Lovecraft Mythos - Cosmic Horror

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17757029

Lovecraft’s lengthy body of work continues to terrify people of our time as much as it did his contemporaries, and has successfully crossed over to the world of cinema and even video games. There are many excellent video games which have been inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, some whose inspiration you might not even be aware of, so let’s look at the best of them...

Hallowe’en in a Suburb
By H. P. Lovecraft

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penn’d,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

Video - Read by Moose Matson

Movie on Vimeo

An Eldritch Place is a short film directed by Julien Jauniaux, released in 2016. This Belgian production steeps in the themes of Lovecraftian horror, exploring the boundaries of sanity and the unknown.

Abdel, takes a job as a night watchman for a man named Francis. As he settles into his role, Abdel uncovers an unsettling secret that challenge his perception of reality and sanity.

imdb.com/title/tt5686360

starring : Habib Ben Tanfous / Ludovic Philips / Florence Guillaume editor : Océane Yvert music : Sarah Boom cinematographer : Elodie Drion sound recordist : Lucas Lecomte sound design : Benoit Charron / Jérémy Bocquet creature design & SFX : Alexandre Dorlet / Jake Kokot from the Proteus Workshop colour grading & VFX : Julien Jauniaux

writer & director : Julien Jauniaux

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1224100

I love the colors and the glowing eyes

artstation | website

Asperitas Walkers

"Silverfish"

Eldritch Mermaid

Mother Wake

Elder Star

I moved into a creepy old house earlier this year, and now I'm super excited to decorate it for Halloween. I'm looking for some Lovecraft inspired Halloween decorations. I was thinking about for instance writing "Cthulu fhtagn" on the wall in fake blood, maybe like a pentagram. But I'm looking for better ideas too. So I figured, where better to ask than here. Bonus points if it's hacked together on a shoestring budget.

Respectfully yours, Bizzle

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20023406

Video on YT

Out of Mind casts an entertaining eye on the work of American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), one of the early 20th century’s masters of gothic-horror literature. Made for Canadian television in 1998, the film offers an encounter with Lovecraft and enters into his world. Engaging in a kind of game around the writer, the film playfully winks at some of the themes characteristic of his work: the occult, cursed books, monstrous creatures. Out of Mind draws its inspiration from Lovecraft’s personal correspondence and many of his stories, carrying the viewer through a labyrinth “beyond the wall of sleep”.

Director, screenwriter: Raymond St-Jean Producer: Michel Ouellette Director of Photography: Serge Ladouceur Editor: Philippe Ralet Music: Gaëtan Gravel, Serge Laforest (Gemini award for best original music) Production designer: Sylvain Gingras Costume Designer: Linda Brunelle Makeup Designer: Florence Cornet Cast: Christopher Heyerdahl, Art Kitching, Pierre Leblanc, Peter Farbridge, Michael Sinelnikoff

Can't post all the panels (limit of weight or smthing🤷‍♀️) you can find the full comics here:

https://www.deviantart.com/signerjarts/art/The-North-Sea-Crone-1-7-947751086

Short comic about a fishing village and its resident eldritch entity

bonus art

Lyrics:

I hath dreamed bleak and grim, desolate visions
Of the pre-human serpent volk
And communed with long-dead reptiles
Silently watching through the ages in cold, curious apathy
The unending sorrows and suffering of an abysmal humankind

I dare not again surrender to the deep sleep which ever beckons me
Lest I in dread
Shudder at the nameless things
That may at this very moment
Be crawling and lurking
At the slimy edges of my consciousness
Slithering forth from the bowels of their infernal pits
Worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses
On subterranean obelisks of blood-soaked granite

I await the day when the claws of doom shall rise
To drag down in their reeking talons the weary
And hopeless remnants of a jaded, decayed, war-despairing mankind
Of a day when the earth shall open wide
And the black, bottomless, yawning abyss engulfs the arrogant civilizations of man
Chthonic retribution shall ascend
Amidst universal pandemonium and those who slither and crawl
Shall rise again once more to inherit the earth

Liner notes (Nile is known for how comprehensive they can be):

H.P. Lovecraft was one of the most influential authors or horror stories of the last century. The last few decades have seen Lovecraft’s rise from a forgotten author of phantasmagoric pulp magazine fiction to a subject of serious academic study. (A second major biography has recently appeared.)

Lovecraft’s influence on other writers in the horror genre has been significant. His writing is considered to be seminal, and it still exerts a powerful influence on artists and film makers. A distinctive feature of Lovecraft’s ficton that sets it apart from that of many writers in the genre is his construction, as he wrote, of a “background of consistent and elaborate pseudo-myth”. Thus, his invention of the ultimate grimoire – the Necronomicon – was an important part of his fictional modus operandi.

Lovecraft first referred to the Necronomicon in 1922 in his short story “The Hound”. (“The Hound” was later collected in the volume Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, which was published by Arkham House in 1965.) He would refer to the Necronomicon in several other stories. A circle of writers who were friends and correspondents with Lovecraft also started referring to the Necronomicon in their horror tales, which in turn solidified its “existence”. The fact that they would refer to the Necronomicon along with actual books dealing with witchcraft and demonology helped to sell the illusion. Inspired by Lovecraft’s lead, this literary “circle” also invented arcane and “forbidden” texts: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Book of Eibon, Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and Robert Bloch’s Cultes de Goules and De Vermis Mysteriis were all forbidden books invented to add further depth to their spine-tingling tales of horror. The “Lovecraft Circle’s” practice of inventing “forbidden books” is very well documented. Not only did they “invent” such books, they even went to great lengths to create bogus histories, which only added to the illusion of their existence.

Robert E. Howard first introduced Nameless Cults through his story “The Children of the Night” (1931). In 1932, Lovecraft came up with a German title for it – Ungenennte Heidenthume. Several of Lovecraft’s correspondents balked at this unwieldy title. August Derleth came up with the title Unaussprechlichen Kulten, which stuck, despite the fact that this more literally means “Unpronounceable Cults”: “Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten” or “Unaussprechliche Kulten” would be more correct. The reason for this debate amongst the circle of authors is clear – the German is technically incorrect. The adjective would end in -e for the indefinite plural, not an -n, to with: Unaussprechliche Kulte… If we wish to accept “Nameless Cults” as being the correct wording for an English translation, we would have to accept “Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten” as being the real German title of the work. The addition of the “Von” also allows us to keep the -n ending (perhaps even more appropriate would have been “Die Namenlosen Kulte”). In any case, although Lovecraft doesn’t mention this forbidden text any more than he does others, but he does give its publication “history” in the story “Out of the Aeons”:

“… a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt’s horrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable significance. At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy were exceedingly few; copies having been incredible scarce in the interval between the suppression of the original Düsseldorf edition (1839) and of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the expurgates reprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909.”

According to surviving correspondence from Robert Howard to Lovecraft:

“1839: Unaussprechlichen Kulten was published in Düsseldorf. Written by Friedrich von Junzt [read Necronomicon in Greek translation]. Von Junzt dies six months after returning from trip to Mongolia while working on second book. Less than a dozen copies exist of this edition. Von Junzt relates many stories of the survivals of cults worshipping pre-human entities or prehistoric gods, such as Ghatanothoa, Bran, and others. The principle obscurity of this book is in Von Junzt’s use of the term "keys” – phrase used many times by him, in various relations, such as descriptions of the infamous Black Stone in Hungary and the legendary Temple of the Toad in Honduras."

Now, where all this dusty old literary shenanigans takes a more Nile-relevant turn of events… As I was working on this song “Unaussprechlichen Kulten” and driving myself nuts trying to figure out whether to stick with the original Lovecraft variant of the title or the more correct linguistic one, I got a call from Orion Landau (Relapse’s resident graphics genius).

Orion, at the time was working on the cover for my “Saurian Meditation” side project. He contacted me for a quote that he could use for the CD layout relating to the album’s theme. I was compelled to reply, “Oh, yeah sure” (as if there was some book on my shelf ready-made with authentic quotes concerning reptilian meditative states), but on the other end of the phone sat stark silence. In that pregnant moment of silence, a thunderbolt struck me, as I had, of course, been working on the Nile song gathering as much information that I could find on the much-vaunted “Unaussprechlichen Kulten”. I laughed, and said, “What the heck. Sure, I’ll send a quote over. No problem.” So, with Lovecraftian invention, I fashioned a fictitious quote (from the fictitious Von Junzt) from his fictitious Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

It worked so well that I went ahead and blew it up into a full-blown song. After “Saurian Meditation” came out, I got a rash of e-mails wanting to know where they could obtain a copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, as they had, of course, been unable to locate any of the supposedly existing copies. Try as I might to convince these insistent folks of the truth, they were steadfast in the conviction that the quotes were indeed authentic. Although I denied owning any such book, in their minds I was merely lying to them. They thought I was keeping the dreaded, “legendary” tome to myself. One of them, an obviously bright and thoroughly versed literary student from East Germany (who I will respectfully name here only as “Torsten”), was adamant on the subject, as he had managed to find an empty catalog reference (with the volume long missing from a library shelf in Prague) to an unrelated work by a German author of the same period (Hamburg, 1837) with a very similar name, Frederick von Juntz. In my mind, this coincidence only underscores the incredible, timeless power of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, and the ingenious way his fantastic stories continue to exert their mysterious, otherworldly power.

Eldritch horror, monsters, Cthulhu…These are the associations that spring to mind in discussions about Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The author is predominantly known for his distinctive and atmospheric horror stories – often referred to as Lovecraftian horror – which centre on the existential dread provoked by the vastness of the universe and cosmic insignificance.

(...) Lovecraft’s literary philosophy, cosmicism, emerges from his deep exploration of astronomy. Cosmicism fundamentally embraces posthumanist ideals in emphasising humanity’s insignificance in a vast cosmos, a theme vividly embodied in Lovecraft’s weird fiction. As he states: “It is man’s relation to the cosmos–to the unknown–which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.” (Lovecraft in Joshi 2013, 686) (...)

"We wrapped recording on Lovecraft Investigations 4 on Wednesday evening, and it all went very well indeed. We spent five fun-filled days on location in a (REALLY) remote house in the countryside, which gave us pretty much every sound environment we needed.

Most of the familiar faces were there, alongside some new people - we're introducing a couple of major new characters this time around. There were also, unfortunately, a few notable absences.

Now we're into the edit, which also involves cutting down each episode for the Radio 4 slots (BBC Sounds and the podcast apps will carry the full versions, which will include a whole story strand that will be absent from the Radio 4 broadcast).

We're expecting the series to be released in October and I'm teasing a major new story for Season 5, but we won't know for a while if we're getting the go-ahead on that from the BBC..."

New Lovecraftian FPS in Decadent. Developed by Incantation Games, Decadent is described as a story-driven first-person shooter that “combines atmospheric exploration, Lovecraftian horror and combat into an immersive experience.”

Decadent tells the tale of one John Lorn, a royal explorer and World War 1 veteran turned occultist. To make things even more interesting, as a result of a traumatic experience during his occult research, Lorn has become the host for a strange parasite. Lorn has traveled to the to the Arctic to follow the traces of a lost Miskatonic University expedition. At the same time, he’s also on a mission to save his estranged son. In doing so, his courage and sanity are pushed to the limit, and learn how much grief he is ready to cause in order to save someone he holds dear.

You’ll have at your disposal exotic weapons and special items, such as conventional 1920’s firearms to hexed pistols given occult properties, strange artifacts, and even alien bio-weapons. You’ll also be able to scavenge and customize your arsenal. You’ll need them as you venture into lightless forests, frozen tundras, underground lakes, timeless necropoli and more in your frantic journey to a land beyond all reason. (...)

TEASER

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/spooktober-carol-its-beginning-to-look-lot-like-fish-men-UzaNmbe#/t/eldritch_horror

Song by Andrew Leman and Sean Branney from the album "A Very Scary Solstice" Original fan video by haakor https://youtu.be/3tTHn2tHhcI

Above edit by @YouTubeRed at https://imgur.com/gallery/LGlgvHz

wikiart.org | more works

Zdzisław Beksiński (February 24, 1929 – February 21, 2005) was a prominent Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor, renowned for his work in dystopian surrealism. Born in Sanok, Poland, he initially studied architecture at the Kraków Polytechnic, graduating in 1952. Despite his formal education, Beksiński had no traditional training in art and began his artistic career in the mid-1950s, focusing on painting, photography, and sculpture

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19125777

Lovecraft’s Untold Stories is an action roguelike with RPG elements.

"DwC talks to Richard Stanley. This is big. This is awesome. For those who are unfamiliar, Richard Stanley is the man behind the 1990 steam-punk cult classic, Hardware, the 1992 hallucinatory fever dream, Dust Devil, and 2019’s gloriously psychedelic, Color Out of Space...

While attending the Rhode Island Film Festival, Stanley announced that he was getting back into the director’s chair for an adaption of another beloved H.P. Lovecraft tale, The Dunwich Horror, a delightfully twisted yarn that sees the evil “wizard” Whately make a deal with a malevolent deity, receiving a lifetime of riches in exchange for offering up his own daughter to bear the offspring of this being.

That offspring, Wilbur, is a half-human, half-deity whose purpose is to bring about the destruction of mankind and make way for the return of “the Old Ones.” But Wilbur also had a twin brother, the titular Dunwich Horror. After Wilbur is killed trying to steal the infamous Necronomicon, this twin brother, who much more closely resembles their father, escapes and wreaks havoc upon the unsuspecting populace of Dunwich. It’s a fantastic story.

Fresh from his trip to Rhode Island to scout filming locations and attend the film festival, I was lucky enough to have a brief conversation with Richard about his upcoming film, Dunwich…"

YT video / Link Invidious

Short film adapted from Lin Carter's poem "The King In Tatters", set in the mythic world of Carcosa, where Hastur is the King In Yellow. Mix of stop-motion animation and live action.

Creator website: http://loneanimator.blogspot.com/2016/11/carcosa-project-finished-film.html