Lovecraftian horror

Is this going to become the next goon talking point? Why don't you just stick to SA if imageboards are so scary and full of "weebs"?

There's a live action version of Uzumaki. Haven't seen it but AFAIK it has a good rep. There's also an anime coming next year that's going to adapt Ito's stories.

Nice. Hadn't heard about that. Hopefully they don't screw up the anime.

...

What western Lovecraft stuff exists?

Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Uzimaki is meh, it only gets scary once it starts building on its concepts in the last two or three chapters. Gyo is kind of shitty and stupid as well. Ito shines in his one-shot short storys. For Ito it seems longer=shittier. I think he simply does not know how to world-build.

Finished Saya no Uta. And it was really, really average.

95% of the cast was completely unlike-able, the exceptions being Saya herself and Kouji. The plot wasn't all that good, though it did have it's moments. The resolution was either extremely stupid or doesn't resolve much at all, depending on which you take.

That said, I didn't hate it. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but it never wowed me or made me experience any emotion at all, for that matter. The sad moments never effected me, and the 'intense' moments made me go meh. Everything is pretty much forgettable.

Can somebody explain me why people hyped it so much? Because there's absolutely nothing special about it.

the only image you posted that comes close to lovecraftian is the 3rd

Ok bud.

The psychological horror aspect was pretty unique. The idea that insane people are experiencing a totally different fucked up reality was kind of shocking. The visuals could have been better though. At one point the game describes a bed as a mass of writhing worms but all of the visuals were just the environment as veiny flesh chunks. I expected a bit more from the plot instead of just the main character saying "fuck it" and becoming a murderer. Saya should have had some malicious intent instead of being muh pure interdenominational being but I guess japs are waifufags to the detriment of story telling. But it's not like VNs are often well written anyway. I would say it was pretty good relative to the rest of the medium.

Ok.

H.P. Lovecraft

you're missing the entire point of Lovecraft's style of horror

No I'm not. You are, though.

This is Lovecraft in a nutshell.

>>>/reddit/

its called subtlety you fucking faggot

.t waifufag
The main character felt nothing when he learned that Saya was murdering people for food. He didn't even flinch when he had to murder his best friend. Because he was a stupid nip waifufag like you

That is literally the argument you gave me first, retard.

Where did I say I'm a waifufag? What is a waifufag even supposed to be?

Didn't you just say Saya did nothing wrong?

Except it's usually not jumpscares.

I said she should have had "malicious intent." It would have added mystery to the game and tension between her and the main character. Killing for food is not really malicious.

Have any of you read Lovecraft?
I've read most of his works, he was never this obscene about things. His works built up suspense and tension, he rarely just dumped weird shit in there for the hell of it. The only times things went this dark were the climaxes of his works.

Here, I'll post one of my favorites so you can see what his work is actually like.

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place; and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.

The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.

(1/?)

My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.

Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man’s acquaintance.

One night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking, and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.

Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its moth-eaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.

Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognised the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.

The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hill-top, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner; forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil in the laboured French of a foreigner.

The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.

As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night-wind—and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend. The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.

It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.

What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.

Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.

It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighbouring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the west.

At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night-wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy, and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

geez thanks for ruining my thread

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

You're welcome friend.

Wow this is very tame. I think we've reached a point where "lovecraftian horror" holds a different meaning than actualy lovecraft horror. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is subjective. It is a term that describes the indescribable horror, instead of lovecraft's actual methods.

I read Lovecraft obsessively as a kid.
Bullshit.

It's strange compared to the average author, but comparing Lovecraft to fucking Junji Ito like one of the anons I replied to did is either dishonest or ignorant.
Some of his stories had strange elements in them, like The Dunwich Horror, but he never wrote anything on the same level as Uzumaki.

It's totally legitimate. Some unknown force makes people insane and obsessed with symbols. Am I talking about a Lovecraft short story or Uzumaki?
The guy wrote a story about prehistoric starfish aliens that colonized Earth and genetically engineered protoplasmic shapeshifters to construct undersea cities.

I think what user is trying to say is that the focus of his stories was never big freakout stuff like what people always take from his stories.
He had much tamer stories as well, like Dagon, but the core structure of a Lovecraft story is still there. Big themes in Lovecraft's work are a sense of dread, insanity, a fear of the unknown and powers beyond human understanding.
The Cthulhu mythos is great and all but sometimes it's good to scale back a bit into a story about a weird old man playing a violin.

...

'Lovecraftian' is the same as 'Cyberpunk', they are both shitty for the same reason.

As sub-genres they have narrative elements and recurring themes that give them the 'feel' that they have. Cosmic horror is about hopelessness and fear of the unknown. Cyberpunk is about isolation, society and the implications of technology. These are the 'bones' of the sub-genre if you like.

With these elements included, they are enjoyable. However, anybody can just pick up the visual style of said subgenre and run with it. A tentacled horror only works if it's creating that sense of existential dread, otherwise it's just a big dumb tentacle monster. A dark smog covered cyberpunk city means nothing if it's not a representative of an oppressive and bleak society.

Hence why so much cosmic horror stuff is garbage, the faithful stuff is far too derivative (for whatever reason creatively bankrupt people love using Lovecraft's shit, there is no copyright and no need to create new ideas) and the rest is like stolen valour, looks fine but none of the underlying stuff that makes it feel right is present .

Cheeky cunt.

What?

No joke, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.
It centers on a relationship between a man and his Lovecraftian creative, who walks around bare-breasted for the entire movie.
The source material for the film, a British novel, was heavily inspired by the mythos. Wikipedia even lists "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" as Lovecraft stories with similar themes. Try and find a UK rip of the movie for the full experience.

You rike Rovecraft?

U rike you.

Criminally underrated post.
It is extremely rare to see a good Lovecraftian horror film that actually gets Lovecraft.
Same with vidya and tabletop games – Chaosium’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is one of the worst offenders, and have done irreparable damage to Lovecraftian horror. They throw in a bunch of tentacles in a 1920s setting and have player’s run around New England investigating obvious weird and potentially dangerous cases, then fight off Eldritch abomination (often additions by Derleth et al), and then, maybe, go insane at the end.

This is now what most normalfags think Lovecraftian horror is – a bunch of well-armed scholars fighting gigantic tentacled monstrosities.

I’ve been meaning to write an essay on my interpretation of ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ as a warning against non-Western influences and race-mixing – the alien religion taking over, the city falling into disrepair, the Deep Ones interbreeding with humans, creating hybrids that suffer from the ‘Innsmouth look’.

I think by then he was so lost with seeing his friends and everything else as those disgusting meats of flesh, he stopped having genuine feelings for them some time ago, Saya was the only person he lived for and did whatever it took to not lose her. Before killing his friend he did do other reprehensible things like instinctively murdering the person raping Saya and keeping that girl who loved him as a sex slave dog.

I agree. So much of his imagery is meant to be left up to the imagination so any form of media outside of books is doing a disservice. And whenever they are a group of scholars who try to fight the monstrosities, they loose miserably. Look at Dunwich Horror.
Also Lovecraft wrote Innsmouth after he found out he was half polish.

I suggest all Lovecraft fans to get this book. Its a selection of stories he took inspiration from. Very good read

It's not even a subtext. How could you feel the need to write an essay about something this obvious?

Pleb. Also having finished Dark Corners I'm pretty disappointed
>Call of Cthulhu
>No Cthulhu

You may enjoy this.