...the earlier film, The Haunted Palace has long been perceived as forming part of the 'Poe Cycle' directed by Roger Corman between 1960 and 1965, and based on the works of the grand master of ...American gothic literature. The screenplay, by the noted author Charles Beaumont (who wrote many classic Twilight Zone episodes, as well as scripting Night of the Eagle (1962) and The Masque of the Red Death (1963)), is a cunning adaptation of Lovecraft's original and solves many of the structural problems which left Lovecraft himself dissatisfied with the story. Price is at his maniacal best here, hammering out Mendelsohn on his futuristic pipe organ while gleefully plotting the destruction of his latest victim with his glamorous silent assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North). Since Phibes has a rubber mask for a face and can only speak when plugged into a gramophone, it's to Price's enormous credit that he still manages to give a performance which is both exceptionally sinister and also strangely poignant.
There is a huge and well-known quantity of authors influenced by H. P. Lovecraft not only in literature, but also in other fields such as cinema, video games or comics. In the latter and, ...particularly, in the horror genre, one manga artist is especially remarkable: Junji Ito (1963), creator of numerous works and short stories in which the influence of the American writer is noticeable. This article aims to analyze that influence by considering four groups of topics that are present in both authors’ works: the cosmic and apocalyptic, the oneiric, the monstrous and sectarian, and the musical and sound-related. Additionally, there is a section in which each author’s way of creating horror is analyzed. Allusions to the semiotic differences between literature and comic are also made throughout the work.
In recent decades, philosophical refection on the utopian has focused on the analysis of the way in which the future-possible and the radically unknown or “other” influence our present. Specifically, ...accelerationism and Object-oriented Ontology have identified horror and weird fiction in general, and H. P. Lovecraft in particular, as the privileged field from which to access a radically anti-humanist absolute exteriority (Outside) with the aim of developing a new anti-species worldview, one which Timothy Morton calls “Dark Ecology.” This article analyzes the philosophical foundations of this worldview, showing the exclusive and proto-fascist character it harbors, which is why it should be clearly separated from other post-humanisms and/or new materialisms based on the hybridization and interconnection characteristic of relational ontologies.
This paper uses Algernon Blackwood's weird tale “The Willows” (1907) to argue that the genre of weird fiction is characterized by a disproportionate investment in descriptive modes of writing. The ...weird tale's fascination with description contravenes narratology and conventional reading practices alike, as both privilege narration over description. Tales such as “The Willows” insist that significant subjects and agents have been overlooked in anthropocentric modes of storytelling and that description itself has been instrumental in this oversight, as scene-setting and other descriptive modes effectively cast such subjects as static backgrounds to more important human affairs. By repeatedly dramatizing the discovery of subjects and agents hidden within apparently static descriptive passages, weird tales offer a critique of anthropocentric modes of storytelling and point the way toward a more ecological understanding of interconnection.
Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as ...science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.
This article is concerned with the emergence of proto-cybernetic gadgets and specimen in Antarctica. The essay's starting point is that the Cold War was literalised at the South Pole, which also ...operates as a shadowy double of the overtly militarised Arctic. What happens in Antarctica is a secret assimilation of space into the American Cold War perimeter by way of weapons technology, most notably through the gyrocompass (which develops into the black box navigation systems for ballistic missiles) and the man-machine amalgamation. This assimilation and emergence are traced at hand of exploration narratives (Harold Ponting; Douglas Mawson; Richard Byrd) as well as science fiction stories (H. P. Lovecraft; John W. Campbell, Jr.) that precede the Cold War, but whose forging of a superman-specimen anticipate the conceptualisation of Antarctica as a Cold War space. The South Pole operates as zone of rehearsal for superpower merging: the explorers become prototype cyborgs whose expeditions point towards the containment culture, epitomised in the gyrocompass/black box technology, of the Cold War.
What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In ...Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific Rim and Hellboy, monsters that would have been obscured to protect Lovecraft’s readers are now fully revealed for Hollywood audiences. Using the period-appropriate theories of Rudolf Otto on the numinous and Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, that share Lovecraft’s troubled history with racist othering, I show how modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work invert central features of the mythos in order to turn tragedies into triumphs. The genres of Science Fiction and Horror have deep commitments to the theme of otherness, but in Lovecraft’s works otherness is insurmountable. Today, Hollywood borrows the tropes of Lovecraftian horror but relies on bridging the gap between humanity and its monstrous others to reveal a higher humanity forged through difference and diversity. This suggests that otherness in modern science fiction is a means of reconciliation, a way for the monsters to be defeated rather than the source of terror as they were in Lovecraft’s stories.
The article discusses the influence of translator’s criticism and other extra-textual factors on the translations of poetry by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Since the very first renditions of his Fungi ...from Yuggoth sonnets by Jerzy Płudowski and Leszek Lachowiecki included in two anthologies of horror poetry, Polish versions of Lovecraft’s verses have always been modified in the process of interlinguistic transfer according to either sole preferences of the publishing houses and evaluations proposed by critics of the English originals or the translators’ reception of the previous Polish variants. In most cases these modifications resulted from more or less stereotypical visions of the American writer held by the translators and were aimed at establishing links to his other works already published in Poland (short stories, essays, letters). Thus effects of the semantic shifts, detectable also in the latest variants by Krzysztof Azarewicz and Mateusz Kopacz, can be referred to as consolidating the universe of the writer’s biographical legend and literary works which is more coherent in the Polish target texts than in the originals.
Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ...ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019, set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.
My thesis, Detective Hornswaggle Causes the Apocalypse, is an urban historical fantasy horror comedy detective novel about capitalist realism, modern-day dystopia, the internalization of externalized ...societal malaise and what it will really take to change the world. Aesthetically, I would place this story in the gaslamp fantasy tradition, a sort of modernization of gothic traditions combining horrific supernatural elements with the dark capital R ‘Romance’ of the turn-of the century period. Like most works in this genre, it’s set in a sort of anachronistic hodgepodge of Victorian to World War One era Britain, with elements of the fantastical and inexplicable sprinkled in. Gaslamp fantasy, to me, is the sort of darker twin to the much more well known ‘steampunk’ genre - rather than focusing on the imperial optimism, the high-flying adventures and the splendor of the early modern world, gaslamp fantasy asks us if the new world is a particularly good one, if science is a force to improve our lives, if societal progress will necessarily follow the technological. It was very important to me that the supernatural elements always feel a little inexplicable, a little hard to fully grasp - I don’t much enjoy hard magic systems, and I think that magic often works best as an abstraction of all the things we do not fully understand. In terms of inspirations, I’m partly borrowing from the Amazon Prime series Carnival Row (a show I did not like very much, but found visually interesting), but my biggest inspiration would have to be the Fallen London series of interactive narratives, a dark gaslamp fantasy that inspired a number of the horrific elements as well as the general mood of the story (the Tardocks in particular).It’s also a comedy, and as a result it borrows a lot from the ‘screwball’ school of comedies, ala Hitchhiker’s Guide. One particularly massive influence is the Skulduggery Pleasant series, another dark fantasy comedy about a detective with a silly name and a young woman who go on wacky and vaguely apocalyptic adventures, though the similarities largely end there (Pleasant is not the POV character of those novels, for one - also they’re much more interested in hard magic systems).Another massive influence is, of course, the complicated legacy of HP Lovecraft, particularly one of his most famous and well-read works, The Shadow over Innsmouth. Lovecraft’s reach appears in a lot of places in this story - most obviously, the character of Fondmaker is a direct and somewhat indulgent parody of him; a racist, paranoid shut-in of a horror author writing imaginative fantasy that is only one step removed from his reactionary nightmares. Much of the aesthetic sensibility owes a great deal to the Lovecraftian tradition as well - the notion of ancient, sleeping gods in the deep, magic that drives people crazy, cults and frenzied writing and just the general sense that the world is rapidly losing its equilibrium are all Lovecraftian notions. Most importantly, of course, are the fish people as the racialized other, whose portrayal is in direct conversation with the violent racist fantasy of Innsmouth - Hornswaggle asks us if we should not seek solidarity with the fish people, should not try to understand them and if we should truly recoil at the prospect of being like them.Philosophically, an important part of Hornswaggle is that it is essentially a Socialist Fantasy, in the way that other works are Neoliberal Fantasies (Harry Potter, for example). One of the main mechanics is using the Lovecraftian surrealness of the world as a metaphor for late capitalist alienation, that slowly dawning sense that the world is very bad and doesn’t make a ton of sense, that you don’t understand what’s happening around you or why. And that you should want to change it. I’ve been very inspired by the work of contemporary socialist philosopher Matthew Christman and his thoughts about social change, that as conditions deteriorate we will have to change along with the world, and that we have to be fundamentally ready for that, that we have to be prepared for our lives to change, in ways that we are not comfortable with, in ways that may involve relinquishing power. This book, ultimately, is about that, I think. About recognizing that the world is terrible, and grappling with what it will actually mean to do something about that.
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