Cthul-whatnow?

Kuh- thoo-loo.

In order to pronounce it correctly, I would have to pull out your tongue.

Contemporary or Period?

A clear understanding of the mythology, and not just a gimmicky hook. Also, on purely artistic note, I'd like some of Lovecraft's xenophobia and racism to be an element in a Lovecraftian film. Don't be afraid to have a racist character, or tough subject matter, study not just the work of Lovecraft, but his mind as well, it would make the film memorable.

There is an unfortunate fear of Arabs, and Arab-Americans in our culture right now, and the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is an infamous character in the mythos. Take advantage of that, exploit a true fear w/ positive intentions, and your story will have some backbone.

Read Alan Moore's comic "The Courtyard", or "Yuggoth Cultures/Creatures", serious Lovecraftian tales, and probably more suitable in terms of research than a Ghostbusters episode, depending on what you're going for (although the film is very Lovecraftian).

Otherwise just keep reading actual Lovecraft, "The Road to Madness" and "Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and The Macabre" are great collections of his work.
Also watch Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond" for tips on atmosphere if you haven't seen it already.

You don't have to lift the material, just learn from it.

I was on AICN chat once and asked what Cthulu was, about 1 second later there was a link to a shrine of Cthulu, still to this day that cracks me up thinking how lightning quick that reaction was.

i saw a book a while ago entitled Cthulhu 2000, but i dunno much about it, i havent read it

I believe In The Mountains of Madness makes references to it, as does Charles Dexter Ward (which I never actually read come to think of it)

There's also the Dunwich Horror and stuff like that.

I completely disagree with Jackknife that racism is an intrinsic part of catching the essence of Lovecraft's magic. I actually believe some of his greatest works have nothing to do with those aspects of his character (like Dreams in the Witch House, or Pickman's Model). I guess using the same logic you'd have to say any effective attempt at doing Lovecraft would need to contain sexism because of "The Thing on the Doorstep" or would need to exhibit a hatred of fish like in Shadow over Innsmouth or Dagon. The magic of Lovecraft is that he built a mythos that stuck, he had great ideas, and he refined the technique originated (as far as I know) by Arthur Machen, he played it all straight. He did horror fiction as factual accounts of a hidden terror.


EOD

Personally I'd like to see Cthulhu him/itself presented as a truly unknowable, awesomely malign entity, with none of the Derleth-inspired extended mythos aspects. A lot of newer stories take that route, and I feel it softens the shocking, ancient, alien aspect of these creatures when I read how they have wives and children, that they get mad and scared, and are generally the cosmic pantomime villains to the 'Elder Gods' cosmic good guys.

At the other end of the scale, don't just make him a tentacled Godzilla, a mindless monster -- even HPL dropped the ball at the end of CoC, IMO, by having Cthulhu chasing the boat (and losing it!) the way he did.


And one other thing - go for scale and scope. I hate reading stories where he's as big as a house (!) or a boat - there are millions of monsters like that. I've always seen him as a towering impossibility, miles high - really playing up the appalling excesses of these things; their age, their size, their power - that's what really got me hooked on Lovecraft in the first place, and it's always a shame to see lack of vision or imagination tarnishing such fantastic concepts.

What I would love to see most in a Cthulhu-related film is strict adherence to Lovecraft and the amorphous dread that epitomized the best of his work.

I would also like to see someone take back the Mythos from August Derleth and his infamous misquote of Lovecraft: "ALL MY LORE, UNCONNECTED AS THEY MAY BE, ARE BASED IN THE FUNDAMENTAL LORE OR LEGEND THAT THIS WORLD WAS INHABITED AT ONE TIME BY ANOTHER RACE WHO, IN PRACTISING BLACK MAGIC, LOST THEIR FOOTHOLD AND WERE EXPELLED, YET LIVE ON OUTSIDE EVER READY TO TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS EARTH AGAIN". For all the good Derleth did by joining with Donald Wandrei and forming Arkham House, thereby making Lovecraft's work available to new generations and to the large segment of the population who were unfamiliar with WEIRD TALES and the other pulp magazines of the early 20th century, this is a blatant bastardization of Lovecraft's key intent and style. If what Derleth says is true, and the Great Old Ones were expelled for "PRACTISING BLACK MAGIC" by the Elder Gods, why is it that NODENS is the only Elder God ever even briefly mentioned in Lovecraft's work. On the other hand, The Great Old Ones that are directly addressed in Lovecraft's work contain CTHULHU, YOG-SOTHOTH, SHUB-******ATH, AZATHOTH, NYARLATHOTEP, and HASTUR THE UNSPEAKABLE (there are others also). Derleth would have us believe that Lovecraft was building a duality, a "good against evil" type morality play of sorts. While I've not read the 100,000 letters that Lovecraft wrote to his many correspondents, I have read every single work of fiction Lovecraft wrote, and I see not a shred of any dual, good gods vs evil gods activity whatsoever. The more often than not inadequate good going up against the powerful evil of the Great Old Ones is always a flawed human, who succeeds only in stopping the advent of the ancient evil FOR NOW, and destroying or burying the information that could cause The Great Old Ones to remanifest and retake this world, usually at the cost of their lives, their sanity or both. Derleth comes from a very Midwest, Christian mindset in the belief that for every evil, there must by nature be a stronger good to defeat it. Lovecraft, on the other hand, examines the evil and the dire menace coming from it as something that could easily win the conflict. Each Lovecraft protagonist is lucky to win when they do defeat, or more accurately, delay the advent of the Great Old Ones. This is a direct quote from perhaps the longest segment existant in Lovecraft's work from one of HPL's most effective creations, The Necronomicon, as it appears in THE DUNWICH HORROR:

“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substances walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.......As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”

I don't see the petty moralizing or the optimism of Derleth's vision in this quote, nor do I see it in any of Lovecraft's other fiction. I don't see any benign Elder Gods who will save us, nor who have in the past because of the dire "practising of black magic", and this is one of the direct things that makes Lovecraft's fiction so effective: Nobody is going to save us.

Another great disservice done to Lovecraft's work by Derleth is the cheapening some of the greatest of Lovecraft's monstrous creations as "Elementals". According to Derleth (in the preface to TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS: VOLUME ONE) Cthulhu is relegated to a 'water elemental', Hastur the Unspeakable, is likened to an 'air elemental', and Nyarlathotep is stated as an 'earth elemental'. Where is the fire elemental, which would complete Derleth's flimsy treatise? Nowhere to be found in any of Lovecraft's fiction. In fact, Derleth had to invent one, whom he called CTHUGHA in the story THE DWELLER IN DARKNESS.

Also distressing is Derleth's attempts to state an actual galactic location from which the Great Old Ones originated. Since these beings clearly exist beyond space and time, (“...I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth.” (“The Whisperer in Darkness”); “...that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time. (The Dreamquest of unknown Kadath), it is a cheap, sci-fi ploy to place a location in known space from which the Great Old Ones originated.

August Derleth was a friend and long-time correspondent of Lovecraft's and posthumously helped guarantee Lovecraft's rightful place as a cornerstone of Horror fiction, but as a writer, both in terms of facility, technique, and imagination, Derleth is an ant looking up at Lovecraft's elephant.

So by all means, in any creative project dealing with Lovecraft or any of the Cthulhu Mythos, go straight to Lovecraft and don't let Derleth's creative license continue to water down, or misrepresent Lovecraft's brilliant fiction.



EOD

Totally agree. And I'd forgotten about the silly 'Elemental' aspect of Derleth's mythos, which I thought did a wonderful job of taking all these shocking pre-historic blasphemies and turning them into Pokémon.

Wonderful analysis and very astute, EOD.

The only protagonist for good would be some of the human beings, others than that we are left to fend for ourselves in an evil and incompressible universe of vile godlings of immense power.

Thanks, Hellspawn and Ah, Alucard. I'm pretty passionate about this subject, especially when you have Lovecraft being 'quoted' with the Derleth "black magic" line to this day. Michael Slade somewhat recently used it in either Ghoul or Bed of Nails, and in my opinion, to ascribe that quote to Lovecraft is to strip the true power of Lovecraft and to play into the petty hands of Derleth and the lesser Mythos.

Those who have read Lovecraft know, but people who are just now getting into Lovecraft could be easily mislead by all the goofy 'elemental' and 'black magic' angles that Derleth inaccurately plumbed. Let's face it folks, Derleth either did it on purpose to further himself by comparison with a much more important artist or he just didn't understand what Lovecraft was doing at all. Either one is pretty dire, if you ask me.

EOD

I don't recall stating that racism was an "intrinsic" part of Lovecraft's work at all. I simply voiced my desire to see that element of his stories utilized in an interesting manner.

That's a pretty wild misinterpretation EOD.

By all means, please tell me where I was wild in my interpretatoin of:

I would also argue that Abdul Alhazred's race is not terribly important here. He is constantly referred to as the Mad Arab, but is he any more infamous than Wilbur Whately, or any of the other white Lovecraft characters who played at opening the gates and letting the Great Old Ones back in? I agree that our society has a knee-jerk dislike for people of Arabic descent of late, I should know, being married for the last 5 years to a Moroccan woman, but I don't think much of Lovecraft's racism is directed at Arabs. I think blacks and polynesians as well as multiple indigenous peoples suffer much more from Lovecraft's xenophobia, and I feel personally that one of Lovecraft's key psychological trappings was a hatred of humanity in general, especially himself. Look to the numerous scenes in Lovecraft where the protagonist finds he is a monster, as in Pickman's Model or The Shadow over Innsmouth. I think women are given the worst rap by Lovecraft though. It is the extremely rare female character in Lovecraft that isn't evil or ineffectual.

EOD

PS I think I know what you're trying to say, but a socially responsible message about racism in a Lovecraft film would be distracting. I'd be there to see the horror, not axes being ground, however admirable the cause.

You wildly mischaracterized my post by suggesting that I felt Lovecraft's xenophobia was an "the intrinsic element of his stories". I said it was something I'd like to see accentuated out of my own creative interest, not something that was the most important part in the original work.

I certainly agree w/ you on your points, but I'm not so much proposing a "socially responsible" message, just an extra bit of reality to disturb the audience further, put them, their fears, and their prejudices on screen.

Many of the greatest horror films are about something else.

I agree, but it takes genius to do it. I'm talking Cronenberg/Romero genius here, and that unfortunately, is kind of hard to come by.

Re: the above quote, ok. I'm not splitting hairs. I thought you were suggesting the idea that the racist angle was AN element that was central to his work, not THE element. I think it was more an element of his personality that found bits of purchase in his work. I still think he believed Sartre in the quote "Hell is other people", but I'm being guilty of what I am arguing against.

Lovecraft's key element to me is that he writes scary stuff that sticks with you when you find yourself in bed or in a dark room, etc. The man's writing scares me. I've read other writers in the Lovecraft circle and they didn't scare me, even while consciously trying to write a take on a Lovecraft-style story.

Lovecraft's best work contains all the dread of every shadow I've ever looked at nervously at night, of every spider web I've ever mistakenly walked through as a kid, and he takes it one further, you often can't even see these things he's writing about, and he often refuses to describe them when you can, but they're out there, they're strong and they're just waiting.........That's the intrinsic element of Lovecraft's Mythos to me. He's also a good writer, maybe way stiff at times, but he really worked himself into an important voice. He also touched upon science with tales like The Colour out of Space (could that be radiation and its' effects he's writing about in the 1930's?). There are a lot of reason's I dig Lovecraft, but I think the foremost is that he has the ability to actually scare me, and not in a 'jump out and get you kind of way' but like a low mist off the ocean, slow and cold.


My Favorite period Lovecraft adaptation is the PICKMAN'S MODEL episode of Night Gallery, and my favorite modern take on Lovecraft has been FROM BEYOND, despite the unexplained bomb and the fact that it's not much like the short story at all.


EOD

EOD, you disliked Dagon? I loved that movie to death, and the ending especially was absolutely fantastic.

You know, is it possible to misspell Cthulhu? I was looking at this DVD board game by Pressman called "Atmos-Fear" and they spelled it with a K. Is this an error on their part or on purpose if the character is trademarked?

Lovecraft's stories are in the public domain, AFAIK. I think that ktulu thingy is just a mispelling to avoid fucking up the real way of writing it. I know that Metallica already called their song "Call of Ktulu" ages ago, maybe that book took it from there. I dunno

Not at all. I loved it. Really enjoyed it, and there were segments that were nearly action for action tellings of the story of SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (the room scene where Ezra Godden is trying to fix the lock on the door when they're coming to get him). I just preferred FROM BEYOND. I loved Reanimator too, but I think it was a lesser work of Lovecraft's to begin with, apparently he thought the same thing too. But no, in answering your direct question, I really like DAGON. I have a VHS signed by Stuart Gordon that I've practically built a shrine for.



EOD

Lovecraft spelled it CTHULHU, but there were others in the Lovecraft circle that spelled it differently (I think to emulate the differences in cultural takes on the word, while still maintaining the phonetic pronunciation which is KA TOOO LOOO). Hell, he could have called it PETE and wrote it the same way and it still would've been scary.

As for the trademark and so on: It's my understanding that it's public domain, but you never know how that'll work out, especially because ARKHAM HOUSE is still active. Why take a chance when everybody else will still know what you mean?

EOD