My Top 5 Favorite Lovecraftian Movies

When I was a teenager, I read my fill of H.P. Lovecraft, the man responsible for the Cthulhu Mythos and the current dust-up about the World Fantasy Award statue. Widely considered unfilmable for literally decades, we’ve only recently begun to see his weird and uniquely bleak visions translated into cinematic fever dreams.

To be completely fair, Lovecraftian cinema has been in effect since the 1960’s; it’s just not been done very well. Compromises were made in nearly every movie bearing Lovecraft’s name, some of them so egregious that it makes one wonder why they even bothered in the first place.

I think the best movies that encapsulate Lovcraft’s themes, tropes, and ideas tend to be the original movies made with a Lovecraftian sensibility; this notion that the more you know about the things just outside our consciousness, the more insane it makes you. This is an effective horror motif, and done correctly, like many of the movies below, it’s some of the most effective scares in book or movie form.

Our Political Climate: Elvis Clones, Area 51 and the Necronomicon

In the days of my misspent youth, I was fascinated with conspiracy theories. My first, and favorite, was of course, Area 51 and the Roswell UFO crash. After all, I was a child of the seventies and space was on every kid’s brain. UFOs and governmental cover-ups found their way into all of the popular television shows of the day. Where do you think Mork and Mindy came from?

I was too young to hear about the faked moon landing conspiracy theory that eventually found its way into that great O.J. Simpson vehicle, Capricorn One. It’s probably just as well. Whatever marginal entertainment value the idea of a faked space program contained, there was just too much facts, evidence, and truth to give it much credence.  I think that’s part of what makes a good conspiracy theory. There has to be a lot of interesting coincidences, or incidents that can’t be explained, or questions that have no answers, in order to be really compelling.

VanderMeer's Weirdness and the Lovecraftian Zeitgeist

I just read an excellent post by New Weird champion Jeff VanderMeer regarding the pervasive and clinging influence of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction on the modern Weird Tale. It's a thoughtful post, and I recommend you check it out. Jeff made several good points that I want to speak to. Lovecraft was recently (and perhaps rightly) canonized into the American Literary pantheon, where he joins fellow pulp author Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others. With this indoctrination came a flurry of critics and reviewers who took gleeful aim at Lovecraft's exposed backside and planted their boots firmly. Call him a racist, sure, but it doesn't stop him from being widely read, nor from joining the ranks of authors that includes Jack London. Most people--make that, most free thinking people--are able to contextualize what they read and account for situations and language that are outside of our modern experience. Were that not the case, we'd never get through Heart of Darkness. Or Huckleberry Finn. And I don't see those books coming down off of the Classics wall, either.

So, Lovecraft is here to stay. But what are we really getting for our money? I'll tell you what we're not getting. We're not getting his writing style (like we did with, say, Raymond Chandler). We're not getting his driving, rhythmic prose (Lovecraft was more interested in a pile-up of words to create a sense of dread). We're sure not getting any kind of enlightened or original thinking regarding, um, anyone not a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. So, what's left?

We get Cthulhu. That's the takeaway for most people. And honestly, it's really the only thing worth taking. Subtract the Cthulhu Mythos from Lovecraft's corpus, and what's left? "From Beyond," "Herbert West: Reanimator," and a handful of Dreamlands books that owe more to Lord Dunsany than anything else.

The Cthulhu Mythos is Lovecraft's invented mythology of vast, mathematically improbable aliens who are locked in an eons-old struggle for supremacy, and who are so unfathomable to humanity that the more we find out about them, the more we realize we're not the center of the universe, and thus the more we go insane. It's this idea that make Lovecraft ideal reading for any teenager with entitlement issues. What could be scarier for a fifteen year old but to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them?

But it's become much more, and thus, a lot less, than that. For all of the other Mythos stories that Lovecraft wrote, the eponymous Cthulhu rules the roost. He (it) was the subject of only one story, "The Call of Cthulhu," but that story has torn free of his wood pulp tomb and taken on a ubiquity that would make Justin Bieber envious.

Cthulhu has become a self-generating meme, a thought bomb that infects all aspect of popular culture as generic symbol of ultimate evil. And the stuff you can buy to show that you're in on the joke is too numerous to mention: dice bags, t-shirts, glassware, ski masks, books, games, comics, music, stickers, and so much more. It's enough to make you go crazy. Yeah, I went there.

I know that the vast proliferation of Cthulhu merchandise out there really chaps S.T. Joshi's ass; here's a guy who campaigned for over a decade to bring Lovecraft's work into an academic and more respectable light. Imagine how he feels whenever he sees a pair of Cthulhu house slippers at a convention. Or the eleven-thousandth bumper sticker that says "Cthulhu 2012: Why Vote For the Lesser of Two Evils?" A slogan, by the way, that has been around at least since 1988. I know because I had that bumper sticker on my Volkswagon Beetle. What scared the hell out of a generation of authors and readers is now a throwaway joke. No, worse, it's the punchline to a throwaway joke.

I think I know exactly where Jeff is coming from in his article--maybe not so much from pop culture and a little more towards reading and writing. He writes: 

The shadow of Lovecraft blots out and renders invisible so many better and more interesting writers.  The point isn’t to reject Lovecraft, but to see Lovecraft with clear eyes and to acknowledge that weird fiction should not and simply cannot begin and end with one vision, created by a man who passed away in 1937.

And he's 100% correct. I think just about everyone went through, or will go through, a Lovecraft phase. I think it's somewhat necessary, because so much of Lovecraft has permeated the pool of influences. How much of it sticks on you, and what you make of it, of course will vary greatly. What made those initial stories so revolutionary was the fact that no one else in the 1920s and 1930s, with the possible exception of Harry Stephen Keeler, was thinking the way Lovecraft was thinking. Those stories took us to a place in Lovecraft's head space that was creepy and frightening to visit. I think that's a defining characteristic of what comprises a weird tale--it's getting into a head space, or the nexus of two seemingly incongruous trains of thought, and watching them blow up into one another.

There's a literary term that is bandied about in the Texas SF/F community: Texas Weird. It signifies that, without exception, we're going somewhere that no one else thought to go to because we're not in the same head space as the author. This applies whether you're reading Scott Cupp, or William Browning Spencer, or Joe Lansdale.

I know there's other examples galore. I merely used Texas Weird because it was close at hand. Reliance on Lovecraft as one of the ping pong balls in the giant metal bingo hopper of your imagination is fine. When you start using this formula:

Nerdy Bookish Guy + Strange Old Tome x monster with unpronounceable name /

 Guy goes nuts = cornball ending

Then you have lost the fight already. This is tired thinking and it was played out when Lovecraft was still alive. He lived to actually interact with and indulge his pastichers. Hell, he encouraged them. The only one of his correspondents who actually got the substance of what Lovecraft was trying to do was Robert E. Howard in his story, "The Black Stone," and Lovecraft said so himself. Everyone else copied the plot points and changed the names like a Great Old Ones Mad Libs game. And yes, I'm talking about Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and so many of the other writers on Lovecraft's Christmas card mailing list.

But that's not the problem, not any more. The problem is that Cthulhu Mythos fiction has become its own genre. Think about it. There are rules, expectations, conventions. We expect certain things to happen, and they do. It's sad, really, when you think about it.

Jeff also wrote:

Part of moving past Lovecraft’s influence is also to acknowledge that his definition of “the weird” isn’t as applicable to modern weird — that, in essence, we need a new manifesto, even if it is a fragmented and various one: a kind of anti-manifesto in that the need here is to explore the boundaries, the interstices, as well as the center.

I think it's pretty easy to come up with a non-Lovecraftian weird tale canon that includes him as one of the many authors who contributed over the years. Certain stories from my dim and distant past come instantly to mind. Stephen King's "Lawnmower Man," for example, really disturbed me when I first read it. So did Clive Barker's "New Murders in the Rue Morgue." Both of these shorts take a very left of center approach and when you get to the reveal, you never see it coming. They are, in a sense, traditional horror stories, if you look at them as a series of beats. But their content is what makes them so weird.

Of course, your mileage will vary on the above, but I know you can think of other examples where you read the story and it was just so foreign and so obvious an idea at the same time that it literally bounced around in your head for a while. That's what good weird fiction should do. Kelly Link does it, and does it well. So does Jeff. There are a number of modern-day practitioners of the weird tale, and so many more waiting to take a shot. But as long as people are making and buying Cthulhu plushies, this will be an uphill battle.

Cthulhu Beer (My Dark Secret)

I used to work for Chessex Manufacturing, out in Berkeley, California as their editor in chief for their creative division. It was one the coolest, and also one of the most frustrating jobs I ever had. I won't go into it here, because it's a tale best told over beer, and with some help from my friend Weldon Adams, who was there with me. The story is more of a performance piece, really. It requires props and a brief intermission for a costume change.  Ask me about it at a convention sometime.

But that's not why I called you here today. I am coming clean about something that has taken on a kind of cool cult status in popular culture. I'm the guy who originated Cthulhu barware. I know that seems like a small distinction of note, but bear with me. I'll try to make it relevant.

Chessex Manufacturing was making etched glasses, among other things, in the mid to late 1990s. Stuff like Vampire: The Masquerade wine glasses with the creepy ankh logo on them. This was in addition to their regular line of gaming accessories, dice, battle mats, dice, vinyl book covers, dice, gaming bric-a-brac, dice lead miniature cases, dice, paint, dice, and oh yeah, speckled dice. 

Weldon was in charge of research and development, and that job was only slightly more glamorous than my job title of editor in chief. He and I together worked on roughly 75% of the line projects together in some way. He had a few of his own things going, as did I, but since we lived and worked together, there was a lot of cross-contamination. Anyway.

As was the usual deal back then, we needed to put out something new. Some new product. Something to generate cash, and quick. And so we were all feeling the pressure. Weldon mentioned that he'd like to do something with the glassware. We'd already made Vampire clan glasses to go with the T-shirts, and there were some coffee cups with biohazard printed on them (we didn't come up with that), and those projects were pretty easy to do. But what? Weldon wanted to do pint glasses, but that wasn't really a Vampire-ish thing. Hey, we needed new glasses for the apartment. What can I tell you?

I don't know where the idea came from, but I first suggested fake beer labels with a cthuloid slant to them, but played straight, as if they were actual beers from an actual tavern--and Weldon said, "you mean, like the Whateley Ale House?" Perfect. So, off we go, and since I was all hepped up with the Lovcraftian references, I worked with our house artist, Chris McGee, to design three different logos: Arkham Pale Ale, Dunwich Dark, and Innsmouth Stout (which had the awesome slogan, "Taste the Taint"). We designed them to look like real beer labels, and as an afterthought, Weldon suggested a pitcher with the Whateley Ale House logo--a dancing satyr.

We made sets out of three glasses and a pitcher, and also offered the glasses for sale separately. The sets were limited to five hundred and were signed and authenticated as actual barware from this non-existent brew pub. Everyone liked the logos, so we also offered them as T-shirts.

The powers-that-be got their wish. The sets sold--in fact, they oversold and had to allocate them. Cool. Ditto the glasses and the T-shirts. It was one of the top selling lines that month. We shipped everything to the game stores across the country, and the products were instantly sucked up as if with a Dyson Sphere.

And that's my story. Chessex never went back to print on any of them. In fact, shortly after that, both me and Weldon left the company and they changed hands several times. Chessex manufacturing is still around, making dice, paints, cases, and so forth. But they haven't made anything that cool in a long, long time.

Now other people have made barware, but I don't think theirs is as cool as ours was. I have always loved the idea of a shirt or a glass that, if you aren't a geek, looks completely legitimate to them. These beer labels did that.

Years later, at an ArmadilloCon, a friend of a friend was introduced to me, and he was wearing a Dunwich Dark T-shirt. I hadn't seen one since I was in California, and when I told him that I had designed that, he practically fell to his knees to thank me. The shirt, he informed me, was responsible for a lot of his geek cred. In fact, he confided, he also had the Arkham Pale Ale shirt, but he'd stored it in his garage and some rats got ahold of it...which, if you know your Lovecraft, makes the shirt one hundred times cooler. He still wore that one on special occasions. I didn't ask what those were.

Curious, I went home and looked up the barware and was shocked to find it selling for over a hundred bucks at online auctions. If you have any of these, hold on to them. They are legit collector's items. And here's the rub: I lost my set of glasses in a move. Weldon never even got a set to begin with. Of all the stuff I've ever worked on, those slipped through my fingers. But at least I can show you what the logos looked like. I think they hold up. These were scanned off of the glasses themselves, hence the quality, but you get the idea.

Looking back over this post, I see now that I failed to make it relevant in any way, shape or form. It just comes off as self-indulgent. Sorry about that. I was very excited to find these logos online, having not seen them in over a decade, and wanted to share them with you.

At least now you know what I want for Christmas!

The Finn’s Wake PlugTastic All-Geek Christmas List of Love

I know, I know. We’re hard to buy for. How many of us have been handed gift cards for bookstores with an apologetic shrug from some well-meaning friend or relative? It’s only slightly less difficult when geek buys for geek, because as you know, one cannot cross the streams of another geek’s interest without winding up buried in evil marshmallow fluff. So to speak.

Consider this, then, to be an idea-generating list, literally bristling with someone for everyone, and nothing too unreasonable in price, either. I know times are tough. As an added bonus, most of what’s listed here is either pimping my own work or touting the abilities of my friends and fellow creative types. Truth! 

One final note: I know that most of the links below go to Amazon.com. Please don’t consider that to be an endorsement, but rather where to click for more detailed information. Try to buy these things locally if you can, rather than lining the pockets of giant faceless corporations who may or may not be a front for some kind of Cthulhu cult. I’m just saying.

Cthulhu Gloom by Atlas Games

Speaking of Cthulhu cults...Are you kidding me? Take Gloom, one of my favorite card games ever, and make a fully-Cthulhu-ized version of it? You can be the Whately family? Argh! NEED-GAME-NOW!  Perfect for the Lovecraft fan that you know, and brand new so you know they don’t have it yet.

Whisky Stones from Think Geek

Cocktail culture is still an “in” thing, and so if you have a whisky or bourbon aficionado on your list, here’s a cool stocking stuffer for them—eternal ice! Yep, these things give new meaning to “on the rocks.”

A Song of Fire and Ice 2012 Calendar by John Picacio

Oh, my, this is the goods, folks. My buddy John Picacio is an award-winning artist and he trained his wonderfully-evocative eye on the characters you love to hate, and hate to love, in George R.R.Martin’s epic series. Let this calendar carry you over until A Game of Thrones starts up on HBO next April.

The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer and S.J. Chambers

I’ve got friends all up in this book, from Rick Klaw to Jess Nevins. And they are all smarty-pants, too. This book has been really well received and makes a great companion or an introduction to the arts movement that is steampunk.

Dreams in the Fire edited by Mark Finn and Chris Gruber

This great collection of fiction and poetry, gathered from the members of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, past and present, does double duty. It’s the perfect gift for any Robert E. Howard fan in your life, and also buying a copy helps support the care and upkeep of the Robert E. Howard house. A spectacular collection of fresh stories, written in the blood and thunder style that Howard pioneered, and in a wide variety of genres that Howard himself made popular.

iZombie  by Chris Roberson

Chris Roberson’s smash hit is available in trade paperback form for those of you with discriminating geeks in your life. Great for both geeks and geekettes! And if you don’t like zombies, Chris has written about a million other comics for you to check out, as well.

Midwinter & The Office of Shadow  by Matthew Sturges

Both of these novels are excellent and made me love elves again. Matt reinvented the idea of a fantasy novel and turned high-born epic fantasy into a ground-pounding adventure where the stakes purely political and no less dangerous.

King Kong Old Time Radio Drama by the Violet Crown Radio Players

This one hour program, done in the style of old time radio, makes a great gift for the Gorilla-phile in your life. Celebrate the return of Austin’s premiere old time radio troupe in 2012 with this great stocking stuffer! Includes the hit single “Don’t Shoot that Monkey Down.”

Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory is one of those writers that other writers want to throttle. He’s got fresh takes on familiar ideas and his prose is seemingly effortless. Raising Stony Mayhall takes a very familiar and popular horror trope and turns it on its ear. A wonderful book, like everything Daryl does.

Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham

Even if you’re not reading Bill’s hit series Fables (and why aren’t you? Do you not like things that are great?) you will love this book. It’s a grand old adventure, the kind you can only read for the first time at that impressionable age, and it’s also a glorious meditation on the nature of fictional characters. What happens when we close the covers of our favorite books?

Road Trip by Mark Finn

The stranger on the side of the road doesn't know much, but he's pretty sure he's not Elvis. The baby driving the car has his own set of problems, but that won't keep him from helping a fellow traveler out. Now they are on a journey of discovery in the only thing that makes sense to either of them: a 1963 pink Cadillac... Originally published in the now out of print Gods New and Used, this tenth anniversary edition has been updated and edited by the author and is now available as a stand-alone novella.

Back to the Future: the Card Game by Looney Labs

From the makers of Fluxx and Chrononauts comes this really elegant card game that completely captures the feel of the Back to the Future trilogy. Set up is minimal, and rules mastery only takes a few minutes. Best of all, it’s as replayable as the movies are rewatchable. Good for the movie buff and the games buff on your list.