Why is there so little Lovecraftian media? Is it too ambitious to take on?

Why is there so little Lovecraftian media? Is it too ambitious to take on?

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youtube.com/watch?v=MWbFni6_25Y
youtube.com/watch?v=xQauJW09qRs
youtube.com/watch?v=g4-GK58gZYI
youtu.be/6QFwo57WKwg
theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image
youtube.com/watch?v=KQLQkG64IKU
youtube.com/watch?v=eMuz1rBVB78
hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/
youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

It's not yet financially salient to fund the visual effects needed to nauseate and confuse the viewer that you'd need to really sell Lovecraft. He's also known for some pretty wild statements regarding race and his cat was named Nigger Man so you have to appreciate the predicament that Lovecraft's source material would present to your average idiot

It's too racist.

Lovecraftian horror is some of the most overrated shit by nerds

It's like steam punk, a pointless affect

OOOOH TENTACLES fuck off pls

answer truthfully. how old are you?

>OOOOH TENTACLES fuck off pls
congrats, you missed the entire point of lovecraft.

The tentacle shit is the worst part about lovecraft though. Nobody that reads lovecraft reads it for the tentacles. They read it for the abstract descriptions.

>"geometry that doesn't seem asymmetrical, but rather, following some sort of symmetry that is inconceivable"

That kind of shit is what makes lovecraft great. He allows us to get a taste of what it's like to witness things that are outside of our perception.

Inb4 that one sperg who alway rages about what "Lovecraftian" really means

It's boring

do you have any other examples, because that quote is a poor showing

Because despite "The Call of Cthulhu" becoming his most well known story, Lovecraft's horror was always best when the monster wasn't seen, or was only seen briefly or indirectly, depend heavily on the inner monologue of the narrator as he descends into madness.

That just doesn't translate very well to film.

>when the monster wasn't seen, or was only seen briefly or indirectly, depend heavily on the inner monologue of the narrator as he descends into madness.
>That just doesn't translate very well to film

What is Jaws

It wouldn't be successful unless you just plastered it with tentacles and cthulu, since your average audience thinks that's all lovecraft is.

>Lovecraftian - fiction pertaining to the revelation of incomprehensible, forbidden truths or a reality that doesn't behave as expected in a way that presents a maddening horror to the characters and the reader. these events often take place when interacting with esoteric cults or traveling to strange and remote destinations

fight me

What are good examples?

I haven't read Lovecraft, but I liked Prince of Darkness and this mostly unexplained recurring dream was one of the best parts

youtube.com/watch?v=MWbFni6_25Y

Honestly, I don't think any director can pull off a good Lovecraft story. It works amazingly in book-form for a number of reasons- none of which can be put to film, especially "going crazy from looking at it." How the fuck would you even film something that drives people crazy from glancing it? Lovecraft makes you use your own imagination of what scares you.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a the video game from a decade ago is still the best none-book Lovecraft story I ever saw, and even that is heavily flawed.

Yes. They will never make 40kino because of this

You don't show the thing, you show what happens to the people who saw the thing.

>How the fuck would you even film something that drives people crazy from glancing it

Pontypool fucked with me on that level

youtube.com/watch?v=xQauJW09qRs

That's fucking boring and no one wants to see someone act like they just went crazy seeing a thing. Even in good horror movies where stuff like this happens, it's at least building up to the audience seeing the thing too.
Maybe, just maybe, a talented team can do this, but knowing Hollywood, hell no. And it shouldn't be an indie movie because it needs some serious money behind it.

Lovecraft won't be overrated until we have a 100 million dollar movie dedicated to all the sea and cosmic horror monsters we ever wanted to see and its trailer gets upboated to the front page of reddit and hits #1 on trending and everyone will praise it though it'll objectively be a 6/10.

That is my litmus test for calling something overrated

>"Lovecraftian"
more like rwchandlerian he invented that schlock then lovecraft just add merman and more ays

This is one of the best examples, and the movie still fucked up by showing too much and being too goofy at the end.
Man, I gotta rewatch pontypool. been on a bottle-movie marathon all week

It's not an actual quote. I'm trying to quote it off the top of my head.

I'm too drunk to give a shit TEE BEE AICH.

A Lovecraftian movie would be easy as shit to make. I don't know why Hollywood has such a hard time with this.

>movie trailer
>WHAT IF CTHULU WASN'T JUST A STORY
>ear shattering fart noise
>full frontal shot of Cthulu rising from the sea with water streaming off of its body
>black screen
>coming 2018

>movie
>opening shot is Cthulu rising out of the water
>movie is 2 hours and 45 minutes of Cthulu destroying a city
>ending is Cthulu standing over the leveled city roaring at the sky

It's like dismissing H.R Giger's entire work with a "lol penis looking aliens"

Both artists had a huge influence on defining the concept of strangeness/alienation and the general feeling of horror that can come out of realizing that we are totally insignificant beings on a cosmic scale/for whatever cosmic entities surround us

What other bottle movies you got?

I can't recommend enough to everyone to watch AM1200. The full 40 minute movie is on vimeo. It's a pretty good take on Lovecraftian themes.

because it is hard as fuck to visually interpret something that is indescribable and impossible for the human mind to process without going insane

>test involves browsing leddit
Nice try, I ain't going to that faggot magnet.

This will never fail to make me laugh.

thats not really hard my friend, picture jupiter storm for example, imagine yourself happens to be accused of a crime punished by being thrown alive inside a pod into that storm, picture the horrors of attempting to visally understand a hurricane capable of swallowing whole the already big planet you used to live in, picture that no matter how close you are it always getting closer to the point where you don't know anymore if the hurricane is getting closer or you are shrinking the very spacial notion in your head loses track of reality thus getting you close to insanity to a point where you either close your eyes and wait for death or you open them and witness it all regardless.

youtube.com/watch?v=g4-GK58gZYI

What is that from? It looks amazing!

Jupiter is truly a real life monster, not only you have a strong gravitational pull that means if you miscalculate any space voyage around it you might fall onto it, you also have the strange heat and radiation it emits, every probe that went close to it detected massive amounts of radiation and heat, you probably will get cooked inside your ship slowly like a cat inside a microwave if you fly close to it and now you take into consideration that jupiter has 49 CATALOGED moons and a few ones that we can't even see, any passage close to the planet would suffer miscalculations resulting into getting pulled into jupiter.

To make matters worse the heat and radiation it emits might be signs of jupiter becoming too dense and starting fusing hydrogen that means it could light up and become a star ... it could burn us then pull us.

Space is where horror is at folks.

doesnt translate well to film

It's the most cliche "book-related" horror theme after Stephen King
Go find something more interesting

kek

it's too shit to take on. No one gives a fuck about space meme monsters except edgy kids.

>Lovecraftian
>This is so scary, so scary that you cant even think about it! I cant even describe it without you shitting your mind and going insane! That is how fucking scary it is, we cant even comprehend what it is, its so unnatural that if I even write the monster's name on this page it will tear the world in shreds and it sleeps in the bottomless deathless and ever dark oceans and its snores share our fucking bones! Also there are niggers in the bayou lol

get off your ass and write your own maybe?

Normies can't handle Lovecraft

youtu.be/6QFwo57WKwg

ALIEN is the most Lovecraftian movie ever made. It evokes the absolute endless darkness, mystery and unspeakable Horror waiting for us to stumble upon them. Hints at things that our minds can barely conceive and doesn't explain shit, slowing your imagination to fill in the details. Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the original story (based upon It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Planet of the Vampires) was a big Lovecraft fan as well as Phillip K. Dick and why his name is on Total Recall. He also Co-wrote Dark Star, John Carpenter's first feature and played Pinback. Dude also Scripted and Directed Return of the Living Dead, my most favorite movie!!!FACT!!!

Not to mention that gigantic red eye storm that's been brewing for thousands of years. Creepy as fuck!!!FACT!!!

H. P. Lovecraft's stories are good.

Lovecraftian horror (regular horror, but with tentacles and Necronomicon references) is shit.

the red eye storm has been getting smaller. Perhaps the demons are losing the battle

Wait is this an actual movie? I'll watch that right now.

Welp that took a turn...

>sounds in space
lmao

Because libshits hate him and are trying to erase his writings

theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image

>The World Fantasy award trophy will no longer be modelled on HP Lovecraft, it has been announced, following a campaign last year that called the author out as an “avowed racist” with “hideous opinions”.

>The change was revealed at the World Fantasy Convention on Sunday, where David Mitchell took the top award, the best novel prize, for The Bone Clocks. It beat titles by authors including Jeff VanderMeer, Robert Jackson Bennett, Jo Walton and Katherine Addison to the best novel prize, with other winners at the Saratoga Springs convention including Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S Tepper, who took life achievement awards.

>But organisers also used the ceremony to announce that this would be the last year that winners would receive a statuette modelled on the face of Lovecraft, Locus magazine reported. No reason was given for the change, and no details have yet been announced about what will replace Lovecraft, but authors including Daniel José Older have expressed delight at the news. “THEY JUST ANNOUNCED THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD WILL NO LONGER BE HP LOVECRAFT. WE DID IT. YOU DID IT. IT’S DONE. YESSSSSSSS,” tweeted Older.

That's exactly what this book was, a collection of short stories written by fan's of Lovecraft. It was all tentacles and Necronomicon.

I for one am sorta over Cthullu-esque things in media. I come from a D&D/tabletop background, so I've literally been saturated with this Lovercraft stuff for most of my nerd life.

I literally don't give a shit anymore, and I don't expect audiences to give a shit either. Better to just borrow lovecraft elements instead of adapting them 1/1

Jupiter will never become a star you fuck

>The writer, who was nominated for best of editor of an anthology for Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, later told the Guardian by email: “If fantasy as a genre truly wants to embrace all of its fans, and I believe it does, we can’t keep lionising a man who used literature as a weapon against entire races. Writers of colour have always had to struggle with the question of how to love a genre that seems so intent on proving it doesn’t love us back. We raised our voices collectively, en masse, and the World Fantasy folks heard us. Today, fantasy is a better, more inclusive, and stronger genre because of it.”

>“I’m glad Lovecraft won’t be the symbol of the World Fantasy award anymore (and did in fact lobby the board directly). It’s a no-brainer,” tweeted VanderMeer, who had been shortlisted for this year’s best novel prize for Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy.

>Last year, Older launched a petition asking for the change. Signed by more than 2,500 people, the petition asked organisers to make the acclaimed African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler the model for the trophy, rather than Lovecraft, because while the creator of the Cthulhu mythos “did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith”, and “many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinion”.

I hate american liberals so damn much ... its time to murder them.

>t. person who doesn't understand Lovecraft

While at the vulgar hipsterized level (especially as regards Cthulhu, which is the only thing the average hipster/ normie knows) you are correct, at the level of his and others actual writing you're a fucking idiot.

The ultimate lovecraftkino has already been made

>“I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him! For grades! This is not about reading an author but about using that person’s image to represent an international award honouring the work of the imagination,” wrote Samatar last year.

>Yesterday, the novelist tweeted: “I see the award statue is going to be changed. Hope everyone can take this as a sign of expansion: the healthy broadening of a world honour.”

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

this triggers libshit nu-males because lovecraft was never some jolly science fiction writer who wrote pieces about atheism on the side that they could take quirky quotes out of, like douglas adams or something

he was essentially just the equivalent of someone who posts on r9k all the time. "oh no better censor him!!"

Even though it's the tentacle shit, this Gargoyles episode always spooked me when I was a kid. It's the one where they have to put on the VR headsets on go into his brother's mind or something. Well anyway towards the end of the episode this portal opens up below their virtual world and these tentacles come out and start pulling shit into the portal/wormhole thing.

Hello there

Just like trump will never be president right? careful friend, jupiter is getting hotter everyday its gravitational pull keeps pulling space debree into it and most of it is just adds more hydrogen... theres a point where it will become too dense and it will fuse gas.

space is hostile and there are many things competing to see who will kill we all first.

This.

>Why is there so little Lovecraftian media?
Niche audience.

>person who doesn't understand Lovecraft
Most people don't, go read a book and stop expecting a movie which you will hate anyway.

I honestly have no idea where to begin with Lovecraft. I want to read his works, but have no idea where to start, or what to bypass. Can any of you anons help me out?

>this triggers libshit nu-males because lovecraft was never some jolly science fiction writer who wrote pieces about atheism
he has like a half dozen essays on atheism

I am terrified of space now

youtube.com/watch?v=KQLQkG64IKU

Welp Sup Forums, we live on a floating rock flying out of our control, our lives rely on fragile systems with hidden expiration dates, it all can end at any moment.

it's neat to think about but it's nowhere near dense enough. The smallest star (16% larger than Jupiter) has a mass 100x Jupiter
it would seriously fuck us up though
youtube.com/watch?v=eMuz1rBVB78

A lot of them are short stories. But I liked "The Colour Out of Space" and "At the Mountains of Madness".

The Colour Out of Space is kind of like what people were joking about "it's something, something you can't even understand". It's a color that people can't comprehend.

>2:50 onwards
wut

Pick up a complete works book and start from page 1

hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/
most of them are short as fuck

can you be any more edgy?

VR lovecraft, dizzy, sick, afraid, atmospheric, disgusted.

Seconding a color from out of space, thats my favorite

At the Mountains of Madness will give you great sci-fi archeology, biology, spooky monster ending, a sweeping cosmic backstory that explains the history of earth before man, ANNNNNNND some of that tasty racism with a really blunt slavery parable.

I think it's the perfect intro story for HPL.

Honestly, there is very little to gain from reading his work. Read some of the more popular ones to get a general understanding if you want, but it's pretty much more or less the same shit packaged in a different scenario.

Don't get me wrong, he created a horror mythos that is extremely interesting in itself, but little of it has to do with his writing, which is for the most part shitty.

>Michael Fassbender as Francis Thurston (narrator)
>Jeremy Irons as George Gammell (narrators uncle)
>Tom Holland as Henry Wilcox (sculptor that had dreams)
>Tom Hiddleston as Jeremy Legrasse (investigator in New Orleans, raided Cthulu cult)
>Patrick Stewart as William Webb (professor who helped out Legrasse)
>Diego Luna as Castro (spic who heard of Cthulu in China)
>Mads Mikkelsen as Gustaf Johansen (dude who saw everything)
>Kate Beckinsale and Emma Watson as shoehorned women
>CGI as Cthulu

I mean come on.

This is true

yeah
also
>downloading reaction images off google and leaving the tumblr filename
smdh tbqh

hey I have this. also have the Edgar Allen Poe one

why the Batman comparison? but yes Bloodborne does Lovecraft proud.

...

Normies: "Oh lovecraft? Yeah I love him, DUDE CTHULU LMAO"

no re-animator and at the mouth of madness are great movies that translated really well

hollywood is just shit

whats that from?

there's always Hellboy comics

youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg

...

that's not at all what lovecraft is about. It's about things that are out of our comprehension and any attempt to figure it out would make us insane. Cthulu is considered a lesser great one

What about conceptual horror? Is it tied to Lovecraft? If anyone has seen the Doctor Who episode Midnight, where some entity takes control of a person and then mimics the speech of others to take control of them eventually, that's something I'm interested in, not say a physical entity but a abstract one, a concept.

it's a meme you dip

>jaws is a descent into madness
>jaws has an unseen monster
have you seen jaws before? the shark appears multiple times on screen and is physically tracked by a buoy for a really long part of the movie. also, there's no descent into madness. the two non-sailors prior to their voyage become more on edge and seaworthy as a result of their experience on the ship, the monster is external, and the monster is defeated by the person who apparently underwent a descent into madness.

Lovecraft done right means unsettling the audience, no toys, and the protagonist either commits suicide or might as well.

The Mound is screamingly cinematic, parts of it have definitely been ripped off, and one part of it resembles an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon.

>a being that if anyone were to even think about it once, it would destroy reality

Then what is the point of even introducing or writing about it, dipshit? Genre fiction is so fucking bad

I always thought that the flat-earth shit that people talk about is kind of Lovecraftian if you begin to consider it. There's actually a dome over the entire planet and everything we think of as being in space in self contained within this dome. It's quite literally a thin veil that separates our known world from an unimaginable space that exists outside of it. Who created it, why did they create it, and what would happen if what ever separates us from the outside gets in? Just thinking about it and accepting it is a major paradigm shift and you'd have to consider everything you know about the working universe to be completely false, and actually discovering such a dome or the edge of the earth would drive people insane.

I don't believe in the flat earth bullshit, but whenever I read someone talking about it I think of it in that way. Someone was spouting off some bullshit about how when the Russians and Americans discovered the dome, they spent decades trying to blow it up with nuclear weapons, and that's what the testing was. I mused, what if someone long ago built that to guard us from something that exists outside, what if that someone is around to protect us and we managed to blow it up. We're in a thin bubble shielding us from unimaginable horrors just beyond the scope of our vision.

Because lovecraftian imagery isn't real imagery. It's a cheat. The words just say that the sight is indescribable and drives people insane.
Any actual depiction of this would fail to live up to what it claims to be. Because what it claims to be is bullshit.

"Lovecraftian" is already being run into the ground exactly like steampunk was.
If done right, it's subtle. Subtle doesn't sell.

The point is the imagery couldn't be expressed by the writer or other people in English. The stories are told about the people who are being tormented by forces beyond scientific comprehension. Fear's essence stems from a lack of understanding and details. I don't fear the dark because I know how it is produced, I generally know what can exist in the dark, and I'm not afraid of anything in my immediate life which inhabits the dark.

You have to understand the time at which his stories were written to really understand the content too.
this is why if you're still monitoring OP

Is this what its really like ive never read him