Cthulhu Mythos

The Cthulhu Mythos manifested first with Lovecraft in his short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, published in 1928.(24) The ‘heroes’ of the story, at least to the followers of the cult, are the Great Old Ones whose earthly followers might evoke them from extraterrestrial dimensions when astral alignments are right. Their followers were, from Lovecraft’s description, the most degraded dregs of the Earth: They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.(25) Frater Tenebrous, rationalising…

The Inescapable Void and Ex Oblivione No splendid paradise, no eternal torment, no divine deity; only oblivion and an inescapable void. This is H.P. Lovecraft’s Ex Oblivione prose poem’s main message, but horror enthusiasts are left wondering why he chose to convey this message in particular. Some might say that this was meant to be a work of pure fiction; a poem that does not parallel Lovecraft’s life in any way. Others might say that this poem is a commentary on Lovecraft’s beliefs on…

in Lovecraft’s stories have in today’s society. He declares, “Lovecraft’s fiction has lost whatever capacity it may ever have had to frighten the adult reader, but it has not lost its ability to disturb” (Baxter). The monsters that Lovecraft creates in his stories are terrifying in the fact that they are representative of real-life agonies. These themes of tragedy stem from Lovecraft’s personal troubles during his upbringing. Thus, rather than inspiring fear derived from shock, Lovecraft’s…

Monsters whether human or otherworldly parade through our nightmares and fears time after time. They appeal to our most primal fears. But what about these horrors and creeps truly makes them monsters? Exploring this question gives us insight into our fears and how terror plays with our emotions. Monsters are a common subject in both Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein and H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. In Mary Shelley 's novel the man Frankenstein creates his own monster by turning back…

of horrible creatures, or is it the presence of ghosts, or other types of supernatural creatures, that scares us? Of course, the supernatural is in all these things. Human beings normally fear the supernatural because things supernatural are considered hostile to human life. What does horror do? It reaffirms the sacred or holy, through a plot where a human encounters demons and he struggles to get rid of them. This happens in Dracula. The Count has a terrifying sense of the demonic about him,…

“With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos...” (From Beyond). Howard Phillips Lovecraft first authored these words in November of 1920 in the short story From Beyond, words that would come to resound throughout the rest of his writing career centered around his “weird fiction”. Lovecraft’s influence on the genre of horror would end up being comparable only to Edgar Allan Poe. The Cthulhu Mythos, the most famous of his creations, would contain stories that…

Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Each of these novels created an enduring icon of horror seen in modern re-imaginings on the stage and on the silver screen. Moving on to the 20th century, horror is still evolving from what is once was, and as before it takes some elements and leaves others behind. The proliferation of short articles in newspapers or magazines, led to a boom in horror writing. Writers like Tod Robbins…