Cult horror writer H. P. Lovecraft visits the British supermarket Asda. It's like Walmart, except you can't buy live ammunition. Happy Halloween*! *A kind of spooky Michaelmas.
He was probably lost in morbid and desolate thought as he meandered in his garden, and only realized he’d entered into a market once he noticed the lack of black cats and mausoleums around him.
Lovecraft loved travelling. He went on many trips around New England, as well as rambling through Providence and other ancient towns (ancient in the American sense, that is)
@@anthonyguter But he didn’t travel the world, and he was virulently xenophobic. He never even made it to England, which he considered to be the most cultured land and society.
@@timopper5488 I've never made it to England, and have never had someone call me xenophobic because of it. And, of course, commercial airlines did not exist then - it would be a long boat ride.
The fact that he described regular penguins as "grotesque" in Mountains of Madness is the thing I tend to bring up when when trying to explain that Lovecraft was afraid of everything he wasn't familiar with.
My favourite example of this is the story in which he describes an alien city being overrun by monstrous yellow creatures, only to reveal at the end that they're just eskimos
I think he was a lot more complex than people give him credit for- he travelled around quite a bit, and moved many times. His worst really racist stuff that few people have probably read(I listened to a lot of his older stuff in a compilation edition audibook) was pretty extreme. "It turned out, HIS ANCESTOR WAS BLACK!" and thats the whole premise. His later stuff is honestly very tame- Haitians performing wudu-sacrifice, but with people instead of chickens and goats, and the magic being real pretty much. Historically human sacrifice for wudu was a thing in Dahomey around the early 1900s, so the source material is there too.
IRL H.P. Lovecraft tried to enlist in the U.S. expeditionary force in WWI; he wrote he hoped to be dispatched quickly by a stray bullet or piece of shrapnel. His application was approved, but subsequently rejected on medical grounds after his mother ran in and convinced the recruiting physician that Lovecraft was a medical invalid. There was probably a lot going on in his family that we'll never know about for sure
@@deadNightwatchman you can tell that it's real because he signed the letters “-Thy honorable servant, Grandpa Theodophus. PS I definitely contain no Welsh!”
It's true. HP gets a lot of hate for being racist, which he definitely was when he was younger, but as he got older his racism turned to tolerance, and he had a lot of regrets about his previous feelings. It's a shame he died so young because I think had he lived into his 70's or 80's he would have probably been able to move past that legacy he seems remembered for.
Or at the very least, the friends we made along the way were strictly writing correspondents residing far from Providence, in lands foreign, bleak, and insidiously oppressive, like the wan moon when a dark storm overtakes it.
In retrospect, reading the collected works of Lovecraft while literally committed in a psych ward was one of the odder decisions of my life. Fun, though.
I liked "The Sandwich Horror". Right up there with ""At the Mountains of Glad Bags", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep Aids", "The Reduced Price Meat Out of Time", "The Price-Quest of Unmarked Candy", "Herbert West - Tinned Salmon" and "The Call of Clean-Up on Aisle 6".
Folks laugh at and mock, but how many "real horror stories" have you read that can be summed up as "I met a weird person and immediately assumed the worst."
@@remobothic One time a huge man with filthy dreadlocks sat down next to me at a bar, wearing a tattered leather jacket, ripped biker gloves stained with blood, what seemed to be a gunshot scar on his arm, a knife clearly holstered in his belt. After I started talking to him it turns out he was just dressed as a character from a post-apocalyptic novel and coming back from a sci-fi con, and he gave me a copy of one of his comic books he'd written.
@@remobothic Is there no middle ground between assuming the best and assuming the worst of everyone you meet? I normally start with a neutral opinion of people and form my judgement based on what they do or say from there, but is that against the rules?
@@sernoddicusthegallant6986 It's not unreasonable to make basic judgements about people you see based on their appearances and behaviors. Best not to interact with strangers who are visibly on drugs in public, for example.
Lovecraft wrote extensively about how fear of the unknown is the root of cosmic horror. The man was well aware that he was afraid of things he didn’t understand (like math). It’s the basis of all his writing, just like how loss is the basis of Edgar Allen Poe’s writing.
Funny thing about the ending is that one of Lovecraft's favorite meals was spaghetti Bolognese, which he expressed in a letter to a friend. The guy hated Italians but loved Italian food.
@Пётр Бойков Yeah like we can believe slavs need eradication and still enjoy... Imperialism? Rape? Genocide? Landgrabbing? Serfdom? Oh wait, Soviet music!
@@ahumanistpotato It's pretty easy actually; most of it can be simply scripted and automated. Better to report the whole thing rather than engaging, though. :)
Lovecraft is a fellow to pity more then hate. His father "went mad" when he was young, his mother was both smothering and emotionally abusive up until she "went mad" as well when he was a teenager. He spent the rest of his life convinced it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened to him. He projected that internal fear out onto everything and everyone around him. He had an entire network of penpals later in life, which helped him start to open up, and even began to make him openly regret his earlier, more extreme works. Alas, he died before anything could be made of those growing feelings.
'Tis a pity indeed. But coincidentally all that harrowing misery, crippling fear and queer close-mindedness in his transitory existence was also an irrevocably necessary conconction for us to have "Lovecraftian Horror" at all.
I've never seen any reason to hate him, he was racist at a time when almost everyone was, you shouldn't hate someone for the social norms of their time. You should hate them if they keep doing it after society has moved on.
@@krashd| I'm afraid Lovecraft was a raging bigot even by his era's standards. The man was working with archaic English-styled racism, you see. Where skin colour was coupled with "good breeding" to discriminate against more-or-less everyone outside of an extremely small margin. He expressed this rabid distrust of more-or-less everyone in his early works, and my GOD is it extreme. Keep in mind this was a man who had a paranoid distrust of air conditioners when they started showing up in homes. Just imagine the sort of insane stuff such a neurotic mind would come up with when writing about actual people?
Interesting to know the guy who wrote such terrifying stories as “The Dunwich Horror” and “Shadow over Insmouth” would cower in fear if he saw a meatball
How about visiting an ASDA in a different town. Only 2 hours parking?! Where are the toilets?! Where do they keep the eggs?! Where is the *REDUCED AISLE?!*
But what if _you're_ the only one who thinks the layout has been switched around, and everyone else considers it just fine, or that 'it's always been this way, hasn't it?' Now, that's cosmic horror fuel.
I saw a flapping in the rafters yore, it was a pigeon came in the door, Flapping high above aisle four, where the beer and gin is stored. From Poe's "The Pigeon"
I am astounded at the number of tiny little references and nods to Lovecraft and his work you crammed into less than 40 seconds. Impressive and very funny!
Rather sad though, "big box" stores like Walmart shouldn't exist in the first place. They've killed countless tens of thousands of small, family-owned, local businesses and half their employees don't even speak English. It's the worst of capitalism and scourge to any community it digs its claws into.
@@TheDJEON Also classist. Being Irish was as bad as being Italian or black to ol' HP. Love his stuff tho. I guess it takes a truly crazy motherfucker to come up with some of that stuff.
@@matthewblunndel185 To be fair, there's a good chance he didn't name that particular cat, as he was a child and it was a family pet (likely named by his uncle), and he never had another cat as a pet after that IIRC. That said, this doesn't excuse the fact that he kept using that name as a nickname for other black cats (including infamously naming one in a story as an homage) long after he should have known better. Not defending him, for the record, but I feel like it's a detail worth clarifying on that particular anecdote.
Almost a year and a half after the came out, and I still hear "ITALIAN herbs? No thank you!" in my head when I see a recipe call for Italian seasoning.
I remember reading a book by S. T. Joshi (can't remember which one), who's one of the main researchers of Lovecraft's life, and at one point he shows Lovecraft's shopping/to-do list and he's like "this is just Lovecraft's shopping list, not much to see here"
@@lollikabosso.w.n7153 probably baked beans and bread or spaghetti noodles and sauce depending on when in his life the list was written. Hot Potato Lovecraft did not eat well.
As someone who just got into lovecraft's writing. the descriptive prose is really accurate to his work. Also that italian hate in the end is so true and funny considering he'd hate everyone who is not from providence.
*0:30* This is probably the most horrifying part of the any Lovecraftian fiction. Imagine going shopping and seeing a product with word _Italian_ in it. The most spine-chilling thing one can experience for sure.
The prices were so low, they plunged deep into the unknown voids of darkness, far below any precipice upon which a man may deign to stand. E'en peering into the abyss to which these prices plummet in their maddening descent to the deep would be as to unravel the strings that make up a mind, like a stone sinking into the ocean.
The blasphemous rats in the walls!! Oh dear. I suppose that’s a glass-enclosed terrarium. Ahem…The blasphemous rats in the accursed and ill-kept terrarium, where the foul-scented detritus of long-putrescent wood shavings causes a violent recoil in me when the ghastly odor infects my nostrils. THE HORROR!!!
Oh no, my cat was touched by a..... Latino??? “Sir he works here, to take care of your cat” *not my cat anymore* Fun fact: H.P.’s cat was literally named the n-word
Good job he didn't go to Ikea. The many-dimensional non-Euclidean corridors of endless sofas; the eerie shadows of the deformed desk lamps; the wails of tortured souls trudging sleeplessly from chaise longue to shelving unit...
The Shadow over Innsmouth, which has a rather overt theme about the evils of mixed race breeding, was in no small part inspired by the then recent experience of Lovecraft digging through his family tree and discovering, to his horror, that he was ... 1/16th Welsh.
Great video as always ABK. And congrats on scoring a place on the last episode of Mock the Week. It was such a great show and it's sad to see it go, but how many comedians can say they were on its last ever episode? Well 7, I suppose.
There is debate to Lovecraft changing his views, I think it was a more drastic change as there was an account by Lovecraft's neighbor who said that Lovecraft and his aunts were outraged of the antisemitic attacks in Germany and after that news, he stopped mentioning Hitler.
The most on point detail is the wonderful use of "blasphemous" I think you could send an army of shoggoths to ER merely playing a drinking game based on the use of that word in all of Lovecraft's works, though "cyclopean" would be a close draw
But since Lovecraft was such a dedicated Anglophile, in reality he probably would’ve pronounced it with the “h,” to more perfectly present the sound of a Briton of higher breeding than the lowly Cockney rabble.
I mean... H.P. did eat Italian food. In his letters he talks about like it's something exotic, which is funny, but he did claim to enjoy it now and then.
Uhh... The video makes 2 explicit jokes of that nature. He looks at a penguin and asked if it could come in albino, and literally has an adverse reaction to the *word* "Italian."
@@Scrubjay457 The Albino penguin is a reference to At the Mountains of Madness, which features monstrous albino cave penguins (although the story also suggests that Lovecraft found normal penguins quite unnerving as well, which is... something)
I want these to play instead of youtube ads. BTW, I just started listening to Loremen and love it. Okay, I admit it, I'm binging. It's the soundtrack whenever I'm driving now (and as an American parent, that's like 75% of my day). I give it a 5/5.
Sir! Stunning. Just stunning. Having just written an in depth paper on Lovecraft's xenophobia (and often blatant racism) in his writing, this feels like a gift for my hard-work. Thanks for the early Halloween gift! 🤣
I watch video essays on 0.75x speed to help me go to sleep, and sometimes I forget to turn it back to 1x in the morning, so I watched most of this going "the odd audio distortion in this is a real Choice". honestly I think I still prefer the 0.75x version. the weird slowness is creepier.
Because the amount of effort you put into the things you make sort of doesn't matter. You can be talented and creative and skilled and hardworking but if people don't like the stuff you make they won't be your audience.
@@AusSP To my understanding he did, and to be fair there's an extremely good chance that he didn't actually name that particular cat, as this was from his childhood and it was a family pet (likely named by his uncle). Though he did have a fondness for applying that name to other black cats later on in life whether nicknaming specific ones (though he never properly kept one as a pet as an adult, IIRC), using it as a term for black cats in general, or naming one in a story as an homage. This is long after he should have known better, because even in those days he was extreme enough people tried to get him to dial it back, but let's at least apply a tiny grain of credit where credit is due. Not defending him, but at least applying a footnote to one of the most common stories about him.
@@MythicFox Yup, it's not like he was the only one either. Lots of black cats, dogs, horses etc were named things that people would reel at today. In years to come we will be looked on with the same disdain for things our current social model finds perfectly normal - probably the authoritarian cancel culture nightmare we currently live in. Kind of ignorant to judge an indivdual on the overarching social norms of their time tbh.
I just watched a different youtuber do a 3 minute skit where they just took one joke and did it again and again for the entire three minutes and then I jumped to this, which contained several consecutive jokes in a 36 second span
Excellent! And superb job on your final Mock the Week! It was a great run you had on there! I'm sad it is finished, and having you on it was a welcome added bonus to an already excellent show these past few seasons! Thank you for doing it, and for all of your work here and elsewhere! :)
The Swiss have the most guns per capita and lowest gun crime for one reason and one reason only, the guns are only there for when they hear of someone placing chocolate in to a fridge.
Surprised at the amount of degradation and laughing at agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders and symptoms in this comment section, didn't know that was a common enough thing. (Having a history with these illnesses myself, I wish it wasn't.)
The best combination of nerdy jokes and dad jokes. Albino penguins! You know! Like from the story! Get it? ...Do you get it? Albino penguins? Right? Like, y'know, from the story? Do you get it?
I love that you correctly represented the scope of lovecrafts racist beliefs not only extended to non-europeans, but poor people, the ugly, italians, catholics etc
@@NoNeed2No what do you mean by this? I was referring to the beliefs of a historical figure, should I substitute in my own original thoughts in place of my understanding of his beliefs?
@@NoNeed2No first of all you missed in my comment or what I failed to communicate is that I find his racism funny. There is something really dated and silly about someone who takes race consciousness to such an extreme that he thinks everyone who isn’t an old money Anglo-Saxon intellectual is of an distasteful inferior genetic background. It’s like being terminally online but in 1920. My views are actually much closer to his than they are up any mainstream modern worldview. Though obviously we differ on a number of very important issues The fact that I recognize that Lovecraft was a kook, does not mean I heap condemnation on him from a modern perspective. If you think lovecraft’s xenophobia was entirely typical of the time then you probably don’t know much about history or Lovecraft. Lastly, the fact that you think you can read into my worldview just by me recognizing what a kook he was says more about your state of mental development. You seem to see the world in false binaries. If I told you, I don’t think Black people should be expected to stand during the US national anthem, you would probably think i’m sympathetic to the blm movement. If I told you that I’d rather had the South win the civil war, you would probably assume I think the Southern States were the good guys. You’d be wrong If the only way you can analyze the world is through dichotomies, you should listen more and talk less
The most unrealistic part of this video is the concept of Lovecraft leaving the house
He was probably lost in morbid and desolate thought as he meandered in his garden, and only realized he’d entered into a market once he noticed the lack of black cats and mausoleums around him.
Lovecraft loved travelling. He went on many trips around New England, as well as rambling through Providence and other ancient towns (ancient in the American sense, that is)
@@anthonyguter
But he didn’t travel the world, and he was virulently xenophobic. He never even made it to England, which he considered to be the most cultured land and society.
@@timopper5488 I've never made it to England, and have never had someone call me xenophobic because of it. And, of course, commercial airlines did not exist then - it would be a long boat ride.
@@anthonyguter "ancient in the American sense" so, 80 years, give or take?
>Walks outside after several months of fear and loathing
>Sees an Irishman
>Day ruined
The fact that he described regular penguins as "grotesque" in Mountains of Madness is the thing I tend to bring up when when trying to explain that Lovecraft was afraid of everything he wasn't familiar with.
...like POC?
@@darkangel076 Cry
My favourite example of this is the story in which he describes an alien city being overrun by monstrous yellow creatures, only to reveal at the end that they're just eskimos
@@georgerose1252 Minions.
I think he was a lot more complex than people give him credit for- he travelled around quite a bit, and moved many times. His worst really racist stuff that few people have probably read(I listened to a lot of his older stuff in a compilation edition audibook) was pretty extreme. "It turned out, HIS ANCESTOR WAS BLACK!" and thats the whole premise.
His later stuff is honestly very tame- Haitians performing wudu-sacrifice, but with people instead of chickens and goats, and the magic being real pretty much. Historically human sacrifice for wudu was a thing in Dahomey around the early 1900s, so the source material is there too.
I love the fact that you actually voiced Lovecraft in a Rhode Island accent with the high pitched voice he was described as having.
If this is what he sounded like, then boy am I glad he never released an audiobook
I used to think he have deep/ low voice like story teller.
Yes! Didn't have room for that in my own comment!
@@Vinemaple No one is aware of any comments you made and comments do not have a length limit.
My headcanon voice for him was always Jeffrey Combs.
Somehow, this version of Lovecraft is more well-adjusted than the real one.
Aye.
This one hasn't written a story about a submarine crew full of intra-German racism
he was able to leave the house, so true
Because he went outside.
IRL H.P. Lovecraft tried to enlist in the U.S. expeditionary force in WWI; he wrote he hoped to be dispatched quickly by a stray bullet or piece of shrapnel.
His application was approved, but subsequently rejected on medical grounds after his mother ran in and convinced the recruiting physician that Lovecraft was a medical invalid. There was probably a lot going on in his family that we'll never know about for sure
The best part of the “Italian herbs” is that later in life he wrote letters extolling the wonders of going out to dinner for spaghetti.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. With HPL, anything is possible.
@@deadNightwatchman you can tell that it's real because he signed the letters “-Thy honorable servant, Grandpa Theodophus. PS I definitely contain no Welsh!”
@@EmeraldLavigne Thank you, Stranger with a healthy Name!
Character development
It's true. HP gets a lot of hate for being racist, which he definitely was when he was younger, but as he got older his racism turned to tolerance, and he had a lot of regrets about his previous feelings. It's a shame he died so young because I think had he lived into his 70's or 80's he would have probably been able to move past that legacy he seems remembered for.
"The only thing worse than an interdimensional eldritch horror... is an Italian." -H. P. Lovecraft, probably
Swarthy, I think he called them.
As an Italian I can confirm that
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE
@@theaubergine1337 we don't have super natural powers
@@c0l0rslayer31 I can confirm THAT!⬆️
He improved so much, he didn't even call the guy at the fish counter a racial slur!
Aahaaahahahahahahahahah XD XD XD
Yeah... google Lovecraft's cat name
To be fair, he generally uses colorfully descriptive language to denigrate people different from him.
@@carlonalessandro9021 Could you point me to the evidence for that?
@@realhorrorshow8547perform a dark ritual at his grave and ask, he'll tell you (make sure you do white face if you're not white)
The true horror was the friends we failed to make along the way.
This is my favorite comment 😂
Speaking about that.
th-cam.com/video/cc0kr98-bSk/w-d-xo.html
That was a great plot twist.
Or at the very least, the friends we made along the way were strictly writing correspondents residing far from Providence, in lands foreign, bleak, and insidiously oppressive, like the wan moon when a dark storm overtakes it.
@@timopper5488 Succinctly put
This was much closer to an actual 1920s upper-class Rhode Island accent than I expected.
A surprise to be sure , but a welcome one.
@@t.wcharles2171 [glares] I see what you did there.
We will follow your career with great interest.
@@juxstapo hello there.
@@t.wcharles2171General ....... Charrrles
Hey Jewish histry guy, nice to see you here!
חג שמח. אני עוקב אחר הערוץ שלך.
Lovecraft is literally the type of dude to see an Italian guy and write four poems about how horrifying it was
Did Lovecraft hate italians?
@@arte0021 Search his cat's name
Cool Air is all about how H. P. Lovecraft doesn't understand/is afraid of air conditioning units.
@@Rayitolaser569 but his cat's name was n***r . Thats not a slur against italians
What if it it was Tonio Trussardi?
In retrospect, reading the collected works of Lovecraft while literally committed in a psych ward was one of the odder decisions of my life. Fun, though.
Hope youre doing better!
Too bad no one cares
I see that the duality of man has been presented within two comments
why the fuck were you in a psych ward
I hope you are mentally well now. Everyone deserves be mentally peaceful.
This is a peculiar type of unsettling that fits the spooky month perfectly.
I like how he's not even that rude, he just politely states "no thank you."
I liked "The Sandwich Horror". Right up there with ""At the Mountains of Glad Bags", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep Aids", "The Reduced Price Meat Out of Time", "The Price-Quest of Unmarked Candy", "Herbert West - Tinned Salmon" and "The Call of Clean-Up on Aisle 6".
Prices Slashed!
Now available at Omega Mart!
That's A-level creativity in titling.
@@at-pe8wl You have no idea what's in store for you!
Thank you, you made me laugh
Folks laugh at and mock, but how many "real horror stories" have you read that can be summed up as "I met a weird person and immediately assumed the worst."
This is literally Kafka.
How about you tell us about one of the times assuming the best about a weird stranger paid off for you?
@@remobothic One time a huge man with filthy dreadlocks sat down next to me at a bar, wearing a tattered leather jacket, ripped biker gloves stained with blood, what seemed to be a gunshot scar on his arm, a knife clearly holstered in his belt.
After I started talking to him it turns out he was just dressed as a character from a post-apocalyptic novel and coming back from a sci-fi con, and he gave me a copy of one of his comic books he'd written.
@@remobothic Is there no middle ground between assuming the best and assuming the worst of everyone you meet? I normally start with a neutral opinion of people and form my judgement based on what they do or say from there, but is that against the rules?
@@sernoddicusthegallant6986 It's not unreasonable to make basic judgements about people you see based on their appearances and behaviors. Best not to interact with strangers who are visibly on drugs in public, for example.
Fun fact: Even tho Lovecraft despised Italians, he loved Italian food.
Glad to see he retained some sanity.
Disliking Italian cuisine is an insanity unto itself.
He once wrote a story where the main horror element is an air conditioner.
An ammonia circulated air conditioner! And that guy deserved to melt. Imagine living that long and not having a backup unit for emergencies!
Air conditioning is necromancy!
And it was creepy
Lovecraft 🤝 Mechanics. Hating air conditioning
Wasn't that Stephen King? Oh... wait no, that was a lamp.
Lovecraft wrote extensively about how fear of the unknown is the root of cosmic horror. The man was well aware that he was afraid of things he didn’t understand (like math). It’s the basis of all his writing, just like how loss is the basis of Edgar Allen Poe’s writing.
What's so hard to understand about Italians
@@rootywho is this "Mama Mia"? Is she the dark twisted beast from beyond the stars that gave birth to Italy?
@@Flesh_Wizardand how can the Pope live in Italy and not in Italy at the same time? Is this what they call "transubstantiation"?
Funny thing about the ending is that one of Lovecraft's favorite meals was spaghetti Bolognese, which he expressed in a letter to a friend. The guy hated Italians but loved Italian food.
Of course he did. Bigots are usually hypocrites.
Oh like how I love apple pie
@@piotrbojkoff lol comment.
@Пётр Бойков Yeah like we can believe slavs need eradication and still enjoy... Imperialism? Rape? Genocide? Landgrabbing? Serfdom? Oh wait, Soviet music!
@Пётр Бойков sanest nationalist
the real creeping horror is ABK quietly perfecting yet another art medium for the sake of a funny internet video
I think I'm blessed because if not I wouldn't have met someone who is as spectacular as expert Charles I think he is the best broker I ever seen.
What the fuck now scambots have other scambots to form "legitimate" conversations with
@@ahumanistpotato Yup....
@@ahumanistpotato It's pretty easy actually; most of it can be simply scripted and automated. Better to report the whole thing rather than engaging, though. :)
I don't know how ABK comes up with this stuff but it's always very clever, this man is a genius
Lovecraft is a fellow to pity more then hate.
His father "went mad" when he was young, his mother was both smothering and emotionally abusive up until she "went mad" as well when he was a teenager. He spent the rest of his life convinced it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened to him. He projected that internal fear out onto everything and everyone around him.
He had an entire network of penpals later in life, which helped him start to open up, and even began to make him openly regret his earlier, more extreme works. Alas, he died before anything could be made of those growing feelings.
'Tis a pity indeed.
But coincidentally all that harrowing misery, crippling fear and queer close-mindedness in his transitory existence was also an irrevocably necessary conconction for us to have "Lovecraftian Horror" at all.
I've never seen any reason to hate him, he was racist at a time when almost everyone was, you shouldn't hate someone for the social norms of their time. You should hate them if they keep doing it after society has moved on.
@@krashd| I'm afraid Lovecraft was a raging bigot even by his era's standards. The man was working with archaic English-styled racism, you see. Where skin colour was coupled with "good breeding" to discriminate against more-or-less everyone outside of an extremely small margin. He expressed this rabid distrust of more-or-less everyone in his early works, and my GOD is it extreme.
Keep in mind this was a man who had a paranoid distrust of air conditioners when they started showing up in homes. Just imagine the sort of insane stuff such a neurotic mind would come up with when writing about actual people?
Interesting to know the guy who wrote such terrifying stories as “The Dunwich Horror” and “Shadow over Insmouth” would cower in fear if he saw a meatball
The greatest fear i think is the fear of the Asda layout being switched around.
This terror can actually be described, and is all the scarier for it.
How about visiting an ASDA in a different town.
Only 2 hours parking?!
Where are the toilets?!
Where do they keep the eggs?!
Where is the *REDUCED AISLE?!*
But what if _you're_ the only one who thinks the layout has been switched around, and everyone else considers it just fine, or that 'it's always been this way, hasn't it?' Now, that's cosmic horror fuel.
@@Mevi ...and you get to your car, and realise that you didn't scan your Asda card.....
Edgar Allan Poe's shopping list: gin, gin, gin, beer, gin.
Maybe a bit of laudanum for spice.
I saw a flapping in the rafters yore, it was a pigeon came in the door,
Flapping high above aisle four, where the beer and gin is stored.
From Poe's "The Pigeon"
Quote of Edgar: "pour me more".
I am astounded at the number of tiny little references and nods to Lovecraft and his work you crammed into less than 40 seconds.
Impressive and very funny!
"It's like Walmart, except you can't buy live ammunition." Wowwie even the video descriptions are full of gold
Rather sad though, "big box" stores like Walmart shouldn't exist in the first place. They've killed countless tens of thousands of small, family-owned, local businesses and half their employees don't even speak English. It's the worst of capitalism and scourge to any community it digs its claws into.
Truly horrifying
Walmart owns Asda. I mean legally, not competitively. They bought the store that was most like them and made it even more like them.
Will rewatch thanks
We just call it ammunition. The "live" is redundant.
Love how he dealt with everything else easily but ITALIAN Thats what disturbed him the most lmao
Because he had it literally in his hand. Probably had to wash 57 times in the hand basin in his lodging quarters.
It's true to character. Lovecraft was thoroughly racist.
@@TheDJEON Also classist. Being Irish was as bad as being Italian or black to ol' HP. Love his stuff tho. I guess it takes a truly crazy motherfucker to come up with some of that stuff.
Just never ask what his cat's name was
@@matthewblunndel185 To be fair, there's a good chance he didn't name that particular cat, as he was a child and it was a family pet (likely named by his uncle), and he never had another cat as a pet after that IIRC. That said, this doesn't excuse the fact that he kept using that name as a nickname for other black cats (including infamously naming one in a story as an homage) long after he should have known better. Not defending him, for the record, but I feel like it's a detail worth clarifying on that particular anecdote.
Almost a year and a half after the came out, and I still hear "ITALIAN herbs? No thank you!" in my head when I see a recipe call for Italian seasoning.
I remember reading a book by S. T. Joshi (can't remember which one), who's one of the main researchers of Lovecraft's life, and at one point he shows Lovecraft's shopping/to-do list and he's like "this is just Lovecraft's shopping list, not much to see here"
What was on it?
@@lollikabosso.w.n7153 probably baked beans and bread or spaghetti noodles and sauce depending on when in his life the list was written. Hot Potato Lovecraft did not eat well.
@@HadalStreetlights and ice cream. It is said he really, really loved ice cream.
As someone who just got into lovecraft's writing. the descriptive prose is really accurate to his work. Also that italian hate in the end is so true and funny considering he'd hate everyone who is not from providence.
Why is this Lovecraft somehow less crazy than the actual dude?!
Because this is just a dull copy
He's actually out in public?
Because the one one you're comparing him to is a handful of poorly remembered internet memes, and not a real person?
@@AusSP I'm not saying he was actually mental, just a prick.
Lovecraft wasn't crazy.
*0:30* This is probably the most horrifying part of the any Lovecraftian fiction. Imagine going shopping and seeing a product with word _Italian_ in it. The most spine-chilling thing one can experience for sure.
Not as bad as buying anything touched by *the french*
@@0therW1z you never know with what part of their anatomy those blasphemous French have touched it
"Our prices are insane!!"
HP: "Oh are they... are they really...."
don't know why but this makes me laugh so much
The maddening prices...
The groceries of unimaginable price.
The Eldrich sale.
Prices so low the'll make you mad.
The prices were so low, they plunged deep into the unknown voids of darkness, far below any precipice upon which a man may deign to stand. E'en peering into the abyss to which these prices plummet in their maddening descent to the deep would be as to unravel the strings that make up a mind, like a stone sinking into the ocean.
Next episode: HP Lovecraft picks up his cat from the petcare center
:-|
The blasphemous rats in the walls!! Oh dear. I suppose that’s a glass-enclosed terrarium. Ahem…The blasphemous rats in the accursed and ill-kept terrarium, where the foul-scented detritus of long-putrescent wood shavings causes a violent recoil in me when the ghastly odor infects my nostrils. THE HORROR!!!
"I'm here to pick up..."
Ohgodohgodohgod😳
Oh no, my cat was touched by a..... Latino???
“Sir he works here, to take care of your cat”
*not my cat anymore*
Fun fact: H.P.’s cat was literally named the n-word
@@0therW1z As Rainier Wolfcastle once said...
Nice, can't wait to see the next episode when he adopts his cute cat!
ABK did it again!
Great non-Euclidean comedy with jokes men are not supposed to know!
Good job he didn't go to Ikea. The many-dimensional non-Euclidean corridors of endless sofas; the eerie shadows of the deformed desk lamps; the wails of tortured souls trudging sleeplessly from chaise longue to shelving unit...
Okay, I lost it at 'albino' and it stayed gone for the rest of the video.
"ITALIAN herbs?!"
I'm ded.
The Shadow over Innsmouth, which has a rather overt theme about the evils of mixed race breeding, was in no small part inspired by the then recent experience of Lovecraft digging through his family tree and discovering, to his horror, that he was ... 1/16th Welsh.
Ketchup’s dark twin got me rolling. Good job ABK.
Don't know why but the fact that it's specifically an ASDA that he goes to for shopping makes this whole thing better
Thanks to this video, the phrase "Italian herbs!? No thank you!" is lodged in my brain
Great video as always ABK. And congrats on scoring a place on the last episode of Mock the Week. It was such a great show and it's sad to see it go, but how many comedians can say they were on its last ever episode? Well 7, I suppose.
Noo that is good news chocolate on a sh*t sandwich! I like mock the week. The week so often needs mocking!
There is debate to Lovecraft changing his views, I think it was a more drastic change as there was an account by Lovecraft's neighbor who said that Lovecraft and his aunts were outraged of the antisemitic attacks in Germany and after that news, he stopped mentioning Hitler.
The most on point detail is the wonderful use of "blasphemous"
I think you could send an army of shoggoths to ER merely playing a drinking game based on the use of that word in all of Lovecraft's works, though "cyclopean" would be a close draw
An actual masterpiece
It's the most cyclopean video with mind boggling vistas and by the end I devolved into babbling madness
It's good, but it could have been more squamous and/or rugose
But that’s just the standard of all of ABK’s videos.
@@SheeplessNW6
Or even more singularly abnormal and/or non-Euclidean.
@@SheeplessNW6 I expected more eldrichness, frankly. (Eldricity?)
There were no bas-reliefs or tarpaulins though.
I'm pretty sure the guy at the fish counter works as my store, too... and I'm in America. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Cthulhu?
10 out of 10 would play a game called "Conspiracy? Coincidence? Cthulhu?"
One is coincidence, twice is conspiracy, three times is Cthulhu.
Complot? Congruence? Calamari?
Do you by chance live near Innsmouth
Crack? Crevase? Crater?
Wait, that doesn't sound too different from some Lovecraft stories
The comments:
40% ABK incredible accent
35% italians
25% cat name
Was very much waiting for him to describe HP’s colour using a slur.
I appreciate the fact that you had Lovecraft drop the 'h' in herbs since he was from the US.
We actually didn't drop it; the Brits added it in the 19th century to avoid sounding Cockney.
@@Zaarin1 For reals? Very interesting!
@@Zaarin1 That sounds plausable. its also why we cave earls instead of counts like everyone else. Cockneys ruined the latter...
But since Lovecraft was such a dedicated Anglophile, in reality he probably would’ve pronounced it with the “h,” to more perfectly present the sound of a Briton of higher breeding than the lowly Cockney rabble.
@@Zaarin1 The only good thing about Cockernees is that they make the Northerners sound intelligent.
Mamma Mia! She worked tirelessly to grow those herbs.
He always loved Italian cooking.
He discussed as much in one of his early letters to Robert E. Howard.
I mean... H.P. did eat Italian food. In his letters he talks about like it's something exotic, which is funny, but he did claim to enjoy it now and then.
What's funny is that Lovecraft, in his letters, described loving Italian food.
I love this! As a Lovecraft fan it’s great to see some humour about him that isn’t just the low-hanging fruit of “he was a racist”
…
🤨
@@AEY3587 Well... Lovecraft refused to try to gain "social points" and we know how that went for him...
Uhh... The video makes 2 explicit jokes of that nature.
He looks at a penguin and asked if it could come in albino, and literally has an adverse reaction to the *word* "Italian."
@@Scrubjay457 The Albino penguin is a reference to At the Mountains of Madness, which features monstrous albino cave penguins (although the story also suggests that Lovecraft found normal penguins quite unnerving as well, which is... something)
he's my favorite author and I have to say this is spot on
I want these to play instead of youtube ads.
BTW, I just started listening to Loremen and love it. Okay, I admit it, I'm binging. It's the soundtrack whenever I'm driving now (and as an American parent, that's like 75% of my day). I give it a 5/5.
The fact he even went outside, shows how different this HP is to the real one.
Sir! Stunning. Just stunning. Having just written an in depth paper on Lovecraft's xenophobia (and often blatant racism) in his writing, this feels like a gift for my hard-work. Thanks for the early Halloween gift! 🤣
As a curious eastern european that tasted HP sauce once... blasphemous prince of condiments sounds about right.
It doesn't go well with gherkins.
Fantastic on hot meat, if I ever have a bacon or sausage sandwich it must be HP sauce.
Ketchups dark twin
Hey! That line was in the video I watched. Did we just see the same cartoon?
That description of brown sauce was just beautiful
Dark ichor...
This could be a series. "Franz Kafka goes to the DMV." "Edgar Allen Poe visits the Orangutan enclosure."
'Brown ichor of the indescribable' - fabulous.
Perfect . Happy Halloween ABK . Nice to see you also do (re) animation
I watch video essays on 0.75x speed to help me go to sleep, and sometimes I forget to turn it back to 1x in the morning, so I watched most of this going "the odd audio distortion in this is a real Choice". honestly I think I still prefer the 0.75x version. the weird slowness is creepier.
That image makes Lovecraft look like he had a double chin. Man was like 130lbs for his entire life
You know that you are a genius, right? Because you are! That was utterly brilliant!
how do you not have 1M subscribers yet when you put this much effort into your content?
infrequent short content does not give you first class algorithm tickets
Share it more!
Because the amount of effort you put into the things you make sort of doesn't matter. You can be talented and creative and skilled and hardworking but if people don't like the stuff you make they won't be your audience.
It's not that people don't like it. It's that it's not mainstream popular type content. People do like it a lot, just not a lot of people.
Amazing. One of your best!
As an Italian who loves HPL, i am very sad now
Imagine how black fans of HPL feel when they found out what his cat was called 💀
Then have a tasty meal of authentic margherita pizza with your swarthy family, and toast and/or roast HPL on his birthday.
@@rabbitguts2518 I heard he loved
@@AusSP To my understanding he did, and to be fair there's an extremely good chance that he didn't actually name that particular cat, as this was from his childhood and it was a family pet (likely named by his uncle). Though he did have a fondness for applying that name to other black cats later on in life whether nicknaming specific ones (though he never properly kept one as a pet as an adult, IIRC), using it as a term for black cats in general, or naming one in a story as an homage. This is long after he should have known better, because even in those days he was extreme enough people tried to get him to dial it back, but let's at least apply a tiny grain of credit where credit is due. Not defending him, but at least applying a footnote to one of the most common stories about him.
@@MythicFox Yup, it's not like he was the only one either. Lots of black cats, dogs, horses etc were named things that people would reel at today. In years to come we will be looked on with the same disdain for things our current social model finds perfectly normal - probably the authoritarian cancel culture nightmare we currently live in.
Kind of ignorant to judge an indivdual on the overarching social norms of their time tbh.
An effort, the style, the context, the voice-over and timing - everything is perfect!
Yep. Was wondering how Howie would fare in the Italian food aisle.
🍅😆
All hell breaks loose when H.P.L. inadvertently walks into the Asian supermarket next door.
I just watched a different youtuber do a 3 minute skit where they just took one joke and did it again and again for the entire three minutes
and then I jumped to this, which contained several consecutive jokes in a 36 second span
Excellent!
And superb job on your final Mock the Week! It was a great run you had on there! I'm sad it is finished, and having you on it was a welcome added bonus to an already excellent show these past few seasons! Thank you for doing it, and for all of your work here and elsewhere! :)
This man literally lived his own life in cosmic horror.
Just saw you on the last ever Mock The Week. What an honour to be invited to that! Best wishes for all your upcoming plans!
You have created cartoon gold-fiendishly clever in its intricacies. Make more HP Lovecraft (sauce) videos please!
(picks up cat food) oh this will be perfect for-- BANNED!
He was kept awake at night endlessly, tormented by the horror that people didn't keep chocolate in the fridge.....
I am tormented by the chalky horror that they do keep it in the fridge.
@@wordzmyth I'm with you here, chocolate does not go in the fridge
The Swiss have the most guns per capita and lowest gun crime for one reason and one reason only, the guns are only there for when they hear of someone placing chocolate in to a fridge.
He probably hated chocolate for being brown...
@@shadetreader ouch! 😅
The Brown Sauce segment really got me.
This is probably how going shopping in his mind, since he was incredibly agoraphobic lmaooo
Great video and amazing animation!!
Surprised at the amount of degradation and laughing at agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders and symptoms in this comment section, didn't know that was a common enough thing.
(Having a history with these illnesses myself, I wish it wasn't.)
This is BRILLIANT, thank you so much for this... I would love to put this as a link in Horrorbabble, I think his audience would love it...
Wow, not sure what you did to achieve the animated quality of this, but this just shows how versatile ABK is with his acting!
HP sauce, ketchup’s darker twin had me rolling 😂
I love what you do, man. Stay safe x
Any video with the word "ichor" in it is both splendid and horrifying.
I haven't said the words "no thank you" normally in two years and it's all your fault
I need this to become a full series
I adore ABK's American accent.
I wish there was a series of this
The best combination of nerdy jokes and dad jokes. Albino penguins! You know! Like from the story! Get it? ...Do you get it? Albino penguins? Right? Like, y'know, from the story? Do you get it?
Ketchup's dark twin ... LOL I was just chortling at this and didn't even realize it was The Interdimensional ABK
I love that you correctly represented the scope of lovecrafts racist beliefs not only extended to non-europeans, but poor people, the ugly, italians, catholics etc
And yet somehow he got married.
@@NoNeed2No what do you mean by this? I was referring to the beliefs of a historical figure, should I substitute in my own original thoughts in place of my understanding of his beliefs?
@@NoNeed2No first of all you missed in my comment or what I failed to communicate is that I find his racism funny.
There is something really dated and silly about someone who takes race consciousness to such an extreme that he thinks everyone who isn’t an old money Anglo-Saxon intellectual is of an distasteful inferior genetic background.
It’s like being terminally online but in 1920.
My views are actually much closer to his than they are up any mainstream modern worldview. Though obviously we differ on a number of very important issues
The fact that I recognize that Lovecraft was a kook, does not mean I heap condemnation on him from a modern perspective. If you think lovecraft’s xenophobia was entirely typical of the time then you probably don’t know much about history or Lovecraft.
Lastly, the fact that you think you can read into my worldview just by me recognizing what a kook he was says more about your state of mental development. You seem to see the world in false binaries.
If I told you, I don’t think Black people should be expected to stand during the US national anthem, you would probably think i’m sympathetic to the blm movement.
If I told you that I’d rather had the South win the civil war, you would probably assume I think the Southern States were the good guys.
You’d be wrong
If the only way you can analyze the world is through dichotomies, you should listen more and talk less
"Oh! I see there's a sale on Arkham's Best; Hellish Pink Tentacles!"
You had me at Lovecraft.
"Asda. It's like Walmart, except you can't buy live ammunition" - the description of this video 💀