Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
flashy_mcflash
Feb 7, 2011

Goodnight Mommy is the real deal and is possibly the only truly scary thing I'll see at this drat festival. It's got a bit of a Dogtooth vibe and has really excellent pacing. Dialogue and music are appropriately sparse and the two kids are brilliant. No idea where you'll be able to see this but seek it out if you can.

The Editor, Astron-6's take on giallo, is a bit of fun. You probably already know if you 'll like this or not just by it being an Astron joint do if you liked Fathers Day or Manborg, this will definitely be your jam.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Sad Mammal
Feb 5, 2008

You see me laughin

harpomarxist posted:

nasty stuff that was also homophobic in places?

I really don't think the film is homophobic. To be completely upfront about my prejudices and predilections in a mini-manifesto: I don't feel comfortable calling art "homophobic" or "racist" unless the only possible way to understand the art is through a homophobic or racist lens. I'm comfortable calling H.P. Lovecraft, the man, a racist, but I don't feel that "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is inherently racist just because it's possible to read a fear of miscegenation in the language of that story's horror.

With Irreversible, is it scuzzy that the set piece for the second-most vile section of the film is set in an area for gay men? Yeah. I could understand calling the movie unoriginal, even ignorant (or stereotyped whathaveyou) in its portrayal of gay men, but I see no reason why the segment couldn't also be very uncomfortable due to the graphic violence that also takes place. To extrapolate from Irreversible the mental make-up of Gaspar Noe seems way, WAY too harsh a conviction (maybe I'm taking Wood's words too seriously, but I read his statement as a pretty personal charge) to apply to a director on far too little evidence. If Noe were dead I could understand trying to play anthropologist to his curriculum vitae to get a feel for what he felt, but Noe is a living, breathing director who you (presumably) could talk to if you wanted. And I think if you want to insinuate derangement in someone's mind you've gone outside the purview of criticism and are instead trying to engage in journalism. Someone living being crazy is a real statement that can have real consequences to make so you should be held to journalistic standards, and I haven't gotten the notion that Wood did anything more than watch Irreversible and say "Oh that portrayal of gay men must mean Noe has a flaw in his brain".

But hey, I'm not gonna champion Noe's artistic ability or anything. If someone wants to say he sucks for how he portrays gay guys I can't tell someone their taste is wrong. But saying Noe has a hosed up brain comes across as a trite way of discussing art.

sigher
Apr 22, 2008

My guiding Moonlight...



Rogue was loving baller, loved that poo poo.

Is Deliver Us From Evil worth seeing for $3? It's playing at my local cheapo theater and was wondering if it'd be worth catching on the cheap.

Sad Mammal
Feb 5, 2008

You see me laughin
I was seriously unimpressed with Deliver Us. I'd say skip it unless you're with good movie trashing company.

an owls casket
Jun 4, 2001

Pillbug
Just finished watching "Honeymoon", with the lady from Game of Thrones and some dude from Penny Dreadful. It is worth a watch, although the first twenty minutes are filled with nearly unbearable over-the-top cutesy acting from the two leads, which nearly made both my wife and I want to throw up all over the place. Stick with it.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Man, I had heard that Blood Glacier sucked but I thought to myself "how could this possibly suck? It's such a good premise!" But nope, turns out it sucks.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Talk me some Punishment Park, rear end in a top hat.

I don't really have much to say about it, since it's really blunt and forthright. Obviously, it functions as a sort of matrix-type narrative where we're seeing the blunt reality 'beneath' day-to-day life. The titular park fills roughly the same role as the future-war in Terminator. Steve Shaviro pointed out the similarity (and dissimilarity) to Gamer in his must-read review of that film, and I think that kinda highlights what's interesting about it. Though you get the requisite imagery of the rich gorging themselves amid suffering, the enemy in Punishment Park is almost-entirely the state and not - in the case of Gamer - the free market.

So, I feel the most interesting approach would be to question the underlying premises of the film itself. Obviously the entire thing is metaphorical, but the basic literal point of the game is to be freed from jail and allowed to return to society. If they won, the contestants would have to cease their activities or risk being re-incarcerated anyways. So, ultimately, what they're pursuing is a re-integration into the status quo.

Exacerbating things, the entire film is overwhelmingly preoccupied with speech - to the point that the metaphorical freedom-goal is a freedom of speech. A good half of the film is devoted to people talking, most of the contestants are jailed for 'dissident speech', and so-on. Although the message that democracy doesn't work is a good one, the best-case alternative (in the logic of the film) is the creation of the internet.

I don't think this is a flaw, though. Watkins seems more ambivalent than you might expect. Along with the downbeat ending, the intercutting of the two narratives (the one group heading into the park, the other group heading out) imply an unending cycle.

schwenz
Jun 20, 2003

Awful is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.
Did we already discuss WER?

If so, I don't care, here are my thoughts on it anyway.

The first half, maybe even 2/3rds of the movie, I was completely on board. The end of it kind of spiraled out of control, but I don't really fault it for that, I was happy enough with the beginning to call it a wash. I think at some point while discussing found footage on CD I made a comment that there is no reason you couldn't just mix found footage with traditional camera work. Especially in horror movies, FF seems to add a level of realism to the fantastic. After watching WER I realized that you can do it, but now I think it's important to write into the script where the FF that you're seeing came from. The opening of WER has an exceptional attack scene where a mother and son are torn to shreds. It's filmed with the typical hand-cam style, and I spent the entire scene trying to figure out who was holding the camera. You have to be pretty hosed up, I thought, to film a little kid getting mauled. Later, some guy is watching the footage on his laptop. So...that was really stupid. The rest of the movie is just peppered with Survaillance cam footage, and poo poo like that and it rolls pretty smoothly.

Outside of the questionable FF style, WER has a lot of poo poo it's doing right. The first half is all about the characters trying to determine whether the gigantic hairy man they have in custody is really capable of mauling two people. We know he is, because we've deduced by that lovely name they gave the movie what's going down. The director did a really good job of building tension. A few times tension builds and builds but doesn't explode. When the poo poo actually goes down it's really satisfying. The attack scenes are really good. They're scary as poo poo, and the guy that plays the monster owns.

Two things go horribly wrong with the movie though. The big one, for me, is that making this movie a werewolf movie is completely unnecessary and drags the whole thing down. Towards the end there is some terrible exposition that explains why it is a werewolf and not just some hosed up dude tearing the poo poo out of people. The problem is, if it was just some hosed up dude tearing the poo poo out people, it would have been a lot scarier. You can tell at the end the writer thought he had come up with the coolest explanation ever for where the werewolf mythos comes from. It wasn't. A high school kid with decent weed could have done better. At least they didn't force some hamfisted scientific explanation as to why they need to somehow get a million silver bullets for all their assault rifles

On a side note: Is the movie going public so stupid that every werewolf movie has to have werewolf in the title?

The second problem is they couldn't come up with something more deft than a small army of police shooting guns everywhere for an ending.

Besides that though, WER did a lot of cool poo poo. It had a ton of tense scenes. They guy that plays the monster was incredible. The thing that impressed me the most about it was that they actually skipped the transformation scene, and what they put in it's place was infinitely more scary than anything they could have done with prosthetics or lovely CGI.

Ride The Gravitron
May 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

schwenz posted:

Wer
The attack scenes are really good.

Gonna have to disagree with this part. The first attack scene was amazing. Everything after that I felt that the movie did a poor job of showing force. In the hospital scene when the wolf man freaks out looks so bad. You can tell he's suppose to be shoving that bed around and destroying people with it put it looks like he's just gently shoving people out of his way

The final fight was cheesy as hell too.

PriorMarcus
Oct 17, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT BEING ALLERGIC TO POSITIVITY

I'm a sucker for Werewolf films. Where is the easiest place to watch this one?

sigher
Apr 22, 2008

My guiding Moonlight...



Amazon has it on VOD; I'll give it a look as well.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Man, I had heard that Blood Glacier sucked but I thought to myself "how could this possibly suck? It's such a good premise!" But nope, turns out it sucks.

I don't really have much to say about it, since it's really blunt and forthright. Obviously, it functions as a sort of matrix-type narrative where we're seeing the blunt reality 'beneath' day-to-day life. The titular park fills roughly the same role as the future-war in Terminator. Steve Shaviro pointed out the similarity (and dissimilarity) to Gamer in his must-read review of that film, and I think that kinda highlights what's interesting about it. Though you get the requisite imagery of the rich gorging themselves amid suffering, the enemy in Punishment Park is almost-entirely the state and not - in the case of Gamer - the free market.

So, I feel the most interesting approach would be to question the underlying premises of the film itself. Obviously the entire thing is metaphorical, but the basic literal point of the game is to be freed from jail and allowed to return to society. If they won, the contestants would have to cease their activities or risk being re-incarcerated anyways. So, ultimately, what they're pursuing is a re-integration into the status quo.

Exacerbating things, the entire film is overwhelmingly preoccupied with speech - to the point that the metaphorical freedom-goal is a freedom of speech. A good half of the film is devoted to people talking, most of the contestants are jailed for 'dissident speech', and so-on. Although the message that democracy doesn't work is a good one, the best-case alternative (in the logic of the film) is the creation of the internet.

I don't think this is a flaw, though. Watkins seems more ambivalent than you might expect. Along with the downbeat ending, the intercutting of the two narratives (the one group heading into the park, the other group heading out) imply an unending cycle.

One thing I've always loved about it is that it's the rare movie that actually heads up the generation gap as equivalent to class or race as a legitimate social division - see the kid at the end who they harangue for shooting in a panic (where Watkins actually gets involved) and the pithy concessions the kangaroo court makes to the prisoners they allow to speak. The middle aged adults' "shut up, we know better" improvisational condescension is shown for what it is; purely reactionary in defense of the status quo. The movie's so blunt it has a literal patriarchy, a kind of apple-pie fascism that's got beer drinking suburbanites on the counterrevolutionary council.

It's one of those movies someone should really homage with smuggled footage out of Tranquility Bay or another one of those troubled middle class kid labor camps.

schwenz
Jun 20, 2003

Awful is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.

Volume posted:

Gonna have to disagree with this part. The first attack scene was amazing. Everything after that I felt that the movie did a poor job of showing force. In the hospital scene when the wolf man freaks out looks so bad. You can tell he's suppose to be shoving that bed around and destroying people with it put it looks like he's just gently shoving people out of his way

The final fight was cheesy as hell too.

The hospital bit was my favorite part. I did watch it on a laptop though.

Honest Thief
Jan 11, 2009
VHS Viral oh lord almighty, the segment of the cronocrimes dude, this is why I love this franchise.
Not a big fan of the first segment though, it had a great hook, and I like the main visual trick but it's kinda wasted.


All Cheerleaders Die is at time hilarious and other times unbearable, do we really need all that screaming, just shut the gently caress up, jaysus; also the movie is blurry for some reason, like a rmvb pirate copy

Grendels Dad
Mar 5, 2011

Popular culture has passed you by.

schwenz posted:

Did we already discuss WER?

Who?

TUS
Feb 19, 2003

I'm going to stab you. Offline. With a real knife.


Dead Snow 2 is a thing and Martin Starr is in it. Sooooo bizarre

Lil Mama Im Sorry
Oct 14, 2012

I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS
As Above, So Below chat:

After going through my copy of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, I'm fairly positive the preserved corpse in the crypt that they stumble upon is Hermes Trismegistus. A quick read up on him should give an idea to why he was there, and the purely symbolic meaning of having his body in that room.

Edit: here's a depiction of him that they also find in the film

Lil Mama Im Sorry fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Sep 13, 2014

schwenz
Jun 20, 2003

Awful is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.

Wer man. Forget it.

Hollismason
Jun 30, 2007
An alright dude.
I know it's off topic but if you really really want to read some classic Horror comics, you can get a collected edition of EC comics, the guys who pretty much started it all.


Vault of Horror
Tales from the Crypt

Can all be found in collected volumes and are pretty much wonderful reads, they were hugely influential on horror in general, so I mean if you want to just delve into the history of horror and get some media that's not film you'll be doing yourself a favour.

I strongly recommend them.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:

As Above, So Below chat:

After going through my copy of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, I'm fairly positive the preserved corpse in the crypt that they stumble upon is Hermes Trismegistus. A quick read up on him should give an idea to why he was there, and the purely symbolic meaning of having his body in that room.

Edit: here's a depiction of him that they also find in the film



That owns. What of the second body? If I recall right, they emerge on the other side in the crypt with La Taupe and there is another corpse there in no finery. Or am I remembering that wrong?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:

As Above, So Below chat:

After going through my copy of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, I'm fairly positive the preserved corpse in the crypt that they stumble upon is Hermes Trismegistus. A quick read up on him should give an idea to why he was there, and the purely symbolic meaning of having his body in that room.

Edit: here's a depiction of him that they also find in the film



That's a good guess, but the dude on the slab is dressed as a Templar Knight, and I doubt he'd put a picture of himself up on the wall. More likely he was inspired by H.T.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

That owns. What of the second body? If I recall right, they emerge on the other side in the crypt with La Taupe and there is another corpse there in no finery. Or am I remembering that wrong?

It's the same corpse, but perceived differently. Where the last one was perfectly preserved near a room of gold and eternal fire, the other is 'just' a well-preserved mummy.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
I'm OK with it being a cool Maltese gold/Last Crusade thing. What it also implies, sort of, is that they left the world of myth and emerged in our world.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Sep 13, 2014

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
I was pretty sure that the body they discover is supposed to be Flamel's, and that they even identify him as such. I need to see it again, and there's probably more room for ambiguity, but it is Flamel's tomb that they're looking for, because that's where they believe the Philosopher's Stone is.

Lil Mama Im Sorry
Oct 14, 2012

I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

That owns. What of the second body? If I recall right, they emerge on the other side in the crypt with La Taupe and there is another corpse there in no finery. Or am I remembering that wrong?

I think the second corpse was just like the first but slightly more decayed. In the picture the top half represents heaven and the bottom Hell, and I feel like the second corpse looks just like Hermes as depicted in the bottom of the symbol. But I don't know if I'm remembering that scene correctly.

Lil Mama Im Sorry
Oct 14, 2012

I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

That's a good guess, but the dude on the slab is dressed as a Templar Knight, and I doubt he'd put a picture of himself up on the wall. More likely he was inspired by H.T.




But the symbol of Hermes has a templar cross in its center. The hair and beard seem to match perfectly with depictions of H.T. I think the tomb and its inversion is a physical representation of the As Above So Below symbol.

The corpse doesn't really look anything like Flamel, at least from the pictures I've seen. I immediately assumed it was Flamel when I saw the film but it wouldn't make sense if he was immortal to just spend it laying comatose in a tomb.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:

The corpse doesn't really look anything like Flamel, at least from the pictures I've seen. I immediately assumed it was Flamel when I saw the film but it wouldn't make sense if he was immortal to just spend it laying comatose in a tomb.

Whoever it is, I interpreted his presence to meaning that unlike the characters in the film - who have this horrifying realization of the totality of everything, where innocence and cruelty are juxtaposed vividly in what they believe to be 'Hell,' but which is really just a mirror of our own world, an external projection of the inner self - he accepts his role as a total oneness between the above and the below. Whoever he is, he saw his inner demons and remained unafraid. Thus, his body persists largely uncorrupted, his spirit becoming one with the totality of everything. He sees the spiritual knowledge that immortality has offered not as a curse, but a blessing, one that allows him a sublime sleep away from the nightmares and memories of living. (That 'angels to some, demons to others' thing.)

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

Kvlt! posted:

I've heard of this before. Also, might be common knowledge but here are some more horror themed bands:

The Misfits horror punk
Carach Angren (have their own IP, not based on any established horror franchise) symphonic black metal
the aforementioned Howling (thrash metal)
Twiztid, and by by extension most other Psychopathic records artists (horrorcore rap)

Man you did not just tell someone to listen to Juggalo bands. I know that did not happen.

Kramjacks
Jul 5, 2007

Literally The Worst posted:

Man you did not just tell someone to listen to Juggalo bands. I know that did not happen.

Its too late Dickeye, you've stepped through The Scary Door.

Lil Mama Im Sorry
Oct 14, 2012

I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS

K. Waste posted:

Whoever it is, I interpreted his presence to meaning that unlike the characters in the film - who have this horrifying realization of the totality of everything, where innocence and cruelty are juxtaposed vividly in what they believe to be 'Hell,' but which is really just a mirror of our own world, an external projection of the inner self - he accepts his role as a total oneness between the above and the below. Whoever he is, he saw his inner demons and remained unafraid. Thus, his body persists largely uncorrupted, his spirit becoming one with the totality of everything. He sees the spiritual knowledge that immortality has offered not as a curse, but a blessing, one that allows him a sublime sleep away from the nightmares and memories of living. (That 'angels to some, demons to others' thing.)

I agree with this because this is the essential goal of alchemy. The perfect harmony of the Body, Mind, Soul, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit... Air, Water, Fire etc etc. One mathematical equation applied to the trinity in all its forms to create gold in all its meanings (not just the elemental)((I also think its no accident that there were 3 survivors))

I really liked the film because even though there was a lot of exposition, it leaves enough unexplained to really get the imagination going once the credits roll. This is the first movie since Insidious to really stick with me for days after seeing it. I still wanna dig into the imagery of Hell and find where they took their inspiration.

Lil Mama Im Sorry fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Sep 14, 2014

Popelmon
Jan 24, 2010

wow
so spin
Someone here (or in the general thread) talked about Honeymoon a few days ago. I just want to say thanks for the recommendation, I really loved it. the atmosphere is super creepy and the actors are doing a great job. It feels a bit like Under the Skin, or maybe a really good X-Files episode.

Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Earlier today I watched Vincent Price's "Witchfinder General" and absolutely loved the whole rural English horror atmosphere, really reminded me of "The Wicker Man". Can anyone recomend any similar movies with that sort of setting?

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Nckdictator posted:

Earlier today I watched Vincent Price's "Witchfinder General" and absolutely loved the whole rural English horror atmosphere, really reminded me of "The Wicker Man". Can anyone recomend any similar movies with that sort of setting?

The Blood on Satan's Claw

EDIT: Unfortunately it doesn't have a Region One release, which is absolutely criminal. You can get it as a Region Free DVD on Amazon, but also as part of Anchor Bay's Region Two Tigon Collection along with none other than Witchfinder General.

You can also watch it in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEDYSf65usk

K. Waste fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Sep 14, 2014

Sad Mammal
Feb 5, 2008

You see me laughin
If you haven't heard of it yet I really liked A Field In England

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 206 days!

SALT CURES HAM posted:

Well now if anyone asks me if I know any movies about dudes getting eaten by an anus I can say Irreversible.

The Borderlands, perhaps?

The Irreversible discussion over the last ten or so pages is some of the better posting I've seen on the forums. I can't help but wonder if some of harpomarxist's discomfort with the scene in The Rectum doesn't come from identifying gay culture so strongly with patriarchal/misogynistic violence. There are plenty of legitimate points to be made there (I usually think of Alan Moore's From Hell in much the same vein), but it seems like difficult ground to tread for an artist in ethical terms.

Sad Mammal posted:

I really don't think the film is homophobic. To be completely upfront about my prejudices and predilections in a mini-manifesto: I don't feel comfortable calling art "homophobic" or "racist" unless the only possible way to understand the art is through a homophobic or racist lens. I'm comfortable calling H.P. Lovecraft, the man, a racist, but I don't feel that "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is inherently racist just because it's possible to read a fear of miscegenation in the language of that story's horror.

I dunno, I really don't think Lovecraft's cosmic horror makes sense outside of the lens of his coming to terms with the irrationality his own racism. The comforting cosmology that his work challenges is one in which white, Anglo-Saxon culture is the objectively superior evolutionary step along a teleological path to (white) humanity's destined mastery of a wholly rational universe.

This basically has to be read alongside Robert E. Howard's (a personal friend of Lovercraft's) work, in which the superiority of barbarism to civilization is a major theme.

In the case of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the discovery by the white anglo protagonist that his identity is compromised by the inescapable fact that racial purity is a lie isn't even subtext.

Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Sep 14, 2014

The Senator Giroux
Jul 9, 2006
Dead Ringer

There's some real crazy racism in Lovecraft that can detract from his work, and not even just stuff like Innsmouth or one of the evil gods literally being called at one point "the black man". The description of the boxer in Herbert West - Reanimator is particularly striking:

"Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke”. The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things."

It adds nothing to the story. It's not like the narrator is supposed to be a racist. It never comes up again (except for saying stuff like he wasn't sure if it would work because it was only tested on whites. It's Lovecraft's personal bigotry coming out in a blatant way.

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 206 days!
Well, the "unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon" stuff comes up a lot in Lovecraft, often in a context that mixes racism and classism quite organically. Like in The Dunwich Horror, where there are "respectable" Whateleys alongside a "degenerate" branch of the family who practice backwater rites and like to summon the Great Old Ones to gently caress their daughters. Basically the lower classes and races stand in for Howard's barbarians, but usually aren't noble the way Conan is (I seem to recall the odd exception, but these are identified as the decadent remnants of an Orientalized civilization lost to the past; the respectable branch of a fallen culture that also promises to be the future Anglo society).

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
Yeah, it's not simply that Lovecraft is overtly racist, it's that his writings are identifiably contemporaneous with reactionary nativist theories that Western civilization was literally on the brink of being destroyed by miscegenation with non-white Europeans / rape by brutal Black bucks.

"The Rats in the Walls" is a particularly good example that demonstrates this, because it rings as especially relevant to any non-theist who has heard the fallacious argument that morality extends from the fear of divine reprisal. The racist protagonist discovers that he's descended from 'monkey people' and on-the-spot gives into cannibalistic urges that he didn't even know he had.

The question becomes whether or not the abject horror that his racist protagonists experience necessarily satirizes their social views, or if it simply exploits the paranoid fear of the thin line between civilized man and his savage essence. I think the case can stand to be made either way, but the dude wasn't Mark Twain. (In fact, he probably wrote in precisely the style that Mark Twain would have hated and written essays criticizing.)

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 206 days!
As I understand it, Lovecraft basically knew that his racism was repugnant, but also couldn't escape it because it was too much a part of his own rather fragile self-conception. So I tend to see his writing as confronting, rather than satirizing, his own beliefs. The horror his protagonists experience is certainly his own; any distance the pulp format gave him was too much a necessity to be ironic.

Sad Mammal
Feb 5, 2008

You see me laughin
It's entirely possible to read Innsmouth with the lens of "fish mating = miscegenation" but animal mating has been recognized as gross going all the way back to the minotaur, so I still don't buy into inherent racism in Lovecraft's writings.

e: just to fire a flare -- I'll call Lovecraft himself racist all the livelong day, but I don't think it's fair to judge art for being the child of a potentially douchebag artist.

Sad Mammal fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Sep 14, 2014

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 206 days!

Sad Mammal posted:

It's entirely possible to read Innsmouth with the lens of "fish mating = miscegenation" but animal mating has been recognized as gross going all the way back to the minotaur, so I still don't buy into inherent racism in Lovecraft's writings.

e: just to fire a flare -- I'll call Lovecraft himself racist all the livelong day, but I don't think it's fair to judge art for being the child of a potentially douchebag artist.

quote:

It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before—something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Sad Mammal posted:

It's entirely possible to read Innsmouth with the lens of "fish mating = miscegenation" but animal mating has been recognized as gross going all the way back to the minotaur, so I still don't buy into inherent racism in Lovecraft's writings.

e: just to fire a flare -- I'll call Lovecraft himself racist all the livelong day, but I don't think it's fair to judge art for being the child of a potentially douchebag artist.

I don't think people are judging Lovecraft's work by his personality, though. Like, when I say he's not Mark Twain, I literally mean in the sense that Mark Twain loved the poo poo out of minstrel shows and thought miscegenation was gross but his literature reflects a concerted effort to humanize and challenge rather than merely regurgitate racist paradigms.

As others have pointed out, it's not so much that "fish mating = miscegenation," it's that the miscegenation stuff isn't even subtextual. The people who are engaging in the fish-mating/worshiping are almost always lower-class or non-white heathens, and the horrific tension and gnosis of his literature is almost always a protagonist who is literally driven mad by the idea that these 'savage forms' both culturally and historically 'outnumber,' 'surround,' and pervade Anglican white purity.

The Senator Giroux's quote is the most-telling; there's racism in Lovecraft's literature even when it isn't textually relevant. Lovecraft's racism doesn't necessarily automatically transmit to his literature, but it does lend them an overtly cynical and anti-humanistic subtext that while perhaps appropriate for the pulp medium in which he wrote is basically regressive and un-salvageable. It's the mirror of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, where Tarzan literally accidentally lynches a Black tribesman and Burroughs starts commenting on how 'natural' this feels to him, followed up by Tarzan having to constantly rescue the impotent white intellectuals from the maw of death.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5