Category: General

Ave Satani: The Devil in Literature

It goes without saying that Satan has fascinated humanity since… well, a very long time indeed. Representations of evil predate Christianity’s version by millennia, and some devils are consequently heavily inspired by pre-Christian tradition. The most fascinating aspect of him is probably that there are so many variations. But what are the coolest most haunting representations of Satan in literature?

From simple two-dimensional portrayals of absolute evil to highly complex characters with confusing motivations, representations of the devil in literature are as varied as they are many. It just goes to show how pre-occupied humans are with the idea of evil and temptation, and what characteristics we believe best represent pure evil.

If you move away from straight-forward portrayals of Satan, things become even more confused. Captain Ahab and/or Moby Dick can be read as versions of the devil himself; Sauron or Lord Voldemort come close to being Satanic manifestations; even in less fantastical literature – such as much of Dostoevsky’s work – we can find figures who could be said to be ‘of the devil’s party’.

Consequently, when selecting my list for a few examples of fascinating ‘Satans’, I had to limit myself drastically. I will only list figures who are actually the devil, not Satan-like characters. But even then there are countless options to choose from, and all vary.

Additionally, I will also just pick some of my favourite representations. You could write endless essays on any given of these characters, so rather than doing an ongoing list with no descriptions, I thought I’d focus on just a few of my favourites to give you a quick taster, in the hope that you may find it interesting. There are, doubtlessly, many, many other Satans out there which you may find equally or more engaging than the ones I’ve chosen. So! Without further ado, here it goes.

Dante’s Three-Headed Satan

In Dante’s Inferno from the Divine Comedy, Virgil leads the poet through the circles of hell on their path to purgatory. On the way, they must brave some of the most horrific things imaginable, with each of the nine circles representing an individual sin – lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery.

Unlike some of the other representations, this Satan is passive. Having committed treachery to the Christian God, he is condemned to the very centre of the ninth and innermost circle of hell, where he is frozen waist-deep in ice and suffering eternally.

On top of that, Dante’s Satan has three heads which are constantly crying a mix of blood and pus. Each mouth is perpetually chewing on some of history’s great traitors – two murderers of Caesar and Judas Iscariot. Overall, it’s a pure depiction of absolute misery.

Dante’s hell is primarily a warning to wrong-doers: commit one of these sins, and you will end up here and suffer in this way. Treachery is by far the worst sin and woe be you if you are found guilty of it. No wonder this still remains one of the most popular depictions of Satan to this day.

Milton’s Fallen Hero

My personal favourite representation, Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost is primarily a figure fallen from grace. Of course, Dante’s version is also the ex-archangel Lucifer, but here we get the full story and Satan’s gradual fall into slime, muck, and all that’s bad.

Also, this Satan is far more active. After losing the battle against the heavens, God bans Satan to hell where he rules over his own kingdom. And at first he still maintains his glory and his honourable appearance. Only as the poem goes on does he gradually become deformed, twisted, malicious.

Added to that, Satan is by far the most eloquent character in the poem. He convinces Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, after all. Milton cleverly depicts how Satan’s rhetoric gradually becomes more flawed and full of inconsistencies as he develops, in the same way that he starts out as a fallen angel and ends up appearing as a mere serpent.

Milton also gives us fascinating insight into Satan’s psyche. It’s not that he is just evil per se, or that he hopes to make himself feel better after his fall. As he puts it: ‘Nor hope to be myself less miserable by what I seek, but others to make such as I’. In that mindset, hell is wherever Satan goes. It’s a particularly miserable way of seeing the world and tearing everything down with you. In that way, we all possess the potential to become like Satan (yay).

Twain’s contempt for the human race

To leave the realm of drama and poetry and enter the world of prose, I’ll finish with Mark Twain. Unlike virtually all his other work, The Mysterious Stranger is incredibly dark, depressing and twisted, and casts a rather upsetting shadow over a writer otherwise known for adventurous and uplifting subject matters (while also exploring the problems of racism and slavery, of course).

The fragment actually exists in several attempts Twain wrote between 1897 and 1900 and features the story of three young boys called Theodor, Seppi and Nikolaus who live in an Austrian village (although some of the attempts are set in other locations).

Satan moves to the village and predicts a grim future. When one of his prophecies comes true, the boys ask him for assistance, but his help is generally less than merciful. In one case, for instance, he predicts a long disease-ridden period for one of the characters, and his act of mercy is to kill the boy immediately, thus preventing the period of suffering.

Twain’s Satan is so effective because he holds an absolutely detestable and grim view of the world. When he departs towards the end of the story, he leaves the boys with the words: ‘Here is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream – a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought – a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!’

Goethe’s and Marlowe’s Tempter

‘Hang on’, I hear you say, ‘didn’t you promise not to include Satan-like characters?’ Yes, I did; but I do consider Mephistopheles from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Goethe’s Faust Satan. He looks like him, talks like him, he’s a supernatural being. In other words, in every important way, Mephisto IS Satan.

Also, these two may be the same character from the same story, but Goethe and Marlowe were different writers (duh) from different countries (double duh) who wrote in completely different time periods (tripe duh), so it’s difficult to do both of them justice at once. They’re both fascinating in their own way and both plays are absolutely excellent and need to be seen or read by anyone who’s interested in Satan (or literature, for that matter).

Nevertheless, in crucial ways they are identical, which is why I am putting them together. Both only appear after Faust summons them (meaning that we invite evil into ourselves), both are witty and eloquent, both act evil primarily through temptation, and both depict hell as being the absence of God (by which they mean the absence of everything that is good).

There are good reasons why the Faust story is so popular, and I believe everybody I’ve talked to said that Mephisto is their favourite character. He’s just fun, and anyone can understand how flirting with the devil to get personal pleasure and gain might be a tempting prospect. Of course, a real Mephisto is unlikely to appear if you summon him, but your life may feel like a real hell if you invite misery into your own home the same way Faust does in both ‘versions’ of this story.

Closing thoughts

As you can see, there are many excellent depictions of Satan in literature. Hopefully some of these will inspire you to go on your own treasure hunt for other depictions. Or even just to seek out these works if you didn’t know them before.

I believe part of the reason humans find Satan so fascinating is because of our own proclivity towards maliciousness. Given the right circumstances, anyone can become ‘evil’ and act in a way which inflicts suffering on other people. But it’s good to be aware of it. By exploring ‘absolute evil’ in literature we are able to warn ourselves of what the absolute worst can lead to.

Did you enjoy this list? Know of any other ones I should have included? Then please leave a comment. Otherwise, why not share this post? Then please click on one of the tender buttons below to share it on the social media of your choice.

High-Brow vs Low-Brow: Does it matter?

If you’ve ever spent any time discussing topics related to the arts with anyone, chances are you’ve noticed the great (sub-conscious) divide between popular and ‘high’ culture. The deeper you dive into the topic, the more it seems as though there never will be peace. But does the difference really matter?

You probably know the type. The oh-so sophisticated person who has profound insight into everything related to culture, who only listens to music considered high-brow, reads exclusively the classics and is excessively opinionated. The type who snidely condemns reading anything regarded as popular (their targets often include books with a huge following, such as the Harry Potter series).

On the opposite end, you have those who immediately get an allergic reaction whenever anyone mentions a classical composer or a poet. They immediately assume you’re being close-minded and pretentious, and surely the only reason you like those things, they believe, is because you wish to come across as educated. And the pop/rock they listen to, the pulp fiction they devour, they think, is just as profound and insightful as ‘high culture’. If only the ‘others’ weren’t so close minded, they’d surely get just as much recognition as ‘high’ culture.

Of course, in most cases it’s not a malicious attitude, but a sub-conscious bias. People generally (but not always) enjoy what they happened to have grown up with. But is it really necessary to condemn either extreme of the debate? Is it really worth anyone’s time complaining about what other people enjoy? Surely good things can be found in both popular and ‘high’ culture, as well as in any fringe subculture for that matter?

The problem with people who exclusively indulge in ‘high’ culture

The problem with being highly discriminating against anything popular and which society wouldn’t regard as high culture is that it limits your options. Rather than going out there and exploring the market for anything new, you’ll often find that you first listen to what a particular group of people say is worth looking at / listening to / reading.

Some might consider it a rather close-minded approach. While it is true that a work of art which has withstood the test of time has a comparatively high likelihood of being good, it is never guaranteed. Also, individual tastes might mean that it just isn’t for you – even if the work, per se, is good. If you’re exclusively consuming artwork which ‘others say’ is going to expand your horizon, you’re barring yourself from finding hidden gems elsewhere.

Artists, too, never really discriminate in the same way that consumers do. Before capitalism guaranteed the emergence of the middle-class, it was very difficult to distinguish between popular and high culture – indeed, even Shakespeare first wrote and acted for a company dedicated towards entertaining ‘commoners’ in a dodgy neighbourhood. Only time (and his genius!) raised him into the ranks of ‘high’ culture.

The modernists, too, blurred the lines between the two. Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Joyce: all of them enjoyed enough privileges, but nevertheless indulged in popular culture and used it in their own ‘high-brow’ work (alongside what their contemporaries considered high-brow).

At the end of the day, limiting oneself to high-brow culture means limiting one’s perspectives. It’s essentially the same as limiting oneself to popular culture. The only difference is that the dictating entity which tells you what’s good isn’t the wider, but the ‘elite’ population.

The problem with people who exclusively indulge in popular culture

Popular culture has a much larger market, and therefore only consuming popular culture is less limiting (in terms of volume). But by condemning everything ‘high-brow’ as pretentious, you’re barring yourself from a wonderful world with a lot of variety.

Due to the nature of open markets, popular culture often lacks variety. The people creating such art know what is popular, and so they repeat the same tropes over and over again – ensuring that the consumer’s intake is less varied than may seem at first (hence why, for instance, many people say that pop music always sounds the same). It’s just a simple sales strategy.

Also, a lot of ‘good’ popular culture has its roots in high culture. Stephen King was inspired by both Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft; Tolkien’s work was heavily inspired by Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry. Many of our contemporary crime thrillers draw their ideas from the works of figures such as Agatha Christie. Although I must note that she blurs the line between popular and high culture…

For the sake of personal development, there are really worse things one can do than to bridge the language gap between something old (and which is therefore difficult to enjoy) and by doing that to open up the world of ‘high’ culture and to see what the fuss is about. Avoiding it entirely and condemning it as elitist is no better than condemning everything popular. Of course it may have to do with considering such art ‘difficult’. This displays an underestimation of one’s own capabilities. It may also be because it reminds you of dull schoolwork, which in reality is very different from picking it up yourself. Identify your subconscious bias and give it a go. You may surprise yourself.

The solution: mix and mingle

There’s not really any way around it. To avoid both pitfalls, all I can recommend is to be more open-minded about things. Why would you bother condemning Harry Potter for not being particularly important (in literary history) when it probably produced more new readers than any other book series before (aside from its entertainment-value)? Why would you condemn Macbeth as being elitist and pretentious when it’s actually deeply thrilling once you’ve gotten used to the language?

In the end, all you can do is to remind yourself not to close your mind to new things. No matter which side you feel more at home at. You can find hidden gems, beautiful books, gorgeous music anywhere you look. People are varied and flexible enough that a single person may equally enjoy a great deal of varied art. Muse, Klaus Nomi, Ella Fitzgerald and Gustav Mahler? Why not!

And if you don’t want to – or can’t – break out into new areas and enjoy art and culture from places and streams you don’t know or enjoy, that’s also not the end of the world. But then don’t go around complaining about other people who enjoy things you don’t. In short, act open-mindedly. Live and let live.

Closing thoughts

I must reiterate that a lot of the problem has to do with a subconscious attitude. Most people who act in that way are probably unaware of it. But it does, in the end, put a lot of pressure on an activity that should be about personal freedom, as well as the freedom to enjoy whatever you want.

Do you agree with my thoughts? Do you know of better methods to overcome the divide? Then please leave a comment. Otherwise, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Then please click on one of the tender buttons below.

To All Bookworms: Where To Get Your Next Fix

Is there anything better than the thrill of finding the next book that is going to engage your fantasy, teach you something new, or simply make your dull commute a bit more enjoyable?

While reading is hardly the most expensive hobby out there, it certainly can feel rather costly if you buy the newest bestseller every other week and fight your way through it within just a few days. And then there is the insane satisfaction of leafing through beautiful, lovely smelling books at your local book store and leaving with a heavy literary load but a considerably lighter wallet. Within just a few months you might realise that you’ve spent hundreds of pounds on books.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many locations people can go to find great deals on cheap books, or even get books for free. And with the internet, there are plenty of other possibilities to get affordable reading material which should serve you for years to come.

So without much further ado, here’s a list of some of the best ways to get a free or cheap book in 2018.

Libraries

Yes, libraries are the good old-fashioned way to go about getting free books. Not to keep, of course, but you can often extend the duration of your loan and they usually have a beautiful collection which are sorted according to different categories, neatly ordered and only waiting for you to grab them.

Libraries are a wonderful place. It’s all about sharing the written word: returning the books when you no longer need them so that somebody else can read. Most libraries also accept donations, so if you have a heap of books you no longer need, do make the best use of this service.

Of course, you may think of libraries as a rather dusty and dull place. However, many of them have gone with the times. Nowadays many of them are done up really nicely, are clean, well-ordered and well worth spending time at.

While some are struggling, you’re more likely than not to have one in your home town. If you’re lucky enough to live in a city like London, there are more libraries than the eye can see – from small ones such as the Camberwell Library to the British Library (the largest one in the world!), there’s something for everyone.

The larger libraries often also host other types of events. The British Library features frequent exhibitions and various talks on book-related topics. Smaller libraries, too, offer things such as readings and related smaller events. So there’s really no reason not to make use of this resource – it may be old-fashioned, but it’s still highly usable.

2nd-hand bookshops

If you really feel you must own a book, but want to avoid the strain on your wallet, then 2nd-hand bookshops are your option. Most towns in the UK have one, and again, if you live in London there are literally hundreds to choose from – and many of them are absolutely delightful. Charing Cross Road alone features so many that you could spend hours browsing through old copies of your favourite books.

Like libraries, many 2nd-hand bookshops also accept donations, so if you’d like your old friends to find a more private and immediate home than a library, then this is another good option to go for. There are really worse things to do than to support an important, but small trade.

There’s something touching and sweet about 2nd-hand books. They have their own peculiar smell and you know the book you’ve bought for just £2 or £3 received much love before. It’s really a great way to save money and will serve you well for many years to come.

Lastly, the atmosphere in 2nd-hand bookshops feels a lot more homely than in traditional book stores. You may meet interesting people who share your love of the written word. The shopkeepers are usually truly passionate about what they do, and chances are you’ll discover a volume that has been out of print for many years, making a trip to one a unique experience.

Gutenberg

If you don’t mind using e-books and read primarily classics (for whatever reason), then gutenberg.org is the go-to place for you! Featuring tens of thousands of free e-books, this website serves to spread the accessibility of reading material which no longer has a copyright.

Run by a host of volunteers who do all the digitalisation, proofreading and conversion to other formats, Gutenberg is an amazing project which lives on donations. There are no charges and the books are available in a variety of formats: kindle, mobi, epub, html and more.

Chances are you’ll discover a huge range of reading material you’d never have considered before, and as an ongoing project, you can even easily get involved by digitalising more books, offering translations or donating a little to help them with their online presence.

E-book stores

If you’re not too fond of classics but still don’t mind reading e-books, most large book chains feature online stores to help you in that regard. E-books are usually cheaper than print versions (since there are no printing costs), so you’ll be able to find a good deal on most of the recent bestsellers.

Amazon Kindle Store is probably the largest with the lowest prices on e-books and thus worthy a recommendation. Just note that they only sell books in their own in-house format, rather than the industry standard epub. Also note that rumours speak of Amazon’s shady business practices, so if you’d rather not support that, go for another option.

Other large e-book stores are Kobo Books, Google Play, eBooks.com and Waterstone’s – Waterstone’s own personal brand. Many of them also feature free or very low priced books for the classics, which is another good reason to use them.

Of course, an e-book robs you of the wonderful experience of smelling and feeling the printed page and you won’t be able to add another treasure to your bookshelf, but they are a brilliant way of having a number of books with you wherever you go – and can in fact be quite addictive.

For poetry lovers: Poetry Foundation

Of course, all above sources are perfectly usable for poetry lovers. But if you’re into poetry, the Poetry Foundation is an additional resource to access free material. The advantage? Sometimes you just want to read one poem rather than browse through a whole volume.

The Poetry Foundation features a huge amount of free pieces, sorted by theme, poet or school of poetry, making it very intuitive to navigate through. And the poems are all featured on their own website, so just navigate to the poet you’d like to read, select one – and there you go!

Since poetry doesn’t particularly adhere to the industry, it’s also possible to find a range of poetry on there which is still copyrighted – even a select few contemporary poets. With frequent updates and the occasional essay, the Poetry Foundation is a definite website to bookmark.

Closing thoughts

If you use just one or several of these resources, you should probably never fall short of having something to read again. In 2018, reading material is more accessible than it has ever been before – so why not make the best use of it?

Can you think of any other sources I might have featured in this list? Anything to add? And what are your thoughts on classical vs e-books? Then please leave a comment below. Otherwise, why not share this post on the social media of your choice? If you desire to do so, please click on one of the tender buttons below.

Dark Romanticism: A Brief Introduction

We’ve all heard a great deal about Romanticism. Whether we’re talking about poetry, music or art, most people have a rather concrete picture in their mind whenever anyone mentions the word. But what about its gloomier cousin, Dark Romanticism?

For the last article of October – and the final Halloween-themed one – I want to introduce you to a movement in the arts which not that many people have heard about, although most will probably be familiar with some of the works or artists I’ll mention.

As the word implies, Dark Romanticism is closely related to Romanticism. And like Romanticism, it has had a stark influence on many contemporary artworks, including novels, film, music and more. But enough of the introduction – let’s dive right into the world of the Dark Romantics!

What is Dark Romanticism?

Much like its lighter-hearted cousin, Dark Romanticism grew out of a resistance to the Age of Enlightenment, to the Industrial Revolution and general rationalisation, placing special emphasis on raw emotion, pure aesthetic experiences and other forms of intense feeling. But taking a gloomier turn from there, Dark Romanticism focuses on all the negatives of this approach. This includes irrationality as the end-result of a resistance to absolute rationality, demonic and grotesque aspects of human nature, and some of the darkest possible themes – suicide, death, madness, terror.

Consequently, many of the motifs we can find in Dark Romanticism are part of the realm of the uncanny. Love becomes lust, imaginative experience becomes escapism, nature features mist and lightning, buildings often feature haunts and ruination.

Dark Romanticism also involves other elements, such as demons and ghosts, pseudo-sciences, alchemy and magic, occultism, drugs (especially opium or alcohol), nightmares, melancholy and depression, resignation, despair, possessiveness, decay and personified evil.

Isn’t it just Gothic fiction?

If you’ve been following the article this far you’ve probably been wondering whether there’s any difference between Gothic fiction and Dark Romanticism – and there is! Gothic fiction is more of a wide-reaching genre which can refer to particular works of art over a wide period.

As such, Dark Romanticism can be classified as a part of Gothic fiction. The latter can refer to works from any period of time, whereas the former is tied to its relation with ‘regular’ Romanticism. Consequently, we would classify Edgar Allan Poe as a late Dark Romanticist, whereas Bram Stoker is too Victorian to be considered one. Meanwhile, both are indisputably members of Gothic fiction.

But there are also differences in the types of media used. Gothic fiction is usually literary or related to film, whereas Dark Romanticism lies within the realm of literature and visual art (and some Romantic music, although that is probably debatable).

Furthermore, as with every artistic movement, the differences are often fleeting, and so we might classify even something contemporary as heavily inspired by Dark Romanticism – making it questionable as to how useful the distinctions are beyond using them to define a particular type of art in a particular moment in history.

Also, within Romanticism itself it’s difficult to distinguish succinctly between dark and ‘regular’ Romanticism; few artists were as consistently uncanny and dark as Poe – perhaps E.T.A. Hoffman or the Marquis de Sade; others less frequently so, such as Lord Byron or John Keats.

Dark Romantic Music

To complicate matters even further, let’s have a brief look at Dark Romantic music. The reason why this complicates things is that, of course, Romanticism in music incorporates the entire 19th century, rather than just the late 18th/early 19th century as in literature and the visual arts.

I’d feel slightly inclined to classify primarily parts of early Romantic music as Dark Romanticism because it’s in the early 19th century that Romantic music was closest to the ‘roots’ of Romanticism (and Dark Romanticism is part of the ‘roots’ of Romanticism). Anything along the lines of darker pieces by Schubert or Schumann, or even late Beethoven, falls under this category.

To give you a couple of examples, here’s Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of Death). The theme is obviously perfectly suitable for Dark Romanticism and the constant onslaught of uncanny, darker harmonies and the threatening underscore of the Dies Ira melody make this an excellent piece for those in a gloomy mood.

A second example is Franz Schubert’s Der Tod und das Maedchen (Death and the Girl), a haunting Kunstlied (song) about the coming of… well, death. It contains a brilliant contrast between the quick-paced voice of the dying girl and the dark, solemn tone of Death. Always haunting and eerie, it gives you a brilliant sense of inevitable tragedy.

Dark Romantic Visual Arts

Since Romanticism in the visual arts is much more narrowly defined than in music, it’s a lot easier to make a case whether a piece can be seen as Dark Romanticist or not. To point out the obvious, a lot of Dark Romanticist art is so-called because it uses darker scenes and colours – and because it enables the artist to depict the ‘dark’ subject matter directly, such as death, darkness and general depictions of morbidity.

Indeed, it probably boils down to the depicted scenes. If a work deals with the sublime, exaltations of any kind and general feelings of joy, it’s probably ‘regular’ Romantic; if it deals with death, madness, melancholy or related themes, it’s Dark Romanticism. In the visual arts, we can literally see death: people dying, yelling for help, shipwrecks, storms, darkness engulfing all.

In other words, a William Turner depicting a ship during a storm is Dark Romantic. A Henry Fuseli is more often than not Dark Romantic through his depiction of witches, demons, and scenes of madness. Again to give you a couple of examples, here’s one from the Belgian painter and sculptor Antoine Joseph Wiertz. After the death of his mother, he painted his famous Deux jeunes filles – La Belle Rosine, which captures the confrontation of death and beauty (much like Schubert’s Der Tod und das Maedchen).

A second example is Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. This haunting picture features a woman lying asleep in an uncomfortable pose with an imp-like figure sitting on her chest. Its dreamlike depiction of uncanny eroticism was a huge success after its first exhibition in 1782 – and it leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Is the picture the manifestation of her nightmare, or is this a vision she has during her sleep?

Dark Romantic Literature

I don’t want to go into too much detail about literature related to Dark Romanticism since I already covered a lot of Romantic horror-like literature earlier this month. Nevertheless, since horror and Dark Romanticism aren’t exactly the same, it might be nice to provide a brief list of literary works which might be considered Dark Romanticist:

  • Marquis de Sade: Justine. This 1791 novel depicting a young woman recounting her story on her way to punishment and death after attempting to live a moral life. It’s an exploration of how trying to be good can end with dire consequences

  • Matthew Lewis: The Monk. This is a 1796 novel about a monk falling into sin. It was criticised by many for its heresy and obscenity

  • Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Featuring the first Byronic hero, this poem published between 1812 and 1818 explores the travels and reflections of its hedonistic protagonist

  • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. See my other article for more information

  • Anything by Edgar Allan Poe. Esp. The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart or The Raven, all of which deal with anxiety, ruin, depression, and overall gloom

  • Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal. Okay, I’m cheating with this one. It’s actually a rather late work, having been published in 1857. But French symbolism was rooted in Romanticism, and this scandalous volume deals with eroticism and hedonism – a wonderful combination in the arts

Closing thoughts

Due to the wide-reaching nature of Dark Romanticism, this article is hardly a comprehensive list of all features and examples from the movement. But they may have given you a good overview as to what elements define something as Dark Romantic art and will let you go on your own journey to discover its pleasures.

If you fancy listening to, looking at or reading something which is old, solemn and serious but with a touch of the eerie and uncanny, Dark Romanticism is for you. It’s also an excellent way to discover some of the roots of our contemporary Gothic fiction and horror. Thus, it’s perfect to finish off this Halloween-inspired month.

Did you enjoy this article? Do you want to add something? Or tell me that I missed something important? Then please leave a comment below. Otherwise, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Then click on one of the tender buttons below.

Why there are no good Lovecraft film adaptations

While often considered an outsider in literary circles, H. P. Lovecraft’s writing nevertheless maintains a large popularity. But in the world of movies, directors seem to struggle to get across the right tone. In this post, we’ll go through some of the reasons why this might be.

If you’re into Lovecraft, enjoy the oddly archaic (even for his time) language, overuse of adjectives and descriptive elements, the accessible style and above all the gorgeous sense of uneasiness and fear stemming from incomprehensible horror in his writing, chances are you’re rather frustrated that there are essentially no good Lovecraft adaptations out there.

Yes, of course there are Lovecraft-inspired films which are reasonably well done, but when it comes to direct adaptations of his lore or stories, there’s a bit of a gaping hole (with one exception, which I’ll get to towards the end). But why is this the case? I believe there are several aspects about his work which simply make him difficult to translate to film.

The fear of the unknown

Not only does Lovecraft tap into the fear of the unknown, but his writing is usually centred around the fear of the incomprehensible unknown. We’re not just talking a fear of something we don’t know and could learn to know, but the fear of something which lies outside of the grips of our imagination. Films, being a scenic and sonic medium, necessarily portray things which are based in reality – even when they’re set in an otherworldly universe (Sci-Fi, Fantasy). But how do you capture the nature of something so different and horrific that it makes onlookers go mad? No matter what you display on the screen, it will be a disappointment, and if you downplay it too much the film might not grip the audience properly.

The fear of human insignificance

In many ways, Lovecraft was a product of his age. Living in the first half of the 20th century, he felt the gnawing sense of insignificance which emerged out of human progression – and which plagued many philosophers and psychologists around that time. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism, especially, seems to shine out of Lovecraft’s writings – whether he was aware of it or not. We get the same sense of fear of the meaninglessness of life, and how small humanity is when facing the rest of the universe. But how do you capture nihilism in film? How do you reflect the spirit of an age when it’s so psychological? That’s right: you don’t!

Psychological horror

While there have been many great psychological horror films out there – The Shining springs to mind – they’re few and far between. It’s a difficult genre to get just right, and Lovecraft relies entirely on psychological horror. The fears he explores are primal, basic, hidden beneath all sense of rationality, and portraying this in film requires a great deal of skill and subtlety. Too much relies on the imagination, on tapping into a psychological area we are hardly aware of, to allow for films to do him justice – making Lovecraft a risky area to attempt.

The horror relies on his writing style

I’m not going to debate whether Lovecraft’s writing is any good, although there are large discussions in other circles. Generally, people often criticise his deliberately archaic style and his overuse of adjectives and his simplicity (despite both former aspects!). But I believe that all this adds to the sense of horror in his writing. In the same way that his subject matters are weird and otherworldly, so is his style. It reads like English and it’s easily understandable – but it’s strange, eerie, and matches the mood perfectly. But here’s the problem. If the horror relies on his writing style (whether it’s good or not), how would you translate that into a visual medium without a written narrative? Simple: it’s not possible.

That one good Lovecraft adaptation

If you read through this article so far and thought to yourself, ‘well, that would be excellent material for a silent film in the style of the 20s’, then I’d agree entirely! Thinking of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the silence, pacing, and weirdness of early silent films would provide an excellent style to portray one of Lovecraft’s stories. And indeed: one particular Lovecraft adaptation has done it exceptionally well.

The Call of Cthulhu from 2005 is an excellent, low-budget and very faithful rendition of Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They even kept the camera quality similarly old-fashioned and less than optimal. This allows us to experience a wonderful bit of Lovecraftian horror since it captures the right tone succinctly. I’d recommend it highly.

Sadly, there’s not really a large enough market for this kind of thing. So we’ll probably never get anything quite like it again. But at least – and this is a good thing – many directors use Lovecraft-inspired techniques in their horror films, even if they’re never comprehensive and only hint at the source material. However, it does mean that we’ll never really go completely without Lovecraftian elements.

Essentially, it all boils down to this. Transcribing the indescribable and incomprehensible to film is inherently difficult. The range of aspects that a Lovecraftian story consists of makes him generally unsuited to movies. This is the case even if individual elements can be adapted. Unless, of course, there was a decent market for old-fashioned silent films.

Do you have any questions or anything to add? Then please leave a comment in the comment section below. Otherwise, if you enjoyed this article, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Then click on one of the tender buttons below.