John Darnielle had teamed up with Aesop Rock before on the track “Coffee” with fantastic results. This time Rock is remixing a Mountain Goats tune off their new album Heretic Pride with accompanying video by Sketch Theatre artist Nate Frizzell. One can only hope that very soon these two decide to do an entire album together.
A departure from the traditional image of Cthulhu but one that works just as well, making the Old One appear even more alien than usual. I especially like the long, thin neck combined with the bulbous cranium.
When life throws you a terrible curse in which you vomit squid, make calamari. Thanks, Michael!
Yeesh, lady, don’t play with your food. Set is NSFW. Thanks, Karenw!
The beautiful Anna Lucylle sent us a photo of her fantastic, Lovecraftian tattoo; as well as photos of it in its various stages. The ModBlog post contains a wonderfully heated, pedantic discussion on the correct pluralization of “octopus” as well.
Cast A Deadly Spell is the best Lovecraftian film adaptation to date, anyone that argues that point with you either hasn’t seen it or is an imbecile unworthy of your time. The film centers around Phillip J. Lovecraft, a detective in a 1940’s Hollywood where magic and monsters are not only real, but common. Everyone, from housewives to CEO’s use magic, everyone except Phillip J. Lovecraft that is. It is my dubious honor to present you with the film, a favorite of mine for years, in its entirety, for today’s Cthursday thanks to the piratical inclinations of some benevolent soul. Don’t say we never gave you anything.
Yesterday I called into question the effectiveness of illustrator Rowena Morrill in capturing the likeness of Wilbur Whateley for the cover of the paperback edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. However, ectomite Nick Herold was having none of my shenanigans and, strapping on his neck-beard, brought the pain, pointing out that the fault did not lay with Morrill or her editor but with Lovecraft and my own, preconceived notions:
That’s actually pretty accurate to Lovecraft’s description of Wilbur Whateley. If I may quote:
“Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it. “
You smell that? That’s the burning smell of emasculating pwnage!
A little bit of interactivity for your Cthursday afternoon. What better way to while away a rainy day in Arkham than a bit of old fashioned fun? Turn off those 360’s, unplug that TV, and put down that iPod! Then commence to putting on what will likely be the most disturbing puppet show in existence. Click the image for the full size cutouts and your very own personal gateway into searing madness.
Rowena Morrill’s illustration for the cover of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, paperback, published by HBJ Jove, 1978. Not a very Lovecraftian image to be sure but I can imagine the editor requesting a picture for some horror collection, just so long as it looked “crazy monstery” at which point the illustrator started leafing through their collection of National Geographic back issues for reference.
The power of Ectomo is both wondrous to behold and terrifying to contemplate, as any ectomite knows all too well. Certainly it is a wonder closet of dazzling proportions but it also has a dark and unholy box perched on its top shelf, high up where little ones can’t get to it. Things lurk in this neat little package, things not fit for the minds of man, let alone his spawn.
One must assume, however, that some will find their way into Ectomo’s stash, perhaps when it was left out on the table; after all, these things do happen and the occasional moment of forgetfulness can be forgiven. Not so in this case, however. No, faithful readers, no in this case we must turn our stern eye of judgment toward one Nathan Myers, a gentleman with a wanton disregard for human life and a destroyer of innocence. Mr. Myers is responsible for the most heinous of crimes he has shown his no doubt wonderful and carefree eight year old daughter Ectomo’s secrets and wrought untold damage.
Once exposed to the tentacled, crawling blasphemy contained therein his once lighthearted progeny at once fell into a deep morass of babbling, incoherent madness; her eyes, no doubt, displaying the same dual irises portrayed in In The Mouth of Madness. Her mind shattered, she shuffled off and immediately took up a waxy writing implement and began to work feverishly, trying desperately to put on paper the horror that now assaulted her mind’s eye in a futile attempt to make sense of it.
The product of this sick experiment was this piece, entitled “Sun Goes Like This”. As you can see, clearly the dank recesses of Ectomo have wormed their way into every aspect of the poor little girl’s world, rendering everything a tentacled nightmare. A parade of transmogrified beasts — Shoggoth, perhaps — travel through an empty wasteland under the scorching gaze of a mindless, Cthulhoid sun, led by what appears to be a banished Innsmouth resident upon a R’lyehan death-horse. Truly a bleak and terrible world and a warning to all: the power of Ectoplasmosis is mighty and not to be wielded by those who would prove irresponsible. Take care, Nathan Myers, your daughter’s lost sanity rests on your head.
Are you drawing comics for Marvel? Do you need reference for someone being attacked by a tentacle demon? Swipe it from an adult magazine! Thanks, bela!
Over at io9, the incredible Geoff Manaugh of BLDG Blog analyzes the sanity-breaking influences of Lovecraft’s Eldritch Architecture:
In another hallucination, for instance, the man stands on the “titanic flat roof” of a massive dream-structure, from which he sees “almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide… Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the gray, steamy heavens.”
He even stumbles across “aberrant piles of square-cut masonry” and “dark cylindrical towers,” where “fungi of inconceivable size” grow amidst “great jungles of unknown tree ferns.”
It’s as if the surrealist montages of Max Ernst have been combined with Le Corbusier’s Ideal City.
Even if you don’t read the entire article, the gallery of images featuring R’lyehian towers hulking ominously over the squirming tentacle hummus of alien worlds out of time is worth the click through.
Part of me feels that the title should read S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters!!! as the exuberant enthusiasm that the phrase “Cthulhu Monsters” evokes is deserving of the additional punctuation.
Lovecraft written by Hans Rodionoff and Keith Giffen with art by Enrique Breccia, is a fictional take on H.P. Lovecraft life, combining it with his fiction. It supposes that Lovecraft’s father actually possessed a copy of the Necronomicon which gave him visions of very real, otherworldly horrors and allowed him to travel to an alternate Providence, known as Arkham, where he was known as Randolph Carter.
The graphic novel has received someharsh criticism for its portrayal of Lovecraft, specifically his sexuality which, in turn, leads to some mis-dated references to events in his life. The authors seem to take Lovecraft’s inferred, underlying misogyny and expand it into a fear of women and sex, turning his creations into psychosexual representations of feminine nether-regions.
This seems only as annoying as the reader makes it, in much the same way that the film Amadeus can be enjoyed as fiction or reviled as an affront to historical accuracy and Mozart’s legacy. Personally, I find it more interesting that the authors felt the need to change the name of Lovecraft’s cat from “Nigger Man” to “Necro Man” in an attempt to seemingly clean up his image. Needless to say that they do not quote his poem On the Creation of Niggers either.
Purported to be a “lost” film by director Peter Rhodes, a friend of the late H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods is a short, animated film done in the style of silhouetted paper cut-outs. The film is quite well done and while it is nigh impossible to render the gods of Lovecraft’s tales, considering his maddeningly vague descriptions, the film does an excellent job, using a hypnotic, kaleidoscope effect that gives one, at least, a sense of being unbalanced. The film was featured at the most recent H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and comes to us from Subterranea Entertainment. It will be available on a future volume of Lurker Films’sThe H.P. Lovecraft Collection
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
