Lovecraftian horror
[7] His work was influenced by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe,[8] Algernon Blackwood,[9] Ambrose Bierce,[10] Arthur Machen,[9] Robert W. Chambers,[9] and Lord Dunsany.
"[16] Lovecraft's work is also steeped in the insular feel of rural New England,[17][18] 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.
Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time.
A number of characteristics have been identified as being associated with Lovecraftian horror: Much of Lovecraft's influence is secondary, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many authors who developed their own notable works.
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.
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.
[19] 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.
He appears in Mac Carter and Tony Salmons's limited series The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft from Image[40] and in the Arcana children's graphic novel Howard and the Frozen Kingdom from Bruce Brown.
[45] 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.
In addition to using pastiches of Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, and R'lyeh, writer J. Michael Straczynski also wrote the story in a distinctly Lovecraftian style.
Written entirely from the perspective of a traumatized sailor, the story makes use of several of Lovecraft's trademarks, including the ultimate feeling of insignificance in the face of the supernatural.
One notable filmmaker to dip into the Lovecraftian well was 1960s B-filmmaker Roger Corman, with his The Haunted Palace (1963) being very loosely based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , and his X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes featuring a protagonist driven to insanity by heightened vision that allows him to see God at the heart of the universe.
This includes the themes of human fragility, impotence in the face of the unknowable, and lack of answers in Picnic at Hanging Rock,[50][51] and The Dunwich Horror, with its source in Lovecraft's work and emphasis on "forces beyond the protagonist's control.
"[52] The 1979 film Alien has been described as Lovecraftian due to its theme of "cosmic indifference", the "monumental bleakness" of its setting, and leaving most questions unanswered.
John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" (The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness) feature Lovecraftian elements, which become more noticeable in each film.
The 1991 HBO film Cast a Deadly Spell starred Fred Ward as Harry Phillip Lovecraft, a noir detective investigating the theft of the Necronomicon in an alternate universe 1948 Los Angeles where magic was commonplace.
2007's The Mist, Frank Darabont's movie adaptation of Stephen King's 1985 novella by the same name, featuring otherworldly Lovecraftian monsters emerging from a thick blanket of mist to terrify a small New England town,[54] and 2005's The Call of Cthulhu, made by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, a black and white adaptation using silent film techniques to mimic the feel of a film that might have been made in the 1920s, at the time that Lovecraft's story was written.
Since 2010, a number of popular films have used elements of cosmic horror, notably Alex Garland's Annihilation[55][56] (based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer) with its strong themes of incomprehensibility and outside influence on Earth.
[57][58] Ridley Scott's 2012 science-fiction horror epic Prometheus[53][59][60] and Gore Verbinski's 2016 film A Cure for Wellness[61][62] have been noted for their Lovecraftian elements.
HBO's 2019 miniseries Chernobyl has been described as "the new face of cosmic horror", with radiation filling the role of an incomprehensible, untamable, indifferent terror.
[63] The films of Panos Cosmatos, Beyond the Black Rainbow[64] and Mandy[65] take cosmic horror themes and blend them with psychedelic and new age elements,[66][67] while the work of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead in Resolution, Spring[68] and The Endless[56][69] has also been described as "Lovecraftian."
[75][76] Churuli (2021) an Indian Malayalam-language film directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery follows two undercover police officers in search of a fugitive in a mysterious forest, encountering bizarre and otherworldly phenomena.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities features two episodes adapted from Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and "Dreams in the Witch House.
The 1998 text adventure game Anchorhead is heavily inspired by Lovecraftian Horror and features many elements of the Cthulhu mythos, as well as quotes from Lovecraft.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for Windows and Xbox is a first person shooter with strong survival horror elements.
[104] Dredge is a 2023 indie fishing video game, which follows a fisherman who encounters increasingly Lovecraftian creatures as he ventures out further into an open world archipelago.
