Not quite sure how they’re gonna pull this off, Lovecraft’s work not really lending itself to a visual medium. But it should be fascinating to see them try.
I agree with you, it’s a type of horror very… literary horror, it works because the way it’s presented in prose. That said, I think both the silent Call of Chutlhu and Whisperer in the Darkness made by amateurs worked well enough.
It will be interested what they do here.
it would work as long as when people are seeing the REALLY bad things we just get their reactions instead of what they are seeing.
At least that reduces the budget. But yeah, this will fall flat. They will provoke some controversy and ratings due to Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia, but they likely won’t use any of the explicitly racist stories anyway. And I agree his horror doesn’t lend itself at all to a non-text presentation. It might be possible to do his dreamland dark-fantasy-adventure stories, but then they would run into an enormous budget problem.
About the third time a Lovecraftian narrator told me that the horrors he witnessed were so indescribably horrific that he wouldn’t be able to describe them to me, I hopped off the train.
I don’t remember that offhand from any of his stories, though I admit I am not a great fan of most of HPL’s horror. But that sounds more like something you’d find in a HPL parody. I’m not saying nothing like that exists in his prose at all, but for the most part I can recall precise descriptions of horrors the narrator witnesses. Occasionally perhaps the narrator’s mind recoils from some extradimensional vista, but he then generally goes on to describe whatever it is anyway… Maybe Shub-Niggurath or some similar manifestation of HPL’s sexual-xenophobic fears might be too horrible to describe, but someone’s face being eaten off, or the hounds of tindalos or the weird congeries of bubbles that is yog-sothoth or the faceless night-gaunts with their horrible tickling fingers (no, really) mostly get full descriptions.
It’s probably fair to say that he only pulled that particular card 3-4 times total, and probably lampshade hung it at least once by going on to describe it well, but it always bugged me. It’s been years (maybe decades) since I read Lovecraft, but when I was into it, man, I was into it. Read a ton of anthologies in a row and then suddenly just kinda lost my taste for his actual prose.
I think HPL can be a great stylist, and I’ve always liked his dreamland stories, but the on-Earth horror never did much for me and his even-more-than-period racism and xenophobia always turned me off. Ironic that he eventually married a Jewish woman, but I gather he was pretty horrible to her sometimes.
I dunno, I think this could be good if handled properly. It depends on what approach they take. If they try and make this about cyclopian horrors rising from the depths and leathery-winged bat creatures (i.e. a SyFy monster series), it’ll probably be pretty bad. I’d rather they riff on the adventure-mystery-culty part of Lovecraftian mythos than try and make direct adaptations of his stories.
Oh, man! I can’t wait for their interpretation of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family”
At least they’ll get the Trump supporters.
I guess that depends whether or not you liked Cool Air or Pickman’s Model from Night Gallery. IIRC they were pretty straightforward utilizing basic make up effects from the time and no CGI. I liked them, YMMV.
Edit: I’d actually like to see a shoggoth using state of the art effects. Maybe a multi part episode of At the Mountains of Madness. Or an update of the horrible Dunwich Horror movie.
Edit 2: Giant albino penguins.
So I suppose I will write this here.
Two days ago I started reading the complete works of Lovecraft. Years ago I read a book with ~15 tales (from memory: Call of Cthulhu, the Rats in the Wall, The Lurking Fear, The Pickerman Model, The Horror at Red Hook, the Silver key, The Strange house in the mist, one in the Pyramids of Egypt, etc) but I know I was still missing 60% of his works. So time to fix that!
For now I had a pair of meh stories, others that were better but maybe they were too obvious, and others that were pretty good. In the latter classification I liked The Horror in the Museum, and the Dunwich Horror. That last one I only wanted to start reading a few pages and in the end I finished it in one go, it gripped me firmly. It was also pretty funny to see the origin of the famous pen & paper RPG, when I saw three investigators from Miskatonic University deciphering a coded journal and going to defeat an invisible alien monster to save the village, one with a long gun, another with a chemical spray and the third with sorcery after an intensive library research, I could see how someone read that and thought party RPG!
With the Call of Cthulhu, I had the random thought of how suitable could be to make an adventure ‘walk simulator’ game out of it, like Dear Esther or Gone Home, just because the heavy reliance of press cuts, journals, nautical logs, physical evidence, scientific logs, written police investigations, etc. You could explore environments and read/heard all that, like the ever present audio logs of other games.
From the tv adaption, I think the most appropriate thing to translate the particular Lovecraft’s writing style and horror would be to present a biased perspective. The camera shouldn’t show an objective, third person view of reality to the viewer, but in a way put us in the role of the affected victims in his stories, that’s what the overloaded Lovecraft’s prose tries to do, so the colors, perspective, the way all looks in the camera should be more horrific, the biased view of the protagonist whose mind is breaking.
I’m thinking the answer is both “no” and “twilight”.
That said, there’s a long history of unwatchable lovecraft video material out there. I did like Dagon (2001 version I think) though.