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Action Jacktion posted:The Lovecraft Historical Society has done a number of old-time radio-style adaptations of stories, and they've also done two movies. They did the silent Call of Cthulhu movie, which was pretty good, and a movie of The Whisperer in Darkness, which I really disliked. The audio plays usually stay close to the original stories, though they make some changes. Usually they create a character that the narrator is talking to, basically so he won't be talking directly to the audience. Sometimes these framing sequences intrude on the story too much, and in their version of "The Colour Out of Space" they add a framing sequence even though the original story already had a framing sequence, so there are two. Cool trivia: The Call of Cthulhu fan film they made was largely filmed in Nick Offerman's woodshop. He apparently is in pretty tight with that group and plays RPGs with them. I'd say "The Colour Out of Space" is my favorite of his, phonetic writing aside. It's one of those rare sci-fi stories where the alien is truly alien, and it's his best expression of cosmic horror. I really like "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" because it's one of those great examples of Lovecraft slowly building dread through lots of disparate and seemingly disconnected elements. The payoff with the doctor in Curwen's dungeon is really terrifying. The fact that it was a first draft he never intended to publish is pretty crazy. My biggest criticism of him (racism, classism, and xenophobia aside) is that his antiquated style often kills any sort of emotional impact. It's rare that his characters undergo any relatable human conflicts, but even when they do it's just sort of blithely mentioned without elaboration.
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Dec 30, 2014 21:00
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Cobra Commander posted:I've yet to hear anyone ever mention it but I really enjoyed The Curse of Yig. And At The Mountains of Madness is also great. "The Curse of Yig" is really drat good and easily the best of his "collaborations." Aspects of it in the sanitarium with the snake-man have a Silence of the Lambs quality and it has some great plot elements. As for other recommendations, "The Thing in the Moonlight" is really short, pure atmosphere, and one I recommend to someone who is considering reading more Lovecraft. It's a good, short sample of his strengths as a writer. Another deep cut from him I'd definitely recommend is "The Temple." It's probably the first horror story set on a submarine and is really, really excellent. My pipe-dream is for a filmmaker like Ridley Scott to adapt it. I might be in the minority of Lovecraft fans in that I really don't care for the mythos or whatever you want to call it. Whenever his stories get bogged down with histories of ancient alien races it really bores me. I like it when they're used as an excuse for a plot element like the brain cases in "The Whisperer in Darkness" or the brain-stealing/amnesia in "The Shadow Out of Time." To me, Lovecraft is at his best setting a mood of dread that slowly gets corroborated by lots of seemingly disconnected facts or, in stories like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or "The Shadow Out of Time" building up a paranoid sense of fear. His stories are often stronger conceptually than in their execution, but almost all of his stories have some interesting insight or device that rises above the story as a whole. As an example, there are Poe-like dissertations in "The Picture in the House" about how Puritans and there descendants were incredibly pious but also solitary and self-loathing in a way that gradually, over generations, bred secretive people whose religion perverted them in strange and violent ways. The old man exemplifies this through the sick compulsion he has to look at images of slaughter in an ancient book, which is better than just hearing about sermons on Biblical slaughter where he has to imagine it all rather than see it on the page. MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 01:54
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I'm not a huge fan of "The Shadow Out of Time" but I do like that it's one of those rare cases where a Lovecraftian protagonist has a real, human crisis in addition to whatever supernatural stuff is going on. It's really sad to think about the protagonist's wife and sons leaving him forever because his mind was gone and replaced by something inhuman, only for him to regain control of himself and his family still be estranged to him. You get a hint of that in "The Rats in the Walls" with the protagonist being a widower whose only son is maimed by The Great War or in "The Thing on the Doorstep" watching a friendship be strained by a literally controlling wife. But Lovecraft never lingers on these crises, just sort of leaving them for the reader to ponder or gloss over. One thing that's cool about Lovecraft's collaborations (even though they're almost entirely poor) is the change of setting. Reading most of his primary work in New England gives you the impression that he's fixed to that setting, but the collaborations have settings in Africa, the American southwest, and Venus! MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 02:23
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Croisquessein posted:Was Lovecraft misogynistic? I know he hardly featured any female characters in his work and women are largely absent from the world he writes about, but I don't remember any specific instances of him displaying negative attitudes towards them. Granted two of the three women that are featured in his stories are villains and the other is a downtrodden nonentity, but Keziah Mason is a math witch with a demon rat familiar, and Asenath Waite is actually a man. It's been a long time since I've read through them all so I might be way off and there's a bunch of little stuff that I missed last time. I think in one of his many thousands of letters he wrote something like, "I don't regard the rise of women to be a bad sign and their traditional subjugation is due to oriental influences" where I think "oriental" is meant to refer to Judeo-Christian religion. It's really odd for him to have that sort of attitude while simultaneously having that big blind spot when it comes to race/ethnicity.
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Jan 14, 2015 18:47
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hopterque posted:The Willows is just about my favorite piece of weird fiction. It really stuck with me. What's cool is you can look up the area where it takes place and look at pictures and stuff, because it's a wildlife preserve or something. He really describes it incredibly well. Blackwood does something in it (and to a lesser extent in "The Wendigo") where the narrator character is sort of a neophyte in terms of being out in the wilderness, and the character places all his faith in a stalwart, rugged, and more experienced traveling companion. Then, gradually, that stalwart character does or says things to erode that confidence by degrees. Sometimes it's an offhand comment, sometimes it's a gesture, but it all adds up to undercut this misplaced feeling of security that the narrator character has. I love "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" so much.
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Feb 1, 2015 18:22
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She cowrote "The Horror at Martins' Beach" with him, and it has a sensibility to it you don't really see elsewhere in Lovecraft. Definitely one of his better collaborations.
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Nov 27, 2016 09:55
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