One thing about Lovecraft, though, is that, not sharing the man's considerable hangups, I don't really find his works scary. The best description of HPL I've ever read (can't remember the source) is "he doesn't write scary stories, he writes stories about people who are scared." That being said, I think the one story he wrote which I find genuinely unsettling is about the slow disintegration of an isolated New England family, a theme which is also that of the scariest book I have ever read.
Most of the time, though, I find HPL to be funny, and I'm not the only one. Some of the best HPL take-offs are "Muzski's" hilarious Tintin/Lovecraft mash-ups.
Another hilarious send-up is DrFaustusAU's wonderful Dr. Seuss/Lovecraft mash-up. Hilarious, though true to the source material.
Also very true to the source material (it's The Shadow Over Innsmouth condensed into a hilarious one-and-a-half minutes, so the whole video is one huge spoiler) is It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen:
Another funny take on the Old Gent from Providence's work is The Casting Call of Cthulhu (the production team has done several funny Lovecraftian shorts):
Confession time, I think the actress who played "Stacy Gilman" in the video is dark, smallish, and very good-looking... girls who are gilly drive me silly.
Yeah, I love Lovecraft, but I find his writings more funny than horrifying. If I were to have an opportunity to do a Lovecraft adaptation, it would be a workplace comedy based on The Shadow Out of Time, in which (***MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW***) the day-to-day frustrations of the captive minds laboring in the Great Library are mined for LULZORZ:
Yeaahhhh, Wingate, if we could possess your body for another two, three years, that'd be great. Mmmm-kay?
I love this time of year. Non-stop cheesy horror films!
ReplyDeleteI read all the Lovecraft novels when I was younger.
ReplyDeleteDidn't have a clue what his politics were...
~
You're a fan of Stross, right...?
ReplyDeleteIs That first video from Robyn Hitchcock, BBBB?
ReplyDeleteI clicked to "The Thing on the Doorstep" & now await some smart-ass to type "The Thing on the Desktop."
ReplyDeleteI love this time of year. Non-stop cheesy horror films!
ReplyDeleteHorror films about cheese? Must refer to casu marzu...
Didn't have a clue what his politics were...
He was one of those "old New England" WASPy types who wasn't too keen on the new immigrants. He wasn't too fond of the GOP, though:
As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
You're a fan of Stross, right...?
I really dig his "Laundry" novels. I need to put up reviews of the second and third ones.
Is That first video from Robyn Hitchcock, BBBB?
No, but Robyn's all about the macabre.
I clicked to "The Thing on the Doorstep" & now await some smart-ass to type "The Thing on the Desktop."
There's an app for that...
Related.
"The Shadow Over the Litter Box"