Why is lovecraft scary

I personally think his stories hold up very well, for what they are. Like Whiskey Jack said, part of the enjoyment of his work comes from the fact that he didn't try and stop other writers from composing stories set in his world; in fact, he quite liked it, saying they built up a sense of 'evil verisimilitude'.

The Hellboy comics and by extension, movies are heavily based on Lovecraft's Mythos, for example. It's more emo then scary imo.

Yeah, not scary, but I think it's quite fascinating stuff. Ars Legatus Legionis et Subscriptor. Originally posted by Wasabi: I read a bit of Lovecraft several years back, and didn't find it all that scary. Lovecraft wrote horror like Dante wrote about Heaven. Punk Walrus. Originally posted by Korgano: quote:. Hound of Cullen. Originally posted by AngrySaki: quote:. And Shadow Over Innsmouth which is the classic.

Die fast. I still need to get around to reading his work. Graeme K. I found the Re-animator short stories quite chilling.

Danger Mouse. Whiskey Jack. Originally posted by Son-volt: quote:. Originally posted by Danger Mouse: quote:. Puke Flyswatter. Originally posted by Whiskey Jack: Lovecraft's horror isn't really a visceral one, more an existential one. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Originally posted by AngrySaki: I was going to oringally try reading them on my computer, but it sounds like it might be better to get a book and read in a room for a different atmosphere Ars Praefectus et Subscriptor. Originally posted by Crossed Reality: Lovecraft is about his ideas. Posted: Fri Dec 19, pm. More to the point, the way he expressed ideas of cosmic horror through bizarre, writhing creatures worked.

Horror was still largely rooted in the Gothic era; for those used to Victorian ghost stories, these alien, inhuman calamari-things had few antecedents. For an author whose whole thing was about the fear of the unknown, Lovecraft has become a very known quantity, to the point of almost being self-defeating at times.

The common problem with all three besides being marred by technical performance issues was that as Lovecraft games, players were all in on the gag.

At that point, players were more likely to derive enjoyment from these tropes than fear. This point may sound asinine, even illogical. After all, anything of sufficient popularity loses some of its mystery. In neither case were the sequels of necessity less terrifying.

Silent Hill sticks with people because of its masterful exploration of universal facts of life like guilt, death, remorse, and alienation. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath ranges across much of the Dreamlands — an alternate realm that humans access via their dreams — and features a run-in with an Outer God Cosmic beings of even greater power than the Great Old Ones.

Share: Share on Facebook. Related Lists. See all. Today's Top Books Want to know what people are actually reading right now? Stay in Touch Sign up. Lovecraft , This quote becomes important when analysing the protagonists of Riverdale , Jughead Jones and Betty Cooper. The desire for knowledge is most prominent in these two characters, who work as teen investigators and journalists for the school newspaper The Blue and Gold.

Betty unequivocally reminds us of Francis Wayland Thurston from The Call of Cthulhu and Etienne Roulet from The Shunned House , because of how passionate she is about each and every investigation that she undertakes. She has an indomitable desire for forbidden knowledge which she tries to quench through these local investigations and, just like Thurston and Roulet, with each of her new discoveries Betty spirals deeper and deeper into psychological instability. For example, she sinks her nails deep into her skin in a way to combat the darkness that overwhelms her every now and then.

When this transformation happens, Betty loses sight of the immediate reality. For instance, while taking revenge on a misogynistic high school bully, Chuck Clayton Jordan Calloway , Betty dresses up in a black wig and refers to both herself and Chuck by the wrong names. The characters of Riverdale are seen playing this game for almost the entirety of the third season of the show.

The game almost becomes a microcosmic representation of the town of Riverdale, as if whatever happens in Riverdale could be predicted through this game. On November 5, , the Riverdale podcast Dial M for Maple tweeted that the glyphs used on the show as a part of the game are certainly borrowed from a Lovecraft inspired font.

What else can we interpret from this? Are there any connections between the two? However, no official Cthulhuian alphabet exists. Lovecraft did not create any.

Marshall now offers a commercial license for the Cthulhuian alphabet. Chaosium too ended up using the Cthulhuian font themselves in several publications. There are no Lovecraftian monsters or supernatural creatures in Riverdale. There are only mentions of H.

Indeed, there are only hints and speculations of a certain Gargoyle King who seems to be supernatural but is actually human.

Therefore, what happens in Riverdale is very different from what would happen in a typical Lovecraft story. There is always a practical, logical and realistic explanation behind whatever bizarre incidents happen in the town. Everything that happens in Riverdale can be connected to either some serial killer, some addictive game, or drugs.

Riverdale is undoubtedly gothic, but is it Lovecraftian? With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.

Keeping this quote in mind, we must analyse the geographical significance of the neighbouring towns of Riverdale and Greendale, which can be considered as belonging to the same fictional universe.

The viewers know about this from the numerous crossovers that happen throughout both series. On the other hand, Archie and friends try to apply their logic and reason to get to the bottom of every mystery. So, there are two sets of people living side by side, right next to each other, but their experience of the same universe is so drastically different from one another.

Despite the proximity of the two towns, Riverdale residents appear oblivious to the supernatural happenings just next door in Greendale, like the arrival of the Greendale Thirteen, the Red Angel of Death, the destructive pagan witches and later on the Eldritch Terrors.

Disasters keep brewing in the town of Greendale, the kind of disasters that could wipe out every mortal living on the face of the earth, yet in Riverdale, everything is absolutely normal.