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stuff, Machen tended to inspire the darker stuff. And Lovecraft was pretty clearly a huge Anglophile who felt like he was born a few decades too late, as he would have reveled in the Victorian Era.

Lovecraft certainly helped popularize it (and helped inspire a new generation of horror writers that followed him), but he was more an intermediary link in the chain rather than the start of it.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

He was pretty much the opposite of a people-person, and was definitely misanthropic in general, so it's not entirely surprising that he couldn't really convey that sort of sociability and charisma in his characters.

Basically, he didn't really care about his characters as anything other than plot devices to tell the story (and most of the time, he didn't really care about the story as anything other than an excuse to write 27 pages worth of adjectives like cyclopean or eldritch with 1-2 pages of story thrown in to justify it all).

If anything, it's kind of surprising that he was sociable enough to maintain such a robust letter-writing circle in spite of his personality tendencies. But let's be honest, he was pretty much the archetypal Internet message board poster, just eight decades too early.

Lovecraft was a troll?
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KnoxKorner posted...

This comment went so far over your head it's on a trajectory to the ISS.

Judging from your reply, I imagine most things you post vastly miss their mark. That's really on you, though, unless you were going for Poe's Law with your original comment.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I've been trying to write a Lovecraft TV script, with kinda a mish-mash of Lovecraft horror themes and the occasional direct reference to one of his stories. The challenge is definitely conveying unspeakable horror (with mostly never showing it), a sense of looming dread and doom, while trying to make actual characters who care about (something Lovecraft's work never does), while dabbling a bit with the "Mythos", Arkham Horror lore (aka, the heroes can kinda fight back or use magic or whatever).

It's been a pet project of mine to see if I can make it work.

It sounds fun. Plus not showing things helps to keep the budget in check.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Basically, he didn't really care about his characters as anything other than plot devices to tell the story (and most of the time, he didn't really care about the story as anything other than an excuse to write 27 pages worth of adjectives like cyclopean or eldritch with 1-2 pages of story thrown in to justify it all).

Boo! Hiss! Boo!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ironically

Ironic in what way?

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Lovecraft certainly helped popularize it (and helped inspire a new generation of horror writers that followed him), but he was more an intermediary link in the chain rather than the start of it.

Sacrilege!

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