Ghostbusting Lovecraft
September 13, 2014 1:41 AM   Subscribe

 
That is wonderful. It reminds me of a professor in college, who remarked -- and who was, I think, correct -- that the only response one could have, if confronted with a thorough-going nihilism, was to laugh, as genuinely as possible.
posted by gauche at 3:40 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


Re-Animator is also pretty funny. But when will someone make a decent horror movie from Lovecraft?
posted by ubiquity at 3:42 AM on September 13, 2014


But when will someone make a decent horror movie from Lovecraft?

Do independent shorts count? Because Bryan Moore's Cool Air (1999) was pretty good, as was Sean Branney and Andrew Leman's silent, 1920s-styled The Call of Cthulhu.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:11 AM on September 13, 2014 [10 favorites]


But when will someone make a decent horror movie from Lovecraft?

Wouldn't that actually require Lovecraft to be, y'know, horrific?

I mean, this is a guy who gets the shakes when Italians move into town. So he isn't exactly batting with a high average in the horror sweepstakes..
posted by happyroach at 4:15 AM on September 13, 2014 [20 favorites]


Lovecraft won't easily transition to film. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but the task does seem difficult.

I'm also somewhat dubious that Lovecraft works well as horror either in print or video, at least not with modern audiences. Even attempts to produce horror via Lovecraftian means by people like Charles Stross often fall short of horror. In large part, I think, because what scared Lovecraft simply isn't seen as that scary by most people today.

The universe is ultimately cold and uncaring? Ok, so?

There are forces beyond our comprehension that could eradicate us almost accidentally? Yeah, and?

The comforting illusion of the universe as something made for us by a benevolent deity who loves us is something that even most religious people don't believe much anymore. The Newtonian view of a clockwork universe where ultimately everything is predictable was so thoroughly discredited by modern physics that people don't even give it a second thought. We've all grown up knowing that the universe is uncaring, and most of us never even heard of the idea of a mechanistic, perfectly understandable, universe until we got into high school physics and it was introduced as an idea that got thrown away.

Anyone who gives the universe much thought knows that we could all die, right this second, from an event we never even saw coming and could do nothing about even if we did (a supernova that happened 20 light years away and 20 years ago, for example).

Even leaving aside his, cringingly embarrassing to modern sensibilities, racism and horror of miscegenation, his devotion to the evolutionary ladder model that was outdated even in his era and never taken seriously by real biologists anyway, the core of Lovecraft's horror just doesn't resonate as horror anymore, if it ever did.

Maltheism may be somewhat more disturbing than an utterly uncaring universe, but the outcome of either is about the same: you could die horribly from forces beyond your control and possibly even beyond your understanding. Yup. Sure could. And?

Don't misunderstand, I like a lot of Lovecraft (in a sort of campy way), and I genuinely love what some writers have done with his ideas (Stross' Laundry series is fantastic). I just don't see a lot of horror there.

To produce horror seems to require a more personal, lower level, thing to be frightened of. A malevolent ghost or ghoul may scare where an alien god who wipes us out almost by accident simply seems like a misfortune. Its sort of like Stalin's quip about death: a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. A somewhat greater than human malevolent entity is horrible; an alien god who destroys our universe in the same accidental, almost unthinking, way that we destroy bacterial colonies when we wipe the table is just unfortunate.
posted by sotonohito at 4:23 AM on September 13, 2014 [58 favorites]


That was excellent, but I'm not sure that it's fair to Lovecraft. Sure, he wrote a few stories that fit this description, but the bulk of his work was scary specifically because of the humanity, like the one about the cannibal.

I feel like the author here has boiled down Lovecraft's ideas into a sort of existential hierarchy that purportedly dictates that man is ultimately helpless and hopeless and will be inevitably annihilated by unfathomable forces. Perhaps I romanticize it, but I think it's more complicated than that. I think the stories communicate hope and bravery too. The people who meddle with the supernatural are shown to be fools, and there are always others left behind who aren't magnetically attracted to their own doom. It's been a while since I've read it, but isn't the stinger at the end of The Dunwich Horror that they find Wilbur's body, and he's only half human?

I'm sure many others here have a better grasp on Lovecraft as literature than I do. I'd like to reiterate that I enjoyed this article immensely, and that I'd like to read a similar dissection of Cast a Deadly Spell. That film is grating in its wackiness sometimes, but there are moments when it's everything I wanted in a film about magic. That early scene where the guy in the diner gets cursed is amazing.
posted by heatvision at 4:24 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


@heatvision: no, the stinger at the end of The Dunwich Horror is that Wilbur's twin brother (aka the thing in the barn) "looked more like the father than Wilbur did". That is, he was a giant mass of mostly insubstantial and invisible tentacles. And that he and Wilbur were the result of the elder god Yog-Sothoth raping Wilbur's mother at the behest of her father.

As for Lovecraft's purpose of horror, he actually spells out pretty much what you wrote in several places. The introduction to The Call of Cthulu, for example:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
posted by sotonohito at 4:36 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


I always thought the perfect Lovecraft movie would be something like My Dinner with Andre but instead of chatting about theater and aesthetics they tell ominous ghost stories and it reaches the point that Wallace Shawn announces that he really must pass on dessert.
posted by sammyo at 4:55 AM on September 13, 2014 [20 favorites]


Great essay, thanks!

But when will someone make a decent horror movie from Lovecraft?

I think the key is to not directly adapt him. Alien and In The Mouth of Madness are both quite Lovecraftian, but they're all the better for each being their own thing.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:57 AM on September 13, 2014 [10 favorites]


Ooooo, that was fun! Now do A Confederacy of Dunces!
posted by valkane at 5:04 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


Personally, I tend to agree with much of what Max says ... but I have a couple of different angles on Lovecraft.

(Disclaimer up front: yes, he was reprehensibly racist. No question about it. But having said that, I want to move on and examine what else he was, and why we still remember him, unlike a bazillion other late 19th/early 20th century white racists: what made him different?)

The first angle I'd like to draw to your attention is that HPL took an early interest in astronomy. And during HPL's early life we saw the first application of the new science of photography to telescopic observation. The advent of telescopes increased the number of known stars from around 400 naked-eye-visible ones to over 10,000. The addition of photography not only introduced spectroscopy (making it possible to catalogue stellar types) but also to register stars too dim for the telescope-assisted naked eye. The number of known stars thus increased to around a million in the space of a couple of decades. Then, during HPL's adulthood, things got immeasurably bigger: the "spiral nebulae" were finally imaged in enough to detail to confirm that they were galaxies! This was still controversial until the 1920s; but with one leap the universe expanded a millionfold yet again. And Edwin Hubble's use of spectroscopy to determine the red shift -- the coefficient of expansion of the cosmos -- set an approximate age of 10 billion years on the visible universe. Prior to Hubble, the best estimate for the age of the solar system was derived from Lord Kelvin's calculation of the longevity of the sun if it was powered by gravitational contraction. This put the solar system at around 10-100 million years.

So, during HPL's life, the universe expanded on the order of a billionfold in size and a thousandfold in age, and the discoveries kept on coming. This is in sharp contrast to our knowledge of the observable universe since the 1960s; yes, we keep discovering new wonders, but the bounds of spacetime haven't grown during that period.

Lovecraft's relationship with spacetime was like our relationship with computers: the universe around him was constantly being replaced by something unimaginably bigger -- and by implication, humanity was constantly shrinking into an ever-diminishing niche of insignificance.

The next angle on Lovecraft's fiction is that he coincided with the great bubble of American science fiction touched off by Hugo Gernsback's Astounding. Golden age SF of the 1920s was, arguably, a literature that leveraged the visible rapidity of change to deliver the cognitive shock described by critics of the genre as "sense of wonder"; look how big the universe is! We could have adventures between the stars -- we could be giants!

Lovecraft was very probably a clinical depressive, not to mention agoraphobic and more than somewhat xenophobic. His natural response to being exposed to such a dizzying expanse was the exact opposite of sense of wonder: to experience a sense of cosmological dread.

This inversion of the SFnal sensibility was, I think, inevitable: if Lovecraft hadn't so uniquely made it his own we'd probably see it for what it is, sense of dread is the obverse coin-face to sense of wonder. And that's what we remember him least unkindly for to this day: it wasn't his vision, but the unique filter he applied to it that provided a dreadful frame around what others perceived as a wondrous picture.
posted by cstross at 5:33 AM on September 13, 2014 [107 favorites]


I always thought the perfect Lovecraft movie would be something like My Dinner with Andre

That would be a great concept, since My Dinner with Andre is all about Wally trying to find out what happened to an old friend who has been seen behaving strangely on the streets of oppressive 70s New York City after he went off into a dark Polish forest with some weird people to perform strange rites that culminate with being buried alive in a mock funeral...

But Gladstone's essay revolves around what's only the context of Lovecraft's horror, with its emphasis on the existential cosmic nightmare angle. Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler had to read all of Lovecraft's stories in one go for a NYTBR review of their Library of America edition and came away with a more intimate insight into what drives his work. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind, Handler argues, is not fear, as Lovecraft wrote: It's loneliness.
It is here, however -- perhaps 50 pages into this 800-plus page anthology -- that something begins to shift, and what was supposed to be sublime (but is actually ridiculous) becomes something that was supposed to be ridiculous, but is actually sublime. {…} If you spend enough time in Lovecraft's lonely landscapes, fear really does develop: not the fear that you will come across unearthly creatures, but the fear that you will come across little else. And what first seems horridly overdone accumulates a creepy minimalism. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft's work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort. There is something funny about this -- in small doses. But by the end of this collection, one does not hear giggling so much as the echoes of those giggles as they vanish into the ether -- lonely, desperate and, yes, very, very scary.
Cosmic horror is only the background radiation for the very human, very real subject of HPL's fears: isolation, estrangement, and the madness that accompanies them. Lovecraft, for all his correspondents and epistolary friendships, was consumed by his own solitude. His attempts to succeed both in New York City's literary scene and his marriage ended in total failure. Following his withdrawal to his home town to write obsessively about fears he could not bring himself to name, his solitary death was not unlike that of many of his protagonists'.

Ghostbusters, haunted by post-70s Manhattan's urban alienation as much as spirits, is about teaming up to fight this.
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:36 AM on September 13, 2014 [39 favorites]


Another thing I'll toss out there: the philosophical flipside to H. P. Lovecraft is G. K. Chesterton. Each man opened the door and saw magical world, more true than our own. Lovecraft sees aliens beyond our comprehension: unutterable cosmic dread. Chesterton saw a retro-medieval-ish Catholicism: a "democracy of the dead".

Both men felt that their discoveries revealed the modern surface world to be a load of baloney.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:41 AM on September 13, 2014 [7 favorites]


More thoughts: part of the reason why Lovecraftian adaptations often fail is because, while people enjoy "visiting" Lovecraft's worldview, almost nobody actually wants to live there, especially when it comes to storytelling. Only a tiny minority of Lovecraft fans sincerely believe that our world is just a thin layer of cellophane stretched over the incomprehensible leftover paella of the universe. No, more people take a somewhat Derlethian view of it: that the Elder Gods can and ought to be faced and fought, even if we might well lose.

Once you start believing that the real world exists and matters, it becomes very difficult to fully sell the archetypical Lovecraft story. You develop another angle. Ghostbusters sees the heroes laughing. Re-Animator sees the audience laughing. In The Mouth of Madness and Cigarette Burns have something to say about the stories we tell. The Mist shows people reacting to Lovecraftian horrors, in the horrifying ways that people-as-people might react to such things. Alien is ultimately just pure adventure, true to its Conrad influence. The silent Call of Cthulhu shows a sincere love for Lovecraft and old-timey sensibilities: it is not horror itself, but rather love of horror.

Thomas Ligotti is a relatively rare exception, as far as devotion to the worldview goes. And look how he gets "adapted", in True Detective: the Ligotti surrogate is a badass cop who undergoes personal growth.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:06 AM on September 13, 2014 [14 favorites]


Surprisingly, I enjoyed that revisiting and reevaluation. Every line, scene and tune was burned into my memory as my son walked around the house in his jumpsuit and goggles with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator strapped to his back for several years. I think we had to replace the VHS tape at least once in that period simply due to wear...
posted by jim in austin at 6:06 AM on September 13, 2014


Another thing I'll toss out there: the philosophical flipside to H. P. Lovecraft is G. K. Chesterton. Each man opened the door and saw magical world, more true than our own. Lovecraft sees aliens beyond our comprehension: unutterable cosmic dread. Chesterton saw a retro-medieval-ish Catholicism: a "democracy of the dead".

Both men felt that their discoveries revealed the modern surface world to be a load of baloney.

You reminded me of one of my favorite bits from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday:

When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the fantastic fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like dreams from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as mere delusions of the nerves—how the fear of the Professor had been the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears were fancies, for he found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense.
posted by dismas at 6:09 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


Another thing I'll toss out there: the philosophical flipside to H. P. Lovecraft is G. K. Chesterton.

c.f. The Man Who Was Thursday, which plays with some of the themes HPL did: a paranoia-suffused investigation a sinister secret society, operating in the shadows of the modern world, headed by a figure to awe-full to comprehend. Chesterton, however, pulls the same trick at every step where HPL's protagonists would go mad from revelation: His investigators discover that they have been scaring themselves into believing in a conspiracy that exists only in their fearful imaginations. As with Ghostbusters, it's all about teamwork.
posted by Doktor Zed at 6:10 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well, they did battle Cthulhu in cartoon form so that sort of closes the loop, right?
posted by Renoroc at 6:11 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


I always thought the perfect Lovecraft movie would be something like My Dinner with Andre

There already was a film similar to that - Ghost Story. It was adapted from a Peter Straub novel. A group of aging chums gather together and exchange stories. Then their (fully adult) sons wind up in trouble. Nothing a phone call couldn't fix, but of course, that would be too much of a sensible idea...
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:07 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Well, they did battle Cthulhu in cartoon form so that sort of closes the loop, right?

Indeed they did.
posted by kewb at 7:42 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


In a fully Lovecraftian universe the investigators creeping loss of sanity or inability to resist tampering with things that should not be tampered with would eventually get them.
posted by Artw at 7:45 AM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]


To produce horror seems to require a more personal, lower level,

Poltergeist
posted by mikelieman at 7:46 AM on September 13, 2014


IMO, the reason you can't easily adapt Lovecraft to mainstream movie/TV is that Lovecraftian horror doesn't end. The horror is that the awful truth is revealed and the protagonist is stuck in a world where that truth exists, has existed, will always exist, the end.

In "traditional" horror, you kill the vampire and order returns to the world. Everyone lives happily ever after. The End.

In Lovecraft, you see the tentacled thing from beyond spacetime and ... and ... holy fuck there is no God, the end? I guess?

That's why True Detective ended with Marty and Rust talking about hope and light. You have to subvert the Lovecraftian ending to put a button on the story.

You blame Shakespeare for this, by the way, not Hollywood execs.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:57 AM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]


Venkman indiscriminately shocks the male student, even when he guesses right,

It's more than that. The test is to see if negative stimulus can trigger a psychic event, and, with the hapless young man his is shocking, it actually starts working. He starts getting answers right. It's the film's first indication that we're in a supernatural world.
posted by maxsparber at 8:10 AM on September 13, 2014 [21 favorites]


Thomas Ligotti is a relatively rare exception

Thomas Ligotti is the Soulcutter of literature.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:11 AM on September 13, 2014


Or, rather, I should say a supernatural world that can be affected by human intervention, as we have already seen the librarian.
posted by maxsparber at 8:12 AM on September 13, 2014


OK, a couple of things, and then the too long part:

1. Ghostbusters is a very good movie, maybe the best horror-comedy ever made (and that is a pretty tough competition) -- it as a great script, fine directing, a coherent look, and pretty much the entire cast is at the top of their game. It's a bit dated now, but that's not any kind of damning complaint.

2. I don't think the author understands Lovecraft's views very well. Venkman's various misfortunes are not really a reflection of that (they are more a reflection of Olmstead's various tribulations on the way to and during the day in Innsmouth).

3. Lovecraft was not an agoraphobe. The man was a prodigious walker, often making a 10-mile round trip walk to get a particularly favored ice cream. He also wasn't a shut-in (he traveled fairly extensively within a limited range (basically the North American east coast as far inland as Cleveland and Montreal), and he probably would have traveled further if he had had the means. He had a rich sense of humor and a lot of friends and correspondences. I suspect HPL would have loved the internet, although he might have had a rough go of it on MetaFilter, what with the racism, classism, and endless autodidact pedantry.

Anyway, now the long bit -- He's some thoughts on "The Dunwich Horror," which I think gives a real sense of Lovecraft's major themes. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

The overall arc of the story is an inbred wizard out in the sticks makes a deal with extradimensional beings who seem to have had greater access to the world in the past. They give him lost gold (yeah, prosaic, huh?), and he gives them semi-human children who, together, can either open the way for these beings or move the earth into their realm. One child is Wilbur Whateley, an unsettling kid who grows at rapid speed. He comes to the attention of the main protagonist, Henry Armitage, when Wilbur tries to get access to a copy of the Necronomicon to fill in some critical gaps in his spells. When Armitage thwarts him (in a delightfully passive aggressive way -- do not arouse the suspicions of academic librarians, my cultist friends), Wilbur attempts to steal the volume and is killed by a guard dog (and a dented revolver cartridge). He turns out to be physically monstrous. Armitage decodes Wilbur's journal and notes and begins to understand the enormity of what he was planning. Then, back in the sticks, an invisible monster goes on a rampage, killing cattle and people. Armitage gathers a few friends, and they go and do occult science battle with the monster, destroying or banishing it. The italicized reveal at the end is that the monster had a giant distorted Whateley face on it's side, revealing that it was Wilbur's brother. (And that Wizard Whateley had offered his daughter to monsters as a breeding vessel or, as some think, committed incest with her). The end. A nice "subhuman degenerates threaten the world, destroyed by good Anglo learnedness" tale of the sort that filled the Pulps.

However. Lovecraft's special viewpoint makes it a very different sort of tale.

First, the story, although it has a happy ending (apparently decided on a whim; Lovecraft liked Armitage and, as the tale developed, decided to give him a "win"), rereadings show that it is a peculiar sort of happy ending. The "Dunwich Horror" is the rampaging monster; it's a bad thing, but local and dangerous to cows and farmers. Together, Wilbur and his "taking after dad" brother were going to utterly destroy the world, clearing off the human taint and turning (or returning) it to a primordial state more suited to the alien creatures they are serving. Wilbur dies due to a damaged revolver cartridge and an angry dog; pure chance rather than intelligence or learning or stalwartness or whatever saves the day. Then, when the "noble academics" go into battle with the lesser of two evils, the scene is scene through the eyes of ignorant country people who narrate it to the reader -- the heroics of the protagonists are diminished to tiny visions seen through a telescope only dimly understood by the narrators -- so the end, although "triumphant" (and evidently taxing) is miniscule and obscure. The central message is that the world is save, this time and only barely, by chance and very little human agency. The next time (and there will be one) may not turn out so well.

There central theme of the story is that there are forces much much bigger than humanity and even a glancing encounter with them is profoundly damaging to Armitage, the most resilient human in the story. The difference of scale (probably influenced by HPL's self-guided study of astronomy and geology (as noted above), means that our efforts don't count for much good or evil compared even to chance. Heroism is a sham, but HPL lets Armitage have his success -- it's important to remember that Lovecraft was not specifically a nihilist. He believed that the universe was essentially purposeless (despite having the idea of "evolutionary progression") and uncaring, but he felt that, in the face of this, you should appreciate your friends and family and culture. World's going to end? Well, there should be time to finish reading Tacitus or writing another letter.

Now a couple of the characters. Armitage is definitely an HPL May Sue, although, as I note above, a particularly ineffectual one for a Pulp hero. The central moment of Armitage's arc is his self-destructive push to understand Wlbur's notes and uncover the plot and its residual threat. Just wrapping his mind around the problem nearly destroys Armitage, so, despite his competence, he's a curious stand in for the author. I think Wilbur Whateley is also an HPL stand-in. He's a sharp guy, forced by circumstances of birth to a rather lonely life of autodidactic study which is ultimately doomed by a taint in his blood. Even as he works diligently on his plot, he rather morosely considers what it will mean for him if his plan succeeds. He's more human than his brother, and that humanity will need to be cleared away as well. He's a determined, but rather glum villain, as much as product of his grandfather's plot as a beneficiary of it. Old Whateley is also a strange villain for a pulp story -- he sets in motion a plot to destroy his family and the Earth apparently to get gold with which he does very little. And, while I am sure Lovecraft did not intend this, Lavinia Whateley can carry a feminist gloss -- she is literally valued only for her reproductive capacity, and, when she gives in to her "destiny," she is pretty much scorned by everyone, including her son. All of the human characters are belittled and crushed by the plot, which has failed halfway through the story. It's a colossal waste of human potential.

Lovecraft also does some good things with setting. Dunwich country is oppressive and malign, stunting and denuding even the normal people who live there. Arkham University is a sterling image of a place of learning, but it holds horrible secrets and much study is literally a weariness of the flesh. Everything that HPL prizes can be hiding a cancer; and every victory requires learning more unsettling things.

So Ghostbusters isn't really an "answer" to Lovecraft's world, but a refusal to engage with it. It has laughs but little horror, it essentially reaffirms the importance of human relations as things themselves rather than as the best reaction to the understanding that none of it will matter in even a few centuries, much less geologic or astronomic time. And, honestly, why should it be? Ghostbusters owes a debt to Lovecraft, because horror has been soaking in Lovecraft's bathwater since the 30s at least, but it is much more of a comedy, both in the sense that it's funny and in the technical sense that it sees society put right at the end. Lovecraft wrote a few out and out comic pieces, and it's quite possible to do comic stories using Lovecraftian trappings, but Ghostbusters is not trying to be horrible enough or weird enough to really be addressing the same questions Lovecraft is asking.

tl;dr -- As Buddha liked to say "The question does not fit the case."
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:12 AM on September 13, 2014 [35 favorites]


In "traditional" horror, you kill the vampire and order returns to the world. Everyone lives happily ever after. The End.

Hmmm, I don't know about this. Most horror movies feature at least "one last scare" to show that the monster is still out there, or some other unhappy variation. See the 2005 Dawn of the Dead for an especially gratuitous "ha ha you lose" moment.

Sidenote: Dressed to Kill deals with "one last scare" in an unusually interesting way.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:20 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, but those are just cheap gotcha scares, not a thoroughgoing element of the base idea.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:27 AM on September 13, 2014


Yeah, but those are just cheap gotcha scares, not a thoroughgoing element of the base idea.

I'm not sure I understand. For example, the ending of the typical zombie movie is that, in a disaster, humanity is largely doomed, and that even good smart planners will die, often undone by violent and untrustworthy humans. In a slasher movie, the idea is often that the monster will live for a sequel - all the fighting was for naught. These go to the core of what these movies are ostensibly about.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:32 AM on September 13, 2014


This is in sharp contrast to our knowledge of the observable universe since the 1960s; yes, we keep discovering new wonders, but the bounds of spacetime haven't grown during that period.


This week in current events:
The supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way is 100 times bigger in volume and mass than previously thought, a team of astronomers says. They have mapped the enormous region and given it the name Laniakea — Hawaiian for 'immeasurable heaven'.
So, OK, it's not all of spacetime that they're saying is bigger, but that's already infinite, isn't it?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:41 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Slasher movies don't purport that the slashers are merely the advance agents of an unending stream of slashers and we're all doomed to be slashed eventually. The slasher is just an agent of chaos that gets dealt with (maybe just in the next episode) so we can all return to our lives. Lovecraft says there's no life to return to at all.

Zombie movies are close to Lovecraft, but even zombie movies offer hope that the struggle might be worth it. We can find a cure, or find a place where the zombies are not. Maybe not *this* protagonist, but someone, somewhere, because the rules of the story universe allow for the idea on a base level.

I'm not saying it's impossible to adapt Lovecraft, I'm saying it's difficult to do so because it cuts across the grain of mainstream tastes in a very specific way. Lovecraft gives you a world without the oxygen of hope.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:46 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: a couple of things, and then the too long part.
posted by weston at 8:52 AM on September 13, 2014 [8 favorites]


I think Wilbur Whateley is also an HPL stand-in.

I think that was pretty obvious (also from the physical description), and in keeping with HPL's sense of humor - a few of his friends also show up as ghouls and madmen in other works.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:26 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Cabin In the Woods is a good example of Lovecraftian Horror. It has the most evil ending I can remember seeing.
posted by idiopath at 9:29 AM on September 13, 2014 [8 favorites]


It should probably be added that The Dunwich Horror is a bit of a cheery adventure romp in Lovecraft terms, and while it's very role playing game friendly (as are most of the Derleth stories, which have a lot in common with it) it's not really one of his better or more distinctive works.
posted by Artw at 9:39 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


The thing that always continues to amaze me about Ghostbusters is that it was made in a time in the U.S when the Environmental Protection Agency was seen as not only effective but plausible as a bad guy.

I mean, I remember that world, it's just not the one we live in now.
posted by jefflowrey at 9:39 AM on September 13, 2014 [10 favorites]


So, OK, it's not all of spacetime that they're saying is bigger, but that's already infinite, isn't it?

That's the point, though. Our worldview has shifted to comfortably incorporate the concept that space is huge, so learning that there's even more, bigger stuff than we had thought is not much of a shock to our view of ourselves or our place in the universe. That shock already happened, we know we're not the center or even very important anymore.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:39 AM on September 13, 2014


The test is to see if negative stimulus can trigger a psychic event, and, with the hapless young man his is shocking, it actually starts working. He starts getting answers right. It's the film's first indication that we're in a supernatural world.

That scene foreshadows the final confrontation beautifully. But I think in general the script works because it uses psychic/supernatural stuff as a metaphor for human qualities. The movie may address man's place in the universe, but it's mainly a movie about aspiration: a Reagan-era slobs v. snobs comedy about a bunch of blue-collar underdogs who start a silly small business. The ghosts and ancient gods and what-not are wonderful, and are cribbed very affectionately from sources like Lovecraft, but they're window dressing: at the emotional level the movie about regular Joes (who just happen to have PhD's) who make good because they believe in themselves, even when the crusty dean and snobby concierge and the officious EPA inspector (ha!) and the diners at Tavern on the Green don't want to admit them to the club.

When Egon, describing Zool, says "It's whatever it wants to be," he might as well be talking about the Ghostbusters themselves. When Zool says "Choose, chose and die!," the nature of the challenge is philosophical more than supernatural.

The Ghostbusters are a bunch of little guys. The odds are against them, and if they stick their necks out they're going to get creamed, but they do, and they choose and they win because, goofy as they may be, they're a bunch of plucky strivers who are willing to cross the streams even though they know they're not supposed to.

It's less Lovecraftian than libertarian.
posted by ducky l'orange at 9:44 AM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]


the Environmental Protection Agency was seen as not only effective but plausible as a bad guy.

I mean, I remember that world, it's just not the one we live in now.


It may not be the world you live in now. My father would beg to differ.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:48 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


Spathe Cadet - please don't misunderstand.

I'm not talking about the *reality* of the agency.

I'm talking about the *perception* of the agency.

I bet you can find a lot of people who don't even know it still exists.
posted by jefflowrey at 9:54 AM on September 13, 2014


I'm not talking about the reality of the agency either. My dad's pretty right-wing; the EPA is part of the government. Therefore it's not only plausible as a bad guy, but it's pretty much assumed to be a bad guy, unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 10:02 AM on September 13, 2014


I love Ghostbusters. It is probably my favorite movie.

Something that always struck me, even from a young age, is that Walter Peck doesn't really make unreasonable demands. It really boils down to Venkman being an asshole all the time. Which is one of the reasons we all love Venkman.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:03 AM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


it's not really one of his better or more distinctive works.

I'd disagree with that. It's definitely part of the stories after his return from NYC to Providence that make up the bulk of his best work. I'm not sure that "The Dunwich Horror" is in Lovecraft's "Top 5," since it's kind of an experiment (along with "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward") in writing longer-form stories. Anyway, I think it has all the elements of HPL's mature philosophy of writing, so it seemed like a good example to draw out some of the elements that Ghostbusters has to answer, assuming that it is an answer to Lovecraft.

By the way, if you are interested in Lovecraft, the HPL Historical Society has a great collection of radio drama adaptations of his stories, Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. "The Dunwich Horror" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are two of the best, in my opinion,.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:10 AM on September 13, 2014 [7 favorites]


The science fiction of Peter Watts seems like the modern equivalent of Lovecraft as any. The stars are cold, humanity has become unrecognizable, and consciousness was a mistake.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:12 AM on September 13, 2014 [11 favorites]


IMO, the reason you can't easily adapt Lovecraft to mainstream movie/TV is that Lovecraftian horror doesn't end.

While the X-Files and Lost didn't have the courage of their convictions, or the confidence in their premises, to go out like this, Twin Peaks certainly did.

As for Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd, a true believer in the occult, psychical research, etc., would be perfectly happy to have it go on and on in sequel after sequel. Bill Murray, who may be after something more philosophically in life, is content to let it end on the second movie's happy note.
posted by Doktor Zed at 10:16 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


I don't necessarily agree with this, but Thomas Frank wrote a piece about Ghostbusters a while ago.
posted by Trochanter at 10:25 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


After reading cstross' discussion of Lovecraft, I'm now pondering the "sense of dread" horror about computers. The Matrix? Terminator?
posted by immlass at 10:33 AM on September 13, 2014


The Blair Witch Project is the most "Lovecraftian" film I can think of. There are the obvious tropes: first person narrative (interrupted), naifs in the woods, consultation of old books, fear of weird cults, a disorienting universe, madness, an inexplicable and abrupt ending.

A lot of people hated this film precisely because of it's Lovecraftian elements. "Dracula" is much more satisfying to these folks. The monster is destroyed, the comfortable world is restored. Lovecraft, when he was on his game, did not want you leave his stories "happy." He wanted you to stop, consider and wonder.

Thoughtful films rarely make blockbusters, so I doubt anything as challenging as a good Lovecraft story will ever appear on screen.
posted by SPrintF at 10:54 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


HPL would have loved the internet, although he might have had a rough go of it on MetaFilter, what with the racism, classism, and endless autodidact pedantry.

Yes, those definitely are the two main ways he would have been out of place.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:12 AM on September 13, 2014 [13 favorites]


After reading cstross' discussion of Lovecraft, I'm now pondering the "sense of dread" horror about computers. The Matrix? Terminator?

Here's my thought on that. That sense of dread is always based on the revelation of humanity's smallness and vulnerability against forces that are much greater, stronger, and also terrifyingly alien but not wiser, perhaps even lacking wisdom and intelligence of a sort we can understand. The revelatory component is the sine qua non of Lovecraft. Robots or computers (at least, those of the sort imagined in Terminator or the Matrix) by their nature cannot be scary in that way. They are rational but evil, and evil in a way that's not really scary. If the shape-shifting Terminator from the second movie had been able to impregnate humans with nanotechnology to serve the purpose of the machines, just y'know to pick an obvious possibility, that would get closer to Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's genius was in destroying the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy by having Dionysus go crazy and eat Apollo's head (so to speak). Being turned into prey, discovering the existence of things that look at us as we look at insects or livestock (or for men, perhaps a little like how they look at women) is what terrifies. Killing machines made of steel or silicon are orthogonal to the life-hierarchy that's being played with in Lovecraft.

Zombies and robots are also two sides of the same coin: human-like but not persons, evacuated of will and qualia. In the early form of the zombie, in pre-war America, it was a biological robot or puppet; today, it is the beast of death, struck by death itself, as though death were a communicable disease, but also animalistic, because the zombie is our fear and inarticulable hope of what we might do if we were betrayed by our corporeality. Because all reason is lost, the zombie is thus a state that implies the existence of some vital principle that confers interiority separated from exteriority. Zombies are what happens to the human body when the unmooring of the soul becomes biologically contagious. In Lovecraft, there's constant teetering at the edge of losing sanity/humanity. The zombie world is post-Lovecraftian because that becomes a world-historical condition.
posted by clockzero at 11:22 AM on September 13, 2014 [7 favorites]


It's less Lovecraftian than libertarian.

This - I'm always amazed "Ghostbusters" gets so much love on MeFi - it's deeply conservative and reactionary at its core. Loved it as a kid, but can't choke it down as an adult.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:48 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: just a thin layer of cellophane stretched over the incomprehensible leftover paella of the universe.*
posted by ndfine at 12:32 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


On the Dunwich horror, I think some of Lovecraft's protagonists have to win. If pulling back the curtain and staring down the abyss of reality only can get you make you unsettled and unhappy and possibly crazy (and maybe eaten by a cosmic horror), you're a fool to do it. However, in the Dunwich horror, it also saves everyone. So it becomes a terrible responsibility; peering into the abyss might destroy your sanity and forever ruin the chances of you sleeping comfortably at night, but you have to do it, because there exists a small chance that you might be able to do something worthwhile against it. Probably not, and it's a temporary victory at best, but with the stakes what they are, you have to try.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:49 PM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


It's deeply conservative and reactionary at its core.

Well, that's what it took to have a hit in the 80's. I forgive Harold. Besides, it's so knowing, it basically works as satire.
posted by ducky l'orange at 2:11 PM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]


Small business owners are the heart and soul of the community!
posted by Artw at 2:33 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


One of the things with an ongoing series is the writers do almost inevitably reach back to past works in the genre to find 'new' stories... the animated Real Ghostbusters had to eventually meet Chtulhu, just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer eventually met Dracula (and X-Files had that 'reaching back' thing baked right in).

But for a comedic turn on Lovecraft, I must recommend the (only occasionally updating) "Call of Cthulhu: The Musical", the concept that took over Brian Hendrickson's attempt to do a sci-fi satire omnibus comic. Come on, everybody, sing along (to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious") "Miskatonic University caused my psychosis..."
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:57 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Robots or computers (at least, those of the sort imagined in Terminator or the Matrix) by their nature cannot be scary in that way. They are rational but evil, and evil in a way that's not really scary.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Though "evil machine" stories are often written with AIs as being of cold logic, they easily could, and maybe should, be depicted more as "forces that are much greater, stronger, and also terrifyingly alien but not wiser, perhaps even lacking wisdom and intelligence of a sort we can understand". There's no reason to believe that an intelligent machine would think or act in any way like or under stable by human beings. They could just as well be the utterly alien gods of Lovecraft, beings utterly different and beyond human ken hurting us for reasons we don't understand, or even no reason.

I thought Terminator 2's explanation of how Skynet came to be moved in this direction:
In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Here Skynet is a complete accident, and lashes out in blind panic. It could very well be one of Lovecraft's blind idiot gods, a being of enormous power and an ability to consciously act but with no recognizable intelligence or wisdom guiding them.

I could imagine a story about an AI accidentally coming to life with access to the resources of the world using them to do things that harm humans not because it's a being of evil rationality but because it is either unaware of the humans outside of the digital systems with which it interacts or that the "real" world and the humans in it mean nothing to it. The people in this world would likely be unaware this god had been born and would see missiles launch and stock markets crash for seemingly no reason.

A great example of a Lovecraftian AI tale is Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
posted by Sangermaine at 4:26 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Post-singularity machine. You can't even understand it, let alone judge it. Your intellect is a tiny spec before it's vast capabilities.
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ray is the heart (I think they even call him that at one point), Egon is the brain, Winston is the hands, and Venkman, well, he's the mouth.
posted by Spatch at 6:00 PM on September 13, 2014


Ray is the heart (I think they even call him that at one point), Egon is the brain, Winston is the hands, and Venkman, well, he's the mouth.

So Ray is George, Egon is John, Winston is Ringo, and Venkman is Paul, though that's not very fair to Paul.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:22 PM on September 13, 2014


Oh man, there is so much to respond to in this thread. I need to digest this, it's not often that I think I can say something useful in response to Charles Muthafukin' Stross....
posted by JHarris at 7:31 PM on September 13, 2014


The Ghostbusters' archetypal comic team roles go back to the Marx Brothers': Venkman=Groucho (the smart-mouth); Ray=Harpo (the clown); Egon=Chico (the schemer); Winston=Zeppo (the straight man). For the Fab Four, the match-ups are, respectively, John, Ringo, George, and Paul.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:00 PM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


GenjiandProust, i am totally listening to that on my next day off.
posted by ELF Radio at 8:52 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Steely-eyed Missile Man: "Thomas Ligotti is the Soulcutter of literature."

"is a dull color lacking all luster that actually seems to draw light into itself", according to Wikipedia. That does seem to fit Ligotti's writing. He writes like a self-aggrandizing, precocious goth teen.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:20 PM on September 13, 2014


I dunno, Ray seems a little more fragile than invulnerable old Harpo, and Egon doesn't seem very Chico-like at all.

Re-Animator is also pretty funny. But when will someone make a decent horror movie from Lovecraft?

In addition to the previouly mentioned silent Call Of Cthulhu (which is not a short, and at least at one time could be caught on Netflix), the squamous guys at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) have made a follow up, a talkie version of The Whisperer In Darkness. They've also mentioned favorably the German movie Die Farbe, a slightly embellished adaption of The Colour Out Of Space. (The movie's mostly black and white. Guess what the one colour signifies....)

>I mean, this is a guy who gets the shakes when Italians move into town. So he isn't exactly batting with a high average in the horror sweepstakes..
> In large part, I think, because what scared Lovecraft simply isn't seen as that scary by most people today. The universe is ultimately cold and uncaring? Ok, so?

I've mentioned before that, with certain execeptions (The Music of Erich Zann!) Lovecraft doesn't really frighten me. But I think he is frightening. And I think what Lovecraft got on about is really the fundamental basis of all horror, fear of the Other.

I think people aren't as scared of Lovecraft now as they used to be, and this might be the root of my own reaction, because Lovecraft won.

Even when it doesn't use his specific named beasties, the fundamental horror of Lovecraft's universe is everywhere in fiction and movies now, and not just horror, but science fiction and fantasy too, and in short stories, novels, movies and (particularly) video games. How many JRPGs has there been where the plucky team of adventurers have to fight the even organization (sometimes a Church, sometimes pariahs) from reviving/summoning/providing a gateway for the Ancient Evil Monstrosity? All of that is pretty directly cribbing from Lovecraft. Of course in those games the Evil Entity ends up getting revived anyway, and of course the plucky adventurers have to defeat it, which isn't Lovecraftian... unless you count The Dunwich Horror, which Joshi himself says isn't the most Lovecraftian of Lovecraft stories, in that the humans do directly win against the horror in the end. Of course in that story the heroes aren't angsty anime teens with spiky hair and gigantic swords but professors and librarians, but you can draw the line.

The conduit through which Lovecraftian concepts leaked out into the wider popular culture? Books and stories, sure, but also, perhaps primarily, comic books, which have been cribbing from the pulps for decades.

(Disclaimer up front: yes, he was reprehensibly racist. No question about it.

I'm continually frustrated that people (frequently those participating in their first Lovecraft thread) feel compelled to remind us about this. Yes, he was. cstross reminds us that he's interesting despite it. What I feel like I should add is that I think that, in a way, Lovecraft felt he could get away with saying those things because he knew there was no way on earth he'd ever have any power to act on them. The all-talk kind of racist. This doesn't excuse it of course, but Lovecraft lived pre-WWII, when the world got shown conclusively what horrors unchecked racism was capable of. Anyway, he married a Jew. Reverse-anyway, he wrote The Horror Of Red Hook. Yeah we've trod that ground before moving on.

His natural response to being exposed to such a dizzying expanse was the exact opposite of sense of wonder: to experience a sense of cosmological dread.

This is the thing I wanted to respond to. This is accurate, and yet also kind of not. I think to Lovecraft the two are intertwined. There are Lovecraft storied that seem to exult in the alienness of his ideas. It is possible to read "The Whisperer In Darkness" in a manner sympathetic to the Mi-Go, and "At the Mountains of Madness" ends with one of my favorite moments in all his works, where the protagonist learns to empathize with (what we now call) the Elder Things. "The Silver Key" is perhaps foremost of these, where Lovecraft expy Randolf Carter, after spending time exploring the wonder/horrors of the universe, comes back to his human friends, changed of course, but still Carter in essence. Then in "Beyond the Gates of the Silver Key" he takes it farther, and identifies Yog-Sothoth as an aspect of Carter himself. I'd like to know, if he had lived, where Lovecraft would have gone from there? Maybe he was finding his own way through his nightmares and horrors by identifying with them?
posted by JHarris at 9:24 PM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]


I don't think it hurts to remind everyone that Lovecraft was a horrible racist. Racism and xenophobia were central elements in his horror and his writing, but more pertinently he was a horrible racist. This is not something that should be glossed over and ignored; it's a major character flaw, and it's one that makes it really hard for people affected by it to really get into Lovecraft per se, as it were.

Basically my friend Rachael said it a lot better than I could the last time this issue came up at the Escape Artists podcasts. Sometimes the chef puts crap in the food, and if you're going to discuss it honestly, you need to at least acknowledge that the crap is there. It's important to do this every time because there will always be someone who is encountering this for the first time and who might need to hear that it's okay to be upset about the crap.

I guess if you have your private book club where you've already hashed all this out, then you can skip the ritual announcement first, but if you're talking in public about someone like Lovecraft, who is both revered and problematic, then yes, you always need to address the problematic elements (even if only to say that they are not pertinent to the current discussion and will therefore not be brought up again, as the esteemed Mr. Stross did.)
posted by Scattercat at 9:47 PM on September 13, 2014 [5 favorites]


This is not something that should be glossed over and ignored; it's a major character flaw, and it's one that makes it really hard for people affected by it to really get into Lovecraft per se, as it were.

Right, and agreed. My only complaint is when it becomes the only thing we can talk about in Lovecraft threads, and comes up constantly, when it becomes a derail. Lots of writers from that time were racist, probably not to the same degree as Lovecraft, but on the other hand they on the average had a lot more of the results of that racism on their hands. Several Presidents owned slaves after all, and of the ones who didn't, not all of them had enlightened views.

Sometimes the chef puts crap in the food, and if you're going to discuss it honestly, you need to at least acknowledge that the crap is there.

But it's not really a good analogy, is it? Because if there's crap in food it's immediately the only thing about that food that matters. That analogy seems like an excuse to discard everything else about Lovecraft.

I guess if you have your private book club where you've already hashed all this out, then you can skip the ritual announcement first

It's not a private book club, but I don't know, a lot of people here have heard the ritual announcement now, it's derailed whole threads before. And this sounds like sticking a warning label on Lovecraft: CAUTION: AUTHOR MAY CONTAIN STUPID NOTIONS ABOUT RACES.

Wait a second, what am I saying? That'd be pretty cool actually.
posted by JHarris at 10:47 PM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]


Can we discuss Lovecraft's racism until we reach the point where people say "Huh. Maybe he's not the best person to hold out as the exemplar of horror, because he's such a bigot"? Until he's regarded more as Leni Riefenstahl than Orson Wells?

Seriously, the whole bit of lionizing Lovecraft while sweeping his attitudes under the carpet is saying some really nasty things about the community of fans.
posted by happyroach at 11:54 PM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]


And if it becomes a derail, you can certainly point that out in any discussions you take part in. I would say it's better to acknowledge (and hopefully thereby at least partially neutralize) the problematic elements and risk derailing than to just pretend they aren't there. When one complains that we have to talk about the racism again, one ends up sounding very similar to the sort of tone-trolling that actual opponents of addressing racism use. The ability to just ignore and walk away from the racist undertones (being generous and not just calling them "tones") is in itself a form of privilege.

On a more pragmatic and specific note, MetaFilter has ten thousand users and many times more daily visitors. I guarantee you that not everyone has fully understood Lovecraft's racism and/or been able to accept it before. It's a public thread and should be treated like any other public speech.

Warning labels would actually be something I would wholly endorse, if we could somehow apply them to the concept of Lovecraft wherever he might arise. Think of it like a trigger warning, if that helps; you're acknowledging the problematic elements in order to defuse them and reassure your audience that you are not part of the, as happyroach put it, "nasty" portion of Lovecraft fans (and they do exist) who seek to partially or entirely excuse Lovecraft's racism because it's uncomfortable for their own uniformly white and privileged reading of him.
posted by Scattercat at 6:10 AM on September 14, 2014


Like, if there are people out there who can't get over Lovecraft's racism and tend to derail threads because they can't discuss other topics due to their anger over his racism and how he's become an icon despite it, well, you know, that's okay, because he was a horrible racist. That's how people really ought to react to horrible racists. I just consider it part of the cost of discussing Lovecraft in public. It's not my place to dictate how other people should react to problematic elements in art that I like despite its problems.
posted by Scattercat at 6:21 AM on September 14, 2014


> It's less Lovecraftian than libertarian.

This - I'm always amazed "Ghostbusters" gets so much love on MeFi - it's deeply conservative and reactionary at its core. Loved it as a kid, but can't choke it down as an adult.


This is one of the things I like least about MetaFilter: it doesn't matter how funny or well done something is, if it's ideologically suspect it must be chastised and rejected.
posted by languagehat at 6:41 AM on September 14, 2014 [11 favorites]


So, this may be a bit of a reach, but I think "The Butterfly Effect", with the 'strangles himself with his own umbilical cord' alternate ending is the most... Lovecraftian-ish horror movie I can think of offhand.

The more you learn, or understand how the universe works, the more horrifying it is, and yet the things that are currently unknown are still the scariest, a protagonist twists and turns trying to make some sense or escape from terrible fate, going more and more insane, and in the end, suicide seems the less torturous path.

So, while at first the setting isn't so lovecraftian, the creeping horror and bleakness is familiar.
posted by Elysum at 6:41 AM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


(Obviously the quoted view does not represent all of MeFi, but it's common enough that's it's pretty much bound to come up in any discussion of art, and it makes my gorge rise, like the crap in the chef's fancy food.)
posted by languagehat at 6:42 AM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Sometimes, isn't it serious though, languagehat? I think of Zero Dark Thirty, where I don't care how good it is; I fear it for what it does to the public psyche. Like, maybe the better it is the worse it is.

Obviously, (to me anyway) in Ghostbusters' case, it seems like the EPA thing is just whimsy, or one more joke that popped into Ramis' head. Or even a joke at the expense of that Reaganite anti-govt sensibility.

But when people start talking about "Going Jack Bauer on their asses" and stuff, don't you worry about the what art, or god save us, art-with-an-agenda does to the zeitgeist?
posted by Trochanter at 8:10 AM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Because if there's crap in food it's immediately the only thing about that food that matters. That analogy seems like an excuse to discard everything else about Lovecraft.

Just pointing out that for some readers, the racism is the only thing that matters because it ruins everything else. I have this problem with a lot of older SF authors and casual sexism. You're reading along and then there's something really gross and BOOM, DONE.
posted by immlass at 8:41 AM on September 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


For the record, I love Ghostbusters. I hope Harold Ramis is dumping slime on Walter Peck in heaven right now.
posted by ducky l'orange at 8:47 AM on September 14, 2014


This is one of the things I like least about MetaFilter: it doesn't matter how funny or well done something is, if it's ideologically suspect it must be chastised and rejected.

Well, only if you think that the obvious and automatic end result of discovering problematic elements in a piece of entertainment and/or it's creator is rejection.

I hadn't really thought of Ghostbusters in a Reagan Era emerging libertarian sort of way; it's interesting, and I have to ask myself why I find the film so enjoyable if other people are seeing these themes so clearly. I might rewatch the film and see if I agree with the analysis and whether it affects my enjoyment f it.

Lovecraft's racism (it's actually a lot more complex than that, but I don't think this is the place to discuss it) is interesting partly because it's so critical to reading his stories at anything except a really surface level. Yes, there are stories where there is very little depth beyond a sort of racial squirminess ("Medusa's Coils," I am looking at you), but there are other stories where thinking about Lovecratft's attitudes are really worthwhile. How do you read the end of "At the Mountains of Madness" or "The Shadow over Innsmouth?" What did Lovecraft intend when he wrote them? What were his readers thinking? Does that intent matter as we approach the centenary of their publication? The more you know about this, the richer your reading can become, even if Lovecraft's personal attitudes remain repugnant.

ina Miéville's "Guilty Pleasures: Art and Politics" (30-40 minute audio) talks a lot about ways to approach art by people you don't like very much (mostly for their politics). I certainly wouldn't blame someone for rejecting Lovecraft because of his racist attitudes (any more than I would blame someone for dismissing Ghostbusters for political reasons); I haven't chosen to do that, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid choice.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:47 AM on September 14, 2014 [5 favorites]


Can we discuss Lovecraft's racism until we reach the point where people say "Huh. Maybe he's not the best person to hold out as the exemplar of horror, because he's such a bigot"? Until he's regarded more as Leni Riefenstahl than Orson Wells?

Although Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia should be as obvious in his fiction as his awkward storytelling and terrible prose, he was not - unlike many of his contemporaries - a public propagandist for them. While Riefenstahl tried to minimize her Nazi credentials after the war, she unquestionably was one of Hitler's most effective propagandists during his rise to power. De Mille's Birth of a Nation helped revive the Klu Klux Klan as a national organization. T. S. Eliot's anti-semitism appears in not only his poetry but also his social/literary criticism, most notoriously in After Strange Gods. And Ezra Pound, a Mussolini admirer like Lovecraft, broadcast treasonous wartime agitprop on behalf of the Axis. Readers come away creeped out by The Shadow over Innsmouth, but its hardly concealed subtext of HPL's fear of miscegenation has never convinced anyone that good old New England Anglo-Saxon stock must never be intermixed with those Portuguese and Polynesians.

Lovecraft was a creep and a crank, full stop, yet not end of story. It's worthwhile for us to discuss his objectionable views alongside his stories and to ask why his weird pulp fiction still resonates with contemporary readers in spite of them. Substituting ideological purity tests for aesthetic criticism, though, is no more illuminating than turning him into a stalking horse for modern reactionaries - the way professional xenophobe Michel Houellebecq does in his Lovecraft study. Whatever lurks underneath Lovecraft's fiction, we're not going to or benefit from regarding them as forbidden blasphemous tomes or go insane from reading them.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:57 AM on September 14, 2014 [6 favorites]


Can we discuss Lovecraft's racism until we reach the point where people say "Huh. Maybe he's not the best person to hold out as the exemplar of horror, because he's such a bigot"? Until he's regarded more as Leni Riefenstahl than Orson Wells?

Lovecraft wasn't involved with any genocidal regimes, though. He lived a life largely in obscurity and out-of-touch nerdery. And so it becomes easier to overlook his racism, because he was far more harmless and powerless than Riefenstahl. It becomes one aspect of his kookiness, rather than a "blood on his hands" sort of thing.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:12 AM on September 14, 2014


I certainly wouldn't blame someone for rejecting Lovecraft because of his racist attitudes (any more than I would blame someone for dismissing Ghostbusters for political reasons); I haven't chosen to do that, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid choice.

I agree here. My only worry is that accusations of racism have a tendency to bounce around by association. They haven't yet, but it's in sight, and I don't hold with it at all.

The way the thinking goes is:
1. Lovecraft himself was a racist.
2. I hate Lovecraft for that, it's a deal-breaker for me.
3. Over there is someone who it wasn't a deal-breaker for. He must be a horrible person!

Lovecraft was kooky, like a crazy uncle you know not to set off at Thanksgiving, and his hands remain bloodless. But, as should be evident by how I sometimes dance around both sides of the point, it's still a bit discomfiting to me. If he were writing today, would we regard him as an Orson Scott Card figure, who wrote cool stories despite odious personal beliefs?

I like to think that, regardless of what he wrote in his letters, his beliefs were not really deeply held, a belief backed up, I think, by the strange reflection on race in his best stories -- "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," for instance, ends weirdly, with the narrator flipping from horror to reverence. And I like to think that, were he alive and writing now, he'd have worked himself entirely out of those attitudes. But I also know that speculating on this is useless, and actually meaningless -- people are products of their surroundings, and a Lovecraft growing up today really wouldn't be the same Lovecraft.

Anyway. One of the biggest problems with the continuing public perceptions of Lovecraft is his prolific letter-writing. Some writers, we have little other than what they got published to inform us of what they really thought, unalloyed with artifice. Not so Lovecraft; he wrote thousands of letters and made his position quite clear in some of them.

(I'm a bit surprised that little hay is made of the other problematic aspect of the guy -- he married, but left his wife Sonia Greene and daughter in New York to return to Providence, and we gather didn't contribute to their well-being. Lovecraft was a deadbeat dad!)
posted by JHarris at 11:45 AM on September 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


> Sometimes, isn't it serious though, languagehat? I think of Zero Dark Thirty, where I don't care how good it is; I fear it for what it does to the public psyche. [...] But when people start talking about "Going Jack Bauer on their asses" and stuff, don't you worry about the what art, or god save us, art-with-an-agenda does to the zeitgeist?

Sure, and sure. But I'm not talking about "sometimes" or Jack Bauer, I'm talking about this specific instance and too many like it, where people use the sometimes-valid "this can be bad in the real world" rejection reflex to dump on perfectly harmless and enjoyable things like Ghostbusters.

And even the "sometimes" is rarer than people tend to think. Yeah, I don't like the hey-torture-is-unpleasant-but-it-works meme that's been disfiguring pop culture for a while now, and I think it can have real-world consequences, but that's not a valid template for everything else, any more than WWII (one of those rare wars that almost everyone agrees was justified) is a template for every goddam military adventure they want to push on us. I really, really dislike using political correctness as a weapon against art.

> I certainly wouldn't blame someone for rejecting Lovecraft because of his racist attitudes (any more than I would blame someone for dismissing Ghostbusters for political reasons); I haven't chosen to do that, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid choice.

I don't know what you mean by "valid choice." I mean, sure, I'm OK you're OK, however you want to view art and life is OK so long as you don't frighten the horses. But no, I don't think it's valid in any more meaningful sense to reject art for political reasons. I think Ezra Pound was a great poet despite his fascism and Hemingway was a great fiction writer despite his sexism and bullying and I think people who reject their art because of their politics (rather than because they simply don't like their writing) are fools. And I think that's one of the defining foolishnesses of our age. Is it better than the routine racism and sexism of earlier times? Without question. That doesn't keep it from being foolish.
posted by languagehat at 1:06 PM on September 14, 2014 [6 favorites]


(I'm a bit surprised that little hay is made of the other problematic aspect of the guy -- he married, but left his wife Sonia Greene and daughter in New York to return to Providence, and we gather didn't contribute to their well-being. Lovecraft was a deadbeat dad!)

This is really getting into derail territory, but Greene's daughter (by her first husband) was in her mid-20s (and already a) employed as journalist and b) on poor terms with her mother) by the time that Greene and Lovecraft married, and it wasn't so much that Lovecraft left Greene, but that she moved to Cleveland to open a business and, after they spent the better part of a year trying a long-distance marriage, Lovecraft would not move west and Greene couldn't move to Providence (since his remaining family wouldn't have tolerated a "tradeswoman" in the family). There's enough things to hang on Lovecraft; this one is kind of excessive.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:30 PM on September 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


To get to back to my original derail, I cite Peter Watts because I see a lot of similarities in his stories to Lovecraft's cosmic horror: humanity- and perhaps biology itself- is doomed by its own nature, the world is coldly mechanicalistic and nihilist, and the author himself is a strident anti-theist atheist. As with Lovecraft, humanity becomes more amoral, ruthless, and degraded: "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy."

Except instead of alien gods beyond our comprehension, Watts' outside context problems are based on actual speculative science and with enough basis in existing research that his endnotes dwarf thes ones in Michael Crichton's techno-thrillers from yesteryear. But his works still trade in similar themes to Lovecraft's work- dehumanization, madness, and even body horror. I don't know if Peter Watts will become as genre-defining as Lovecraft will be, but I haven't seen anyone author take the same approach to "the Singularity is coming but the human condition will still really suck" as viscerally as he does. Maybe role-playing games such as Eclipse Phase.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:47 PM on September 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


I don't know what you mean by "valid choice." I mean, sure, I'm OK you're OK, however you want to view art and life is OK so long as you don't frighten the horses. But no, I don't think it's valid in any more meaningful sense to reject art for political reasons.

I dunno, I think there are a variety of reasons to "reject art" for political reasons. If the artist is still alive, you could reasonably not want to support them by buying their art. You could find their themes or characters off-putting enough that you legitimately don't enjoy their work. You could find those same themes or characters or settings triggering, so you don't want to experience their viewpoint. All of those are reasons why someone might not want to interact with the work of an artist whose politics are opposed to theirs. We all have finite time on earth, and there is more art than any of us can watch or read or listen to, why should anyone be forced to read, say, Lovecraft or Hemingway or watch Ghostbusters or Rosemary's Baby, if they find the experience unpleasant?

Now, if you make that decision, you are limiting yourself. If you don't read Lovecraft, you are going to be unable to discuss horror/weird fiction fully. If you avoid Chinatown, you can't talk about certain aspects of cinema. If the texts or films are required for a class you are taking, you risk earning a lower grade, and so on. But I don't think people should be castigated for making their reading decisions based on their personal beliefs.

I don't read Card. I find his politics deplorable and his writing pretty mediocre (yes, even Ender's Game). I don't agree with Kenneth Hite's politics, but he writes a mean game system, so I tolerate him (even if I roll my eyes at many of his "Ken's Time Machine" segments on his podcast), so I keep reading his work because it brings me more pleasure than irritation. Everyone is making these sorts of judgement calls all the time.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:50 PM on September 14, 2014 [6 favorites]


Oh! GenjiandProust, I was actually completely mistaken there! Mea culpa.
posted by JHarris at 2:17 PM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


> I dunno, I think there are a variety of reasons to "reject art" for political reasons. If the artist is still alive, you could reasonably not want to support them by buying their art. You could find their themes or characters off-putting enough that you legitimately don't enjoy their work. You could find those same themes or characters or settings triggering, so you don't want to experience their viewpoint. All of those are reasons why someone might not want to interact with the work of an artist whose politics are opposed to theirs.

Sure, that's all fair enough. Obviously I have strong feelings on this subject, but I can appreciate different takes on it.
posted by languagehat at 4:10 PM on September 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


But no, I don't think it's valid in any more meaningful sense to reject art for political reasons.

That position itself is a political stance. Especially when it boils down to "Those people who want to bring the politics of the creators front and center should just shut up.".

And removing the politics of creators just leads to completely shallow readings of art. Like looking at Goya's "The Third of May and waiting "Uh, there's some people shooting other people...so I guess that's bad, maybe? Oh but hey, the technique is pretty vibrant, I guess."

Take the whole thing about the end of Shadow over Innesmouth turning from horror to wonder, etc.. It was actually very clearly explicating the "One Drop" law in literary form. If you have one ancestor, no matter how far back that was a monster (read, non-white), then you are a monster, and that cursed bloodline will inevitably take control. Which is the final horror of the story, but a source if wonder. Ignore that highly political, very real-world context, and you end up with a conclusion of "Oh, I guess he's one of them for some reason, and mother forgives him, so uh, yay?".

Lovecraft is best understood in context of his massive racism and xenophobia. Frankly, the insistence that it should be just enjoyed context free I find disturbing, though it fits very much into the culture of classic SF fandom.
posted by happyroach at 6:27 PM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


That position itself is a political stance. Especially when it boils down to "Those people who want to bring the politics of the creators front and center should just shut up.".

Hold it now, no one's said that this thread, that I've seen. My own complaint was how sometimes it seems threads about Lovecraft become just about his politics. There's a world of difference there.

Take the whole thing about the end of Shadow over Innesmouth turning from horror to wonder, etc.. It was actually very clearly explicating the "One Drop" law in literary form. If you have one ancestor, no matter how far back that was a monster (read, non-white), then you are a monster, and that cursed bloodline will inevitably take control.

Hm. I'm not sure this is accurate, other Deep One hybrids never take to the seas, I'm fairly sure this was explicated in the story, although I might be getting roleplaying material mixed up with it. And our hero is one of the hybrids who shows the least, we are given to understand.

Lovecraft is best understood in context of his massive racism and xenophobia.

There's a lot more going on there, although that context is important. But there is more, and thus not every Lovecraft thread has to be only about his racism and xenophobia.
posted by JHarris at 6:36 PM on September 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Take the whole thing about the end of Shadow over Innesmouth turning from horror to wonder, etc.. It was actually very clearly explicating the "One Drop" law in literary form.

That's certainly part of the zeitgeist, but the peculiar thing about Lovecraft… very well, one of the many peculiar things about Lovecraft is that although his protagonists are typically authorial stand-ins, their worldview is always shaken to core after their encounters, along with their sanity. Anglo-Saxon racial superiority is never really a match for assorted eldritch gods and their minions in his stories. In the case of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", HPL's narrator-counterpart's final revelation of his "Deep One" heritage was partly inspired by his own genealogical discovery that his great-grandmother was, as he put it, a "Welsh gentlewoman of unmixed Celtick blood". This was a blow to his self-inflated identity as a blue-blooded New Englander, but one from which he psychologically recovered. Although "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" unquestionably has a racist component, the sense of horror at that story's close is complicated by the narrator looking forward to dwelling "amidst wonder and glory for ever". It's not exactly the literary immortality Lovecraft might have hoped for at one point, but it's not bad for a crackpot pulp writer.
posted by Doktor Zed at 7:00 PM on September 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


My apologies for going on about this decidedly flawed writer who has somehow found such popularity on the 'net, especially when this thread could be devoted to quoting memorable lines from Ghostbusters. ("Sorry, I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.") I suppose I feel somewhat indebted to him for presenting my adolescent self with an obvious example of a racist mindset via a medium already primed for a horrified reaction but without the cultural respectability that might make it seem excusable. It's far more difficult, say, to tease out T. S. Elliot's xenophobia from oblique allusions in his poetry or to determine where exactly Shakespeare's Shylock lies on the scale of anti-semitism compared to Marlowe's Jew of Malta than to recognize the limits of the Lovecraftian worldview.
posted by Doktor Zed at 7:53 PM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Eh, I think casting Lovecraft a crackpot is a bit unfair.

Lovecraft was less of a crackpot than most of his fellow pulp writers. He was an autodidact (I can't offhand remember if he actually finished high school or not) who took a keen interest in most of the sciences of his day. Last summer I read an amusing exchange in the letters to the editor section of the Providence Journal between a late-teens Lovecraft and an "inventor" with some interesting ideas about chemistry and pressure. Lovercraft the junior skeptic came out pretty well. Lovecraft had a lot of opinions, which he shrouded in a cloak of borrowed erudition and he lectured his friends rather tediously in his letters (and, I assume, in person) but he was also friendly and generous as he could be, a man of genuine kindness and eagerness to learn. If tendentious pedantry is a crime, your Honor, will any of MetaFilter escape incarceration?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:57 AM on September 15, 2014 [4 favorites]


languagehat >

This is one of the things I like least about MetaFilter: it doesn't matter how funny or well done something is, if it's ideologically suspect it must be chastised and rejected.

I think this is partially a function of awareness about the fact that culture and social mores are contingent and historical, which is an idea whose apparent popularity makes sense in an educated and mostly liberal enclave like metafilter.
posted by clockzero at 10:32 AM on September 16, 2014


> I think this is partially a function of awareness about the fact that culture and social mores are contingent and historical

I'm intrigued but not clear on what you mean; could you expand a bit?
posted by languagehat at 12:46 PM on September 16, 2014


This is one of the things I like least about MetaFilter: it doesn't matter how funny or well done something is, if it's ideologically suspect it must be chastised and rejected.

It's not like the Right doesn't do its own form of ideological policing, except it's done under the banner of "traditional values" rather than "social justice". Political correctness has many flavors.

For what it's worth, Lovecraft didn't like Republicans in the end: "As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead." (Plus ça change...)

He wrote this in 1936, the year before his death at 46, when he had become a Roosevelt-supporting New Deal Democrat. Who knows how his views would have further changed over time?

(And why have I had to immerse myself in this author beyond my adolescent phase of horror fiction-consumption? Reader, I published him. Or rather, I helped acquire massmarket paperback reprint rights for a couple of lesser volumes of "collaborations and revisions" from Arkham House Publishers. Lovecraft, posthumously, sells.)
posted by Doktor Zed at 2:22 PM on September 16, 2014 [6 favorites]


Great quote. Plus ça change indeed.
posted by Trochanter at 6:15 PM on September 16, 2014


I've long known about Lovecraft's aversion to Republicans. He's was also no fan of organized religion. Except for the racism, he was pretty open-minded in general.
posted by JHarris at 2:28 AM on September 17, 2014


Many New Deal Democrats, Progressives, etc. were still quite racist, though.

Still, very interesting, thanks for the quote.

In conclusion, racism is a land of contrast.

...

I think this is partially a function of awareness about the fact that culture and social mores are contingent and historical, which is an idea whose apparent popularity makes sense in an educated and mostly liberal enclave like metafilter.


I'm not sure if I catch your meaning. I would think that this kind of understanding would necessarily lead to a much more complicated view of what to do with writers and works which contain objectionable material. Flat rejection wouldn't make much sense, especially in Lovecraft's case.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:11 AM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]


« Older If you can dream it, you can do it. But you have...   |   Radical Linguistics in an Age of Extinction Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments