H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos

[JD]

Yeah, it is kind of surprising we haven't seen more attempts at big budget Cthulu/Lovecraft movies.
We did get pretty close with the Tom Cruise starring, Guillermo Del Toro directed At The Mountains of Madness, but I don't know of any others of that caliber that have gotten that close to actually making it to theaters.
EDIT: Actually I just looked through the Wikipedia pages for GTD and ATMoM and it sounds like the movie was never officially canceled, so I guess there's a chance it might still get made........ someday.

 

[Gaith]

The trouble with Mountains as a feature is that there's stuff that happens, but not a lot of story. Antarctic scientists explore a long-dead civilization, deduce some of its history, see a few creatures, and run away from a monster. The End. In other words, lot like Prometheus minus the hunt for God/wanting more life/android who lives with his creators searching for their creators shadings. And the only substantive theme - gaze not into the Eldritch abyss; we're not ready or suited for its terrors - has been done hundreds of times, from Alien to Event Horizon and The Evil Dead to Sphere. It's all old news, much like John Carter was in 2012.

 

[Beagleman]

I don't get why At The Mountains of Madness hasn't been done yet it sounds like a great fit for an adaption (full disclosure, I've only read summaries, haven't gotten arround to it yet).

ETA: ninjad by Gaith, yeah the story as a whole seems not that deep but I think easy to flesh out. Then again I'm not really one to claim any authority here.

 

[Reverend]

The trouble with Mountains as a feature is that there's stuff that happens, but not a lot of story. Antarctic scientists explore a long-dead civilization, deduce some of its history, see a few creatures, and run away from a monster. The End. In other words, lot like Prometheus minus the hunt for God/wanting more life/android who lives with his creators searching for their creators shadings. And the only substantive theme - gaze not into the Eldritch abyss; we're not ready or suited for its terrors - has been done hundreds of times, from Alien to Event Horizon and The Evil Dead to Sphere. It's all old news, much like John Carter was in 2012.

The same could be said for most of HPL's works. It's pretty much all heavy on the internal monologing about brain-freezing psychological terror and light on plot.

There was this video game some years back that had what I thought was a very ingenious solution, which was to smoosh several HLP stories into one cohesive narrative. IIRC the core of it is the same basic plot from 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' but with the protagonist substituted by the guy from 'The Shadow Out of Time'.
I do sometimes wonder if something similar could be done with 'At The Mountains of Madness'. Combine it with 'The Call of Cthulhu' maybe? Or perhaps 'The Whisperer in Darkness' crossed with 'The Dunwich Horror'? Or better yet, an anthology tv show that strings a lot of these stores together in a quasi-X-Files style 1920 period piece?

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

Or better yet, an anthology tv show that strings a lot of these stores together in a quasi-X-Files style 1920 period piece?

I would very much like to watch that show.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Hah! I'd love that.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Or just adapt the Laundry Files by Charles Stross...

The Laundry Files are a series of science fiction spy thrillers written by British writer Charles Stross. The series main character is Bob Howard, a one-time I.T. consultant, now field agent working for British government agency The Laundry which deals with occult threats. The books are influenced by Lovecraft's visions of the future, and set in a world where a computer and the right mathematical equations is just as useful a toolset for calling up horrors from other dimensions as a spellbook and a pentagram on the floor.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

It wasn't just Lovecraft. In general, there seems to have been a resurgence of interest in that whole Weird Tales generation of writers--Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, etc.--back in the seventies, which is when they first started getting reprinted in cheap, mass-market paperback editions.

As I understand it, prior to that, Lovecraft (and Howard) could only be found in limited editions published by small specialty presses--or in moldering back issues of old pulp magazines read only by the most avid collectors. But then mass-market paperback publishing discovered Lovercraft and Co. and suddenly you could pick up cheap paperback editions of Lovecraft at your neighborhood drug store or mall, which must of sold well enough to justify even more such collections.

Not sure what was the chicken and what was the egg here. Did the explosion of paperbacks make Lovecraft more popular, or did we get all the paperbacks because Lovecraft was growing more popular? Or was it just that the folks who grew up reading his work in the thirties eventually ended running publishing companies in the seventies and were in a position to reprint their old favorites?

Along the same lines, the reason you're seeing a lot more Lovecraft today is probably because those of us who discovered him in the seventies, devouring all those old paperback collections at an impressionable age, are now old enough to be writing and editing our own books, making our own movies, creating our own games and comics, resulting in a newer and bigger wave of Lovecraftian material.

It's a slo-motion, generational avalanche, growing and gathering speed.

I think that Stephen King had something to do with it as well. He has always been a big HPL fan and talked him up quite a bit.

 

[JD]

It sounds like HP Lovecraft's stuff might be one of those things where it might be better to adapt his ideas and concepts rather than directly adapting the stories themselves.

 

[Reverend]

It sounds like HP Lovecraft's stuff might be one of those things where it might be better to adapt his ideas and concepts rather than directly adapting the stories themselves.

Pretty much. His strength was is atmosphere, suspense and outlandish imagination. Most of his protagonists were essentially a variation on the same bland, stuffy middle-aged white academic type. None of them really stand out and the one or two times he actually tried to write action it just came off as an untended parody.

Still, I've often found it disappointing that most of the attempts at adapting his works have focused more on the mystery/implied horror side and less on the cosmic elder god craziness. It's pretty much the main reason I wanted to see GMT adapt 'At The Mountain's of Madness' since he has a real talent for wild visuals and imaginative creature design. Hell, he actually gave an Elder Thing a few cameos in Hellboy II and it looked fantastic!

 

[Silvercrest]

The trouble with Mountains as a feature is that there's stuff that happens, but not a lot of story. Antarctic scientists explore a long-dead civilization, deduce some of its history, see a few creatures, and run away from a monster. The End. In other words, lot like Prometheus minus the hunt for God/wanting more life/android who lives with his creators searching for their creators shadings. And the only substantive theme - gaze not into the Eldritch abyss; we're not ready or suited for its terrors - has been done hundreds of times, from Alien to Event Horizon and The Evil Dead to Sphere. It's all old news, much like John Carter was in 2012.

I once wrote a version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" in Lovecraft style.

 

[Greg Cox]

I once sold an alternate history story where HPL became the editor of Weird Tales and lived a much longer and happier life.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I once wrote a version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" in Lovecraft style.

With Goldilocks as the eldritch horror, I hope?

 

[RJDiogenes]

Rapunzel would make a good eldritch horror.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Or Snow White, whose voice exerts mind-control influence over hapless dwarfs and creatures of the forest to form an invincible army.

 

[Reverend]

Well if that's the direction we're going in, surely a Little Mermaid/Innsmouth crossover is a no-brainer, yes?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Well if that's the direction we're going in, surely a Little Mermaid/Innsmouth crossover is a no-brainer, yes?

Genius

 

[Steve Roby]

I'm going to have to try not to go on too long here. A lot of Lovecraft's 1970s revival is due to Lin Carter, who edited Ballantine's Adult Fantasy line in the 1960s and '70s. Before 1977, fantasy was an obscure publishing niche genre. There were books for kids, like Narnia, and there was Lord of the Rings, a series of Conan books, and that was pretty much it. Carter brought back into print some classic material and published some new stuff. He also published some nonfiction books, like Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, and Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, some Lovecraft collections, etc. (In 1977 Ballantine launched the Del Rey line with the specific intent of making fantasy a big deal; they launched with the Star Wars tie-in edition and The Sword of Shannara. It worked.)

So Lin Carter was publishing Lovecraft in paperback and pushing him to fantasy readers looking for more by mentioning him in his Tolkien book. Meanwhile, Conan was becoming a big deal in paperback and comic form, and the introductions to some of the Conan books mentioned Lovecraft as one of Robert E. Howard's fellow Weird Tales writers. Heavy Metal, the "adult illustrated fantasy magazine," did a Lovecraft special in 1979, and other comics and magazines had done Lovecraft here and there. There were more and more references to Lovecraft popping up.

The single biggest push probably came with the Call of Cthulhu game in the 1980s, which brought in a lot of new fans. Chaosium also started a long line of Lovecraftian anthologies.

It used to be easy to buy and read everything Lovecraftian. Not now. With small presses and self-publishers and ebooks, there's an endless torrent of material. There's been a lot of crap along the way (and on an uncharitable day I'd include the Fall of Cthuhu comics at that end of the spectrum), but also a lot of really good stuff.

But first, read Lovecraft. The prose may be a bit challenging. The racism certainly should be challenging; it's not just in him, it's explicit in some of the stories. Some young writers are tackling that head on in a variety of fascinating ways.

For a start on the people who've expanded on Lovecraft, try anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow or S.T. Joshi and take note of the writers whose stories you like. See also the Book of Cthulhu and New Cthulhu anthologies, they've got a lot of good stuff. The Chaosium anthologies are more for the hardcore fans.

There are also good fictional works that use Lovecraft as a character (Peter Cannon's The Lovecraft Chronicles, an alternate universe story; Jacqueline Baker's The Broken Hours, which is a little more difficult to describe without spoilers, but which was a really good read).

 

[Set Harth]

There were more and more references to Lovecraft popping up.

The single biggest push probably came with the Call of Cthulhu game in the 1980s, which brought in a lot of new fans. Chaosium also started a long line of Lovecraftian anthologies.

Also, Dungeons & Dragons mentioned his work in a few places, most notably in the hard-to-find original version of "Deities and Demigods" which contained a "Cthulhu Mythos" chapter.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

In the comics, Lovecraftian elements were introduced by Roy Thomas (the man who pushed Marvel into publishing Conan comics, a huge factor in the resurgence of Howard's work in the '70s) into the Strange Tales/Doctor Strange comics of the '60s & '70s.

In TV, Night Gallery featured a couple of Lovecraft adaptations.

Both of these could've helped generate awareness of Lovecraft in the public conciousness (though it may be overstating the popularity of the Doctor Strange comic for that time ).