Oh Dagon. I’ve seen that movie about six times by now, showing it to friends. When I have time, I’d like to start a thread in movies about Lovecraftian cinema, if there isn’t one already.
I, too, was planning to do my best to write something useful about my interpretation of Lovecraft when my ambitions were felled by Rizla’s post, which laid some of the most powerful attractions to the Cthulhu Mythos startlingly bare.
( Gibbering, descent into madness, shaky italics to describe the climax of my story, etc…)
But I'll go anyway.
I discovered Lovecraft in grade 10. Nostalgia mixed with an appreciation for some of what he was trying to do and even some affection for the quaintness of his tortured, antiquated prose makes me regard his work fondly. There will always be the wincing at the blatant racism and sexism, but it came from a neurotic, isolated man who was born in a time when it was all too common to speak and think that way. Not acceptable, but the origins are explainable.
The thing that really stood out when I first read Lovecraft was his distain for anthrocentric aliens. I was so grateful someone else thought martians as people with green skin, or anything remotely recognizable as a human being, were ridiculous serious guesses as to what extraterrestrials were like. Lovecraft’s utterly inhuman, often unfathomable creatures seemed to mock the idea of a unified type of life, that the universe would be a gently distorted mirror of earth and ourselves. His monsters felt so right*. You could believe in them.
Despite his "horrors hidden in the cosmos”, behind all of Lovecraft’s cosmic stories I always felt there was a buried sense of awe and wonder at the enormity of the universe. Lovecraft filled it with terrible creatures, but he also made it seem vast and mysterious. Capturing that feeling of being on the lip of the unknown. For me this is special, and precious, since very few other authors have been able to do that to my satisfaction.
Ironically, although Lovecraft talked about the terror of the unknown and used it often in his work, his stories made the unknown look absolutely fascinating and weird and exciting to me. I think it's a big reason for his enduring popularity.
*The only other big author I can think of who thoroughly rejects the idea of humanity being able to understand or even comprehend aliens and their cultures as a theme is Stanislaw Lem, which is one reason I’m so partial to his work as well. |
