I have a question for Lovecraft fans

[Mastemat]

At the Mountains of Madness is one of his most scary ones....
But Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath is by far my favorite....

Just be prepared for some SUUUUUUPER racist stuff in Dreamquest... "real negroids" is actually a phrase used....

HP Lovecraft was HELLA racist.
But then so was everyone in the 1920/30s.
That doesn't justify it.

 

[SmokingBomber465]

The Rats in the Walls
Haunter of the Dark
The Colour out of Space
The Doom that Came to Sarnath
The Whisperer on Darkness
The Music of Erich Zahn
Pickman's Model
In the Vault

But if "The Call of Cthulhu" wasn't climactic enough for you then I might suggest a different author--like R.L. Stine. <--stated with a certain air of cocky self-satisfaction, and obviously more of a joke.

 

[Thaluikhain]

HP Lovecraft was HELLA racist.
But then so was everyone in the 1920/30s.
That doesn't justify it.

Lovecraft really had race issues, though, even for his time. His writings are full of the horrors of race mixing, degenerate bloodlines and the like.

(Before anyone mentions it, yes, he was married to a Jewish women. That does not mean he was not racist.)

 

[Thomas Barnsley]

I think there's an awful lot of artistic licence that goes into drawing one of Lovecraft's cosmic abominations. Most of them are only described in very vague terms, if at all. Just did a Google image search for Nyarlathotep, for instance, and there are loads of different interpretations of how he looks. He appears human in his eponymous story, for one thing, even if his true form is different. Admittedly I've not read all of Lovecraft's stories, but the only one I can remember being described particularly clearly is Cthulhu.

Maybe it came to someone in a dream, lol.
Seriously though, I see your point. Like the description of Cthulhu gave me more of an impression that his head was completely comprised of tentacles, rather than looking like a squid.

But if "The Call of Cthulhu" wasn't climactic enough for you then I might suggest a different author--like R.L. Stine. <--stated with a certain air of cocky self-satisfaction, and obviously more of a joke.

My problem with Call of Cthulhu was the ending, when

Spoiler

one sailor guy manages to subdue Great Cthulhu himself by ramming him with a boat. Really?

Other than that it was really great stuff.

 

[Anachronism]

I think there's an awful lot of artistic licence that goes into drawing one of Lovecraft's cosmic abominations. Most of them are only described in very vague terms, if at all. Just did a Google image search for Nyarlathotep, for instance, and there are loads of different interpretations of how he looks. He appears human in his eponymous story, for one thing, even if his true form is different. Admittedly I've not read all of Lovecraft's stories, but the only one I can remember being described particularly clearly is Cthulhu.

Especially as he kept going on about how indescribable everything is. One reason why a movie adaptation is hard, all those colours that don't exist and those shapes that the human mind cant view.

Cthulhu...IIRC, wasn't really well described, just said to be a cross between a dragon, squid and octopus. This got interpreted as a winged lizardman with facial tentacles, but there could be other ways.

Like The_Echo said, we're given a pretty good description of Cthulhu. Certainly clear enough to see where the artistic interpretations are coming from; besides, it says a lot that the pictures of Cthulhu tend to be similar in the essentials. Nyarlathotep, by contrast, is never described, so all the pictures are different.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

The real difficulty with adapting The Call of Cthulhu would be getting the non-Euclidean geometry of R'lyeh on screen, given that it's supposed to be incomprehensible to human perception. The Colour out of Space would be even harder, since all we know about the Thing of the title is that it's a colour unlike any in the spectrum. Very weird stuff, but to me, that's what makes that particular story so frightening.

Just be prepared for some SUUUUUUPER racist stuff in Dreamquest... "real negroids" is actually a phrase used....

HP Lovecraft was HELLA racist.
But then so was everyone in the 1920/30s.
That doesn't justify it.

It is true, unfortunately. Some of the stories do make for uncomfortable reading because of this. The most awkward one to me was the cat in The Rats in the Walls named N*gger-man. Apparently it was named after a cat Lovecraft owned as a child.

My problem with Call of Cthulhu was the ending, when

Spoiler

one sailor guy manages to subdue Great Cthulhu himself by ramming him with a boat. Really?

Other than that it was really great stuff.

Spoiler: Response

In fairness, it's made pretty clear that Cthulhu hasn't been beaten by a long shot. The steam ship puts him down for a couple of minutes at most.

the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form

I agree that it's definitely odd that Cthulhu apparently goes back into his tomb and is trapped there when R'lyeh sinks again, but I suppose the thoughts and motivations of the Great Old Ones are meant to be baffling to humans. He's waited millennia, he can wait millennia more if the stars aren't quite right yet.

 

[SmokingBomber465]

Other than that it was really great stuff.

Yeah I was just screwing around

Legit reason. I still highly suggest In The Vault though--and Whisperer in Darkness. They sound like some you might like