Poll: Do you actually find Lovecraftian horror scary?

[DudeistBelieve]

Haven't read lovecraft but I've been on a Eldritch Abomination kick lately after playing Earthbound.

I keep thinking about the Ants in my yard. To them, I am an eldritch abomination. I'm all powerful. My strength is immeasurable. But I don't give a second thought to their lives or existence until they start to annoy me, at which point... can of raid.

I suppose you gotta look at it from the right mindset. If you were ever the type of person that ever struggled with meaning or purpose to life, the idea that were not the center of the universe is kinda mindblowing and powerful.

Scary isn't the right word... It's... Fantastic and Amazing and Horrible and Scary. And the indifference is just the acceptance of how cruel everything is. Think about that the can of raid, how fucking banal is it that we kill sometimes whole colonies of a LIVING ORGANISM because it annoys it.

Sure it's just an ant, which it is. But we also know life itself in our universe is so astronomically rare. Yet we don't care.

And I'm not saying we should care, but can you imagine if our entire universe was wiped out by some other dimensional being because it was in his way? Or spoiling his carpet? Think of your loved ones, the people you care about, all those little things we think matter so much... Nope, gone. With not even a shrug.

Things get even worse when you start to consider the many worlds theory, that if we have free will our lives are still pointless because in another world we made a different choice. And the alternative is, there is no Free Will...

Like I said, it's not scary but it is certainly... Well eye opening, festering as someone said.

 

[happyninja42]

Whether or not you personally find his work frightening will probably depend on your own outlook. In your case, it probably says that you're somewhat of an optimist : )

Yeah, that would be a pretty good way to describe me in general. xD But it's cool, I don't have any issue with people liking his work, or finding it disturbing/scary/creepy/etc. It just doesn't really do it for me, and for a decent number of other people too it seems, by the poll results. xD

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Ok so, I just don't get it. Granted, I've never actually read any of Lovecraft's work, but I've sure as hell become intimately familiar in it by pop culture osmosis. I know who Cthulhu is, and Haster, and Nyarlothotep, though I'm probably spelling that wrong. I know their general concept "Evil personified from beyond reality that is just so terrifyingly alien it drives you made to gaze upon them"....but they just don't. I don't find them at all scary. Maybe it's just over saturation, since everyone that tries to be a legit horror tries to go for something Lovecraftian. But I just find them to be tentacle monsters, and sorry but I've seen plenty of those. They don't trigger anything at all scary, and telling me that they are so scary as to drive me mad, doesn't actually make them scary.

So, do you actually find them freaky? Or the concept of them at least? If so, why?

**EDIT** Since this has been brought up multiple times, let me clarify something here, instead of quoting the posts over and over. I'm aware it's more than just tentacle monsters. I'm aware that the mood/theme of his work is the insignificance of humanity in a vast universe. People have replicated this concept a bajillion times, so while I might not have read a specific HP Lovecraft story (though I might have, I honestly can't recall), I've read enough work inspired by his flavor of horror to understand the mood of it. I just don't find it scary. I mean, if that's the main thrust of his work, the "omgurd, we're sooooo tiny in this universe, doesn't that freak you the fuck out?!" Well, my answer is "No, no it doesn't." I dunno, maybe it's the amateur astronomer in me, I don't find the vastness of the cosmos scary, I find it fascinating. And considering the results of the poll so far, I'm apparently not alone in this thought. Which is what I wanted to find out. xD

So, the thing about Lovecraft, is that you have to read it. I'm not scared by Silent Hill 2, and you want to know why? Because I never played it. You can't absorb horror by 'pop culture osmosis.' Horror is entirely dependent on atmosphere, and Lovecraft was brilliant at drawing you into his twisted realm of subconscious fear.

Read "The Call of Cthulhu," then read "Dagon," then read "The Colour out of Space." I don't read much horror, but I am an English major so I like to say I know what I'm talking about when I tell you that when I read Lovecraft for the first time last year, I was struck by how effectively he could create a mood.

The draw of Lovecraft's work isn't just the existential dread that has come up in every reply here. It's fair enough if you don't find that concept horrifying. But Lovecraft did, and if you read him, he can convince you that he's right.

 

[CaitSeith]

I don't find them at all scary. Maybe it's just over saturation, since everyone that tries to be a legit horror tries to go for something Lovecraftian.

I was like you. I haven't read any novel and similarly felt a little over-saturated to find it scary. Nevertheless it was fascinating. But then I played Song of Saya (Saya No Uta), a horror visual novel that may not be strictly Lovecraftian; but it shares enough elements to make it comparable.

Spoiler: Uncanny, distasteful and grotesque SPOILERS: Click at your own risk!

The premise is that after a car accident and an experimental brain operation, the main protagonist no longer sees the world as everyone else. Instead it sees it, hears it, feels it, smells it and tastes it like a hellish version made of flesh and guts, and every other people like living repugnant masses of rotten meat with tentacles and distorted voices. And he is pretty aware of what happened. But he doesn't want to become a lab rat, so in public he pretends everything is normal, even if he can barely stand the presence of those monstrous beings he used to call "friends". The only thing that keeps him going in that world of constant torture is the only person he still sees (hears, smells and feels) as a human: a friendly girl named Saya.

I think at this point you can pretty much guess the twist: Saya is actually an eldritch abomination with little regard for human life (except for the protagonist). Any normal person who lays his eyes on one of her grotesque creations (or directly on herself) goes insane, leaving mental scars for the rest of his life (if he survives). Only the protagonist's distorted perception protected him from that fate, which makes his slow descend into madness (to the point of becoming cannibal) sadly ironic.

Something that I clearly omitted was the sex scenes. Because the idea of having consensual sex with an eldritch horror isn't disturbing at all...

After playing that, I got much more interested in reading material actually made by Lovecraft. I'm just waiting for my tests to end the next week, so I have some more free time.

 

[Dalisclock]

But honestly, that makes them less scary to me. That they fuck our reality by accident just, well makes it all accidental. Like a human stepping on an ant hill. Sure, the act of them stepping on my hill is scary, but not them. They're just as uninvolved in the destruction as a rock smashing into my hill.

That's a pretty scary concept in itself, wouldn't you say? Makes humanity seem insignificant and helpless by comparison, as we regard... well, ants, to steal your analogy. It's scary to think we're as vulnerable as ants. I think that's a big part of the success of Lovecraftian horror.

I think for a lot of people, it's the refutation of the egocentric view humanity, or most humans, have of themselves. We're used to thinking of ourselves as the top of the food chain, the center of the universe. The only thing that can threaten us is ourselves(or other humans).

Lovecraft's work is basically "Guess what? There's a lot we don't know about the universe and there are many things out there that could end us in a heartbeat and not even care. We won't be able to do anything about it either, even if we see it coming".

Related to that is the extremely pessimistic view of progress and technological advancement inherent in his work, which had taken root in the aftermath of WW1(after seeing how technology could lead to pointless slaughter on the battlefield), and stood in contrast to the generally optimistic attitude of the years before the war.

 

[Anti-American Eagle]

I don't find lovecraft's horror scary so much as I find it nihilistic and disturbing. Which I believe is kind of the point of lovecraftian horror these days. It's the bridge between modern horror and older gothic horror and was the step that resulted in the transformation somewhat.

Mulling over the ideas in your head is what makes it terrifying, that unknowable things could exist out there so far past our existence that we're less than a speck and could be unceremoniously swatted by some alien horror out there by accident. It's the same reason the characters that go insane in his writings go insane. The horror isn't the spooky thing in the dark it's the revelation that the spooky thing in the dark exists at all. It's the betrayal of everything you know and love and the subsequent unraveling of your reality by knowledge of the alien or self.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I don't consider the writing itself to be scary, but the concepts it deals with certainly are. The vast, unknowable void that represents everything we don't, and may never even begin to comprehend.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Cthulhu and the other Old Ones are likewise a horror trope based around "What if God was utterly indifferent to humanity?" Might sound silly to you and me, but when Lovecraft was writing, the idea that humanity wasn't the special snowflake of Gods creation was genuinely terrifying.

I love Weidman's assessment of Bloodborne. It shows how the devs did their homework and tried as hard as they could to suggest something bigger, more insidious than the game's mechanics alone could represent.

I'd say Lovecraftian horror *can* be scary - it just depends on the chosen tone and approach. If your comic, movie or game basically amounts to "Eeeek! Religiously-motivated fish-men and cosmic beings! Oh my!" then you won't get far. Similarly, if you lean on some of Lovecraft's own crutches and go "Argh! Country bumpkins!" or "Oooh! NEGROES!", you'll not only fail spectacularly but also anger a solid dozen contemporary Weird Fiction authors.

The Mythos can only honestly be scary if you boil it down to its simplest expression, which is knowledge beyond our ken. You have to enter Lovecraft's narrative universe with the notion that he believed in a hard-coded limitation to human cognition and general intelligence, and that things out there had the power to Blue-Screen-of-Death your brain matter. It's a very abstract notion - as if the human mind could conceivably overclock or as if something could prove so shocking or to stand in defiance of so many intrinsic laws of Nature as to just be impossible to humanly process.

It's a crazy thing to say in today's terrorism-filled news, but our scientific approach is markedly optimistic, compared to the sheer angst that permeates Lovecraftian horror. He was obsessed with the idea that there things we'd want to look at that we weren't supposed to - things that would kill us or destroy us the way we step on anthills - and here we are 3D-printing limb prostheses and generally teetering on the verge of Transhumanism while increasingly developing an understanding of what we'd need to get to Mars and beyond.

That's why Lovecraft is a hard sell for some people. We're brought up to assume that Science will answer all the questions we've ever had if we give it time; that the future is always and forever looking brighter than the present we're living in. The Mythos ignores that notion and posits that we might be sealing our fates by peering into the stars. It's also something that's hard to distill into gaming concepts, so even the best efforts ? la Dark Corners of the Earth, Eternal Darkness or Amnesia can be reduced to "Don't let that Sanity meter drop!"

 

[sXeth]

Lovecraft's horror was primarily based on the idea of being afraid of being insignificant and ignorant. Essentially that knocking mankind off its top of the food chain status would unravel most of a person's rational thought and reduce them to mindless primitive instincts such as running from the larger (and potentially predatory, though active predators stalking humans is a rarity in his work) being invading and overrunning their world.

The more basic horror presented in his work was fear of mortality and xenophobia, which was a tad more bluntly delivered when used. And the xenophobia has frequent subtexts that aren't modernly palatable when it deals with other cultures instead of alien entities.

The "Cthulhu Mythos" is mostly an effort by later writers to tie thematic elements together, and often sets aside the psychology for more traditional monster/slasher setups, for fantasy (space or urban) themes.

 

[Thaluikhain]

IMHO, Lovecraftian horror isn't very scary in of itself, and it's often painfully bad and over done.

However, Lovecraft was good at making things scary.

In The Whisperer in the Dark Lovecraft describes this really scary alien race which comes to Earth to quarry stone they don't have on their own world/s and avoid any contact with humans. Sure, later on some other stuff happens, but it starts off scary because of the way he wrote it.

Likewise, there's another story, can't remember the name, in which the character is just walking along a street going somewhere, and it's creepy long before anything out of the ordinary happens.

Of course, he was also seriously racist, and sometimes it really shows, which doesn't help.

 

[Grumpy Ginger]

I highly recommend you read some of his stuff. Allot of his work has nothing to do with Cthulhu and such, they actually go with sheer madness, realization of horrors ect. A story that became a favorite of mine is the story "Rats in The Walls" it's very good in my opinion.

Definitely read rats in the wall had my heart pounding by the end of it though just try to ignore the vintage racism in the story.Lovecraft was definitely variable when it came to his writing an some of his stuff such as the Quest for Unknown Kadath was more fantasy than anything horror.

 

[Pinkamena]

Having actually read most of his stories, I can say I do not find them scary. But I still think they are good stories. They all have an air of the mysterious and unknown about them, and that's what I like.

 

[Czann]

Of course. Imagine a normal person discovering that EVERYTHING he/she believes about the world is a complete lie, all their beliefs are void, reality are unknowable and extremely hostile.

And now that they know it they will be a target of things that shouldn't be.

Well written that's terrifying.

 

[Dalisclock]

As someone who likes Lovecraftian Horror(and has since I first read Lovecraft nearly 20 years ago), I will say that I usually don't find it scary. Though I rarely find horror scary in general.

What I do appreciate is that it's often creepy, atmospheric and disturbing. If a horror story is capable of pulling that off in my eyes, I'm more then happy to call it good.

 

[pookie101]

scary isnt the right word. unsettling and creepy as fuck, that feeling there is someone behind you when you know there isnt magnified a 1000 fold, or that every single thing you think about how the world works is completely wrong.. thats lovecraft for me even if he was a racist twat with women issues

 

[jklinders]

Horror as a genre is not very scary. At most it's suspenseful. Lovecraft came closer to true horror than most not because of what he said but because of what he implied. "Horror" in most common modern contexts is to me synonymous with comedy as most of the plotlines require the victims to be utter idiots to be ensnared by them.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

Generally no, although I do think it has almost infinite intrigue. There was one time though when I had swine flu and was delirious. This was just after I'd finished browsing various wikis and such reading about the lore and stuff. The upshot is that in my delirium I genuinely believed my soul had been taken by Cthulu. That was really horrifying.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Nope.

I think a persistent problem with HPL and people like him is that they want us to be afraid of concepts, and concepts aren't really frightening. Horror is a very visceral thing, it's about tapping into things which are very deep seated. That's one reason why international horror films are such a thing, because (unlike comedy, for example) horror translates really well from one cultural context to another. It's all the same things. Human brains don't like sudden and surprising images, we don't like things which violate the boundaries between human and nonhuman objects, we find the stuff inside our bodies upsetting. Things which actually make us afraid or give us that "horror" response are usually very simple.

Also, I hate to say it, but Steven King was kind of on to something with HPL. All his terrifying and unknowable monsters are basically vaginas..

 

[hermes]

I don't find them scary, more unsettling. Like the feeling you get when you walk into an empty dark room and you just know you're being watched.

I came here to say pretty much the same thing. Lovecraftian literature is more unsettling than scary, specially when taken in the historical context.

It is a punch in the face of the anthropocentric, Victorian era culture that still dominated most of the arts at the time. At face value, his tales vision of the universe include elements like: you (and your entire race) are no more relevant than a mote of dust to the universe; the real universe is so incredibly large and alien that you can't understand it, and never hope to understand it; all of mankind knowledge and science are just as incomplete, inaccurate and downright false as a caveman vision of the world. For a culture that was sure they were special and were close to completely understanding the universe (it is no coincidence most of the protagonists are detached men of science and facts), to be told that they were not close, and they were not special was really unsettling.

The problem with Lovecraft stories is that, once you read a few, you have read them all. The style and themes are very repetitive...

 

[Vicarious Reality]

No, i found The Shadow Out Of Time a very fascinating book when i was little
The color from space was a bit disturbing though, imagine being haunted by a radioactive ghost