THE DUNWICH HORROR
I imagine that Lovecraft’s tendency to devote more words to telling his reader how scared he or she should be than to describing the thing to be feared posed a problem to those filmmakers initially assigned the task of bringing his work to the screen. After all, until the advent of modern J-Horror — whose sensibility is pretty much right in line with Lovecraft’s — the common wisdom would have been that you were supposed to scare your audience by showing them something scary, rather than by just showing them a bunch of people being scared, or, even worse, showing a bunch of people talking about how potentially scary some vaguely defined thing might be if it it actually existed. Furthermore, such filmmakers might understandably conclude that a film whose every character was in a constant state of near-wordless cowering for no clear reason might quickly forfeit audience interest.
#1 by Blake Matthews on October 24, 2008 - 6:29 pm
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“If there does not exist somewhere a porn parody written in Lovecraftian prose…then the internet truly has no reason to exist.”
One of the posters at the BMMB mentioned that he/she got a story or two published in a magazine called “Cthulhu Sex”, whose archives were (and maybe still are) on the internet somewhere.
#2 by lyzard on October 24, 2008 - 8:29 pm
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I must have been very young the first time I saw this, because I remember going around afterwards doing that thing with my hands that Dean Stockwell does at my brother, and you can’t do that wearing glasses. I wonder how much of it I understood? – or perhaps more to the point, I wonder how much it was cut?
#3 by El Santo on October 25, 2008 - 2:19 am
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“If there does not exist somewhere a porn parody written in Lovecraftian prose…then the internet truly has no reason to exist.”
I used this joke once before, but what the hell…
“What eldritch evil lurked within those bleach-bespecked jeans I hesitated to imagine, yet I felt myself compelled as ever, in spite of all my fears and better angels, to pull back the veil of zippered denim and gaze full upon the face of the unnameable. With infinite trepidation, I loosed the brass-toothed fastenings, and oh– such cyclopean abominations are not for mortal beings to contemplate! Still, the sick-making goading of my mad libido drove me on, and I coupled with the noisome Thing beneath the gibbous moon, cackling in damned abandon ’til my reason slipped its moorings, and I knew not where nor even who I might have been.”
#4 by KeithA on October 27, 2008 - 4:02 pm
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I have now read your passage, El Santo, and it fills me with such nameless dread that I can scarce compose myself to grapple with the meaning of what I have read.
#5 by Todd on October 28, 2008 - 10:03 am
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I’m moved by the overwhelming response to my call-out for Lovecraftian erotica. Not only was there El Santo’s amazing contribution to the form, but also Blake’s reference and, in the comments section of the article itself, Houseinrlyeh’s link to a queasy cornucopia of Old Ones-themed smut. Thanks to all of you, I shall never want for Cthulu porn again.
#6 by Cabal on October 31, 2008 - 2:16 pm
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>>Thanks to all of you, I shall never want for Cthulu porn again.
And thus is Nyarlathotep’s soul-shattering ultimate plot brought one step close to fruition.