Why Love Lovecraft
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
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Horror Investigation: why Lovecraft? Why not Stephen King? Or Brian Lumley? Or Poppy Z. Brite? Well I'll tell you why Lovecraft is my own personal pick.
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Sir, just want to say how I love this channel. Your love and knowledge of Lovecraft and horror is so spot on. And speaking as a retro game fan I also want to say thanks for your work on games that I grew up with and still play today. Cheers from Switzerland.
whoa I appreciate it!
@@SandyofCthulhu I have a modest youtube channel dedicated to Lovecraft and I made a post promoting your channel. Hopefully you will get a lot more viewers soon. Keep up the great work!
@@ArkhamReporter thanks so much I really appreciate it.
@KerChing ' thanks! Suggest also checking out Bluworm.
meanwhile in some public library "Oh no, oh no no no, this is the wrong package"
"The normal world is a lie."
Core point, well made~
Look up the Ubaid lizard statues. Lovecraft's knowledge of 19th & 20th century archeological discoveries obviously informed his creatures, as did ancient cultures' concepts of the numinous.
Poe was the better writer, but Lovecraft was better conceptually (world-building/ideas).
Similar situation to RE Howard vs JRR Tolkien in fantasy, imho.
Or, for screenplay writing, Chris Nolan vs George Lucas ;)
REH > JRRT
The two authors are so different that I find it hard to sensibly compare them. Poe goes deep in the heart of madness - he is directed inwardly. Lovecraft doesn't care about the mind of man - he is directed outward to the horrors of the universe.
@Anne O'Nymous And also Lovecraft did explicitly write a few stories in imitation of Poe - notably The Outsider.
Arkham Reporter sent me.
*@Sandy of Cthulhu* yes, the ever present Necronomicon unsettled me too. I tended to think i was on the outside of some dark conspiracy. I would see it in all these seemingly unrelated movies, and it wasn't until much later that i noticed the common link in Lovecraft. Great little story at the end there too! ;)
creeped me out, that's for sure. Also i'd be reading Frank Belknap Long and suddenly Yog-Sothoth gets mentioned. "What the heck?" I'd think.
I thought the necrophiles in the hound were just grave looters. Maybe i need to reread it...
Arkham reporter sent me. Hail Lovecraft!
Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin. Tell your friends.
Dunno about the general public, but Harlan Ellison will be one of my all-time great writers.
Harlan had his points. I was insulted in person by him once, a moment which I will always treasure.
I was watching some old episodes on when he was on a talk show and the man was a hoot and rightfully criticized things in the media of the day.
@@SandyofCthulhu Was it something similar to this :D
th-cam.com/video/F8yzK7bfVwI/w-d-xo.html
@@SandyofCthulhu I feel like most people who interacted with Ellison were insulted or offended by him at some point.
It's wonderful such a passionate send up of Lovecraft!
I may have no respect for Lovecraft as a person and find his writing overly .... Purple prose...
I have to respect the inspiration he was for you.
Hats off to ya man.
Love this series. Please keep them coming Sandy.
Sandy is the best storytelling teacher on TH-cam.
You just earned yourself a new subscriber! Although I'm a lovecraft newbie I love how the stories pull you in even after all these years.
I just got done reading the nameless city today and scheduled my audio review the nameless city next to Dagon and the story beyond the wall of sleep are all quite enjoyable. 🙂❤📚
With the last line about HPL being amazed to see how popular he became, I've often wondered what any of the old Weird Tales gang would have thought if they could have learned how much people today pay for copies of a magazine that paid them a few pennies a word.
I don't quite understand how sandy is able to talk about grisly and graphic themes while still coming across as 100% wholesome. it's great
Great video, Sandy! I agree with a lot of what you have to say here.
Have you missed out the word 'I' in this video's title? Or a question mark?
I miss the tension in most of Lovecraft's stories (at least the ones I read). The revelations are trivial, the unfathomable is mundane and the powerful Great Old One can be knocked out by a fisherman.
I may go out on a limb here, but Robert E. Howard was more "lovecraftian" than HPL himself. Quite a few of his stories feature the unkown and the ancient ("The Tower of the Elephant", "The Hour of the Dragon","Wings in the Night"), but it always remains distant, incomprehensibel and frightening.
However, HPL still deserves praise for dragging Horror away from the "happy ending" Kitsch of the 19 century. Which is quite an archievement.
I think you missed my whole point about why Lovecraft's revelations seem so minor.
@@SandyofCthulhu Than you failed to bring it across.
@@AGS363 yeah maybe. I talked about it for like 5 minutes. Reading over what you said it sounds like you just wanted to gripe that HPL didn't scare YOU and didn't really pay attention to my thesis, which is your privilege of course. Horror's a big room. Heck even people who don't like Lovecraft still benefit from his innovations in horror books & movies influenced by him.
"How do you fight a color?"
*screen laughs in FireBlu*
Check out Dusk, its a quake clone with strong lovecraftian influences. My favorite work by lovecraft was the mountains of madness. "They were men!" Makes me cry everytime.
Theres also a doom total conversion called "shrine"
What are your thoughts on Thomas Ligotti?
Thomas Iverson i like and enjoy his work.
In some of Lovecraft's stories the protagonist doesn't even have a defined gender or ethnicity. Two of my favorites of his short stories are He and The Festival and the main characters of those could be anyone on the planet. (I mean, it's obvious Howie was thinking about a white dude when he wrote those stories but such things are never stated in the text)
What do you think of Clark Ashton Smith, a dear friend of "mine" (see my nick^^)? I read a few short stories last year and I was amazed, I even believe he has an extra gear compared to HPL due to his more libertine way of life, which turns into some narrarive choices HPL would never have thought of for this very reason. Some very alien worlds are beautifully described and they are tangible to the reader and I really appreciate his choice of words (despite forcing this poor Italian to occasionally reach for a vocabulary).
Reading HPL for the first time was mindblowing for me as well, but I believe CAS deserves a little space as well. I really recommend checking it.
This is so well argued, Sandy. I can understand both your continued enthusiasm and the longevity of your game.
Cool editing, minimal but thoughtful! Good stories
This made me really interested in reading HP Lovecraft now, thank you.
Lovecraft makes you fear that you're insignificant. You mean nothing, and if you die, what killed you probably doesn't even know.
Lovecraft is basically saying what is at the core of the materialistic atheist universe - the thing we don't want to know.
@@SandyofCthulhu Thanks for responding!
@@gameon_ct I've said it before, but what's the point of having a tiny obscure channel if you can't take a bit of time now and then to respond to people.
@@SandyofCthulhu surprised you didn't exponentially explode with Seth! It's been fun watching you for jeez at least a year now!
He was right! :)
Oh, yeah. The Lovecraft shop in Leicester Square, with a big yellow sign with blue cursive letters. It also made me raise an eyebrow.
I just dig the scientific Pandora's box horror, scientist find or unleash either an unstoppable A.I. or Genetics alteration or both, What ever Terminator/Aliens/Blade Runner/Robocop is. Thats my jam.
Great words Mr. Sandy!
Love craft is the best for me.
Nothing scares me more than his stories.
I like looking at you Mr. Petersen, you remind me of my dad but with a beard and glasses :D
hopefully your dad isn't as chubby either.
@@SandyofCthulhu Nah he is lol
Damn, Sandy! This is good shit!
So have you ever read "The house on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson published 1908? It's pretty Lovecraftian.
and it was one of Lovecraft's favorite novels. Yeah I have read a ton of William Hope Hodgson and curse the loathsome British jingoism that got him killed in 1917 on the Western Front.
@@SandyofCthulhu Wow. Wasn't expecting a response... Thanks!
@@Simmons8519 what's the point in having a small and obscure youtube channel if you can't reply to almost everyone on it?
14:22 - Exact same experience in Toronto in 2010. Minus the free books :/
Are Irem and The Nameless City 2 different places, or one in the same?
Sandy, have you seen Fantasy by DYE? Ends very Lovecraftean. Really shows how HP has permeated our culture: th-cam.com/video/6QFwo57WKwg/w-d-xo.html
Sounds like Poe's introspective horrors are more about potential and failing there of,
whilst Lovecraft is centering on letting your mind fill in the blanks, afterall what could be most scary than the scariest thing your own mind comes up with?
Personally i prefer introspective and or grounded horror - not just unknown but others, specifically human shaped horrors (Men in black is good example - human by appearance but inhuman by nature, sometimes perceived as Androids).
Ideal for me would be something like familiar place (it'd have to take whole act I to familiarize the audience with the place) slowly corrupted, and twisted around the story, not physically transform just visually, have perception of the observer be the true horror. Familiar yet uncanny and wrong. This lends itself to style of horror without shoddy tactics like jumpscares making it possibly most appealing to me.
I'd say Maupassant was also great.
Get an auto-que, or some memory props set just near your camera, that way you don't need to keep looking down.
Or don't and just keep it real and 'imperfect.'
Grim Reaper thanks!
thanks! I'm on it.
What about Stephen?!
So what books did you get from the store?
(scowls balefully)
Hrmm, is it weird that i consider Clark Ashton Smith to be the better writer?
Nice to see a man obsessive about Lovecraft
Stephen King is not a "great" horror writer?
He's a good one, but has just as many flops as hits.
@@osoewert6439 But could anyone really top his earlier work? Carrie? The Shining? Firestarter? Cujo? Salem's lot? It?
@@CycoSven69 I love King. I hated Carrie. The film was far superior. The others are great books, but he's had a lot of flops and missteps.
CycoSven69 nope. Doesn’t keep me from reading him.
@@SandyofCthulhu If King is not "great", then what constitutes a great horror writer?
why hate hatecraft?
The story at the end is hilarious, and this is a great case for Lovecraft, but my feelings towards him will always be mixed.
While I think Lovecraft's work is pretty impressive and revolutionary, I do feel like it suffers from some thinly veiled, and occasionally explicit, racism. I felt the same way about some of Howard's Conan stories, but knowing what I now know about both author's it would seem that Lovecraft's offenses were probably more egregiously deliberate.
It's good that people have taken the best parts of his work and turned them into something beautiful. It makes me especially happy to see that recent adaptations of the mythos have not only managed to become popular in spite of their murky origins, but have actually started to address the darker side of their source material head on and use it as a way to subvert that negativity.
Call of Cthulhu has definitely played a huge part in making that possible, as have numorous works from other authors and creators. I think those works are where my love really lies; not with Lovecraft himself.
I would argue that Lovecraft's work in point of fact uses almost no racism in his work, with only a few sometimes subtle exceptions.
@@SandyofCthulhu It's true that it's usually subtle, at least in his fiction. There's a certain poem from 1912 that I won't name here and a few passages in "The Horror at Redhook" that aren't so subtle, but beyond that it could just be something that I am just reading into his works based on what I have heard about his personal life. I definitely havn't read as much Lovecraft as you, so I'll defer to your expertise.
@@clayfare9733 No you're right, it is sometimes overt. It leaks into Re-Animator too. The important thing to me is that he changed his attitudes quite a bit between 1912 and 1935. In his personal life there is no indication of overt racism unless you count him wanting to get out of New York and back to Providence. In his private letters the racism does come out - on the other hand I wouldn't like to be judged by my most personal, extreme, e-mails either.
Clay, all i can say is that each of us are a product of our own age. A hundred years from now a generation will be looking back on us in disgust as well. You just have to appreciate people for the good they bring, and some patience with what you disapprove of. At the end of the day, as much as each of want to think ourselves an exception to our neighbor's faults and vices: overwhelmingly we are not. Not nearly so much as we would like to think we are. It is not flattering. It is not pretty. It is just true.
So basically Lovecraft is the Marx of the horror genre, you are either influenced by him or you try to move away from him, hehe.
that is spot on. And even if you are trying to move away, you are still defined by him.
I don't understand why they keep making Halloween movies, Friday the 13 is way better, "kill them, kill them for mommy Jason!" SHh SHh SHh Haa Haa haa. 🔪
Weird xenophobic nerd and the original goth kid who walked around at night with a trenchcoat, only had fond feelings for Edgar Allan Poe, cats and coffee. Like a goth kid from South Park