"Lovecraftian" horror and coffee.

Hello there, take a seat, take a drink of your choice, I hope you’ll enjoy your reading. My personal recommendation for this is a very black coffee, strong, and, maybe, if you’re adventurous, with a little bit of rhum. I think it will be the best for this story. I don’t know what kind of drink Lovecraft would choose but a black coffee suit well to his stories.

To begin, a little bit of context! Howard Philip Lovecraft is an American author, born in 1890 in the city of Providence. He wrote a lot of short stories, publish in pulp magazine before some editors make compilation of them. He’s the father of what we call now “the cosmic horror”. He loves to write stories about how microscopic the humankind is face off the infinity of the universe and all the horror it can contains. Most of his creature are not anthropomorphic, unlike most of his peers. Maybe you already know the Great Old Cthulhu? Well, this monstrosity came from one of his stories: “The Call of Cthulhu”. Most of his creation inspire a lot of author and creator after him, we can saw some references in a lot of horror stories, novel, film, series, video-game, painting...

I want to take the time to make a little parenthesis about the ideology of Lovecraft: in his correspondence, we can read some racists reflections and this can also be found in some of his stories. He changes his mind and made a “mae culpa” at the end of his life but it’s important to keep this in mind when you read it. The story I choose here is not concern by that but it’s an important point to be aware off. I chose to work on the story: “The Color out of Space”, first publish in 1927. I really invite you to read it but to resume it briefly we follow in it a scientist who came into Arkham (one of the fictive cities that Lovecraft had invented and we can find in a lot of his stories) for studied a construction project. He heard about a strange place, a land near the city where nothing exists. Nobody ever came, plants die, even animals are afraid of this zone. In 1880, a meteorite crash in this place, field of the Gardner Family, leaving behind her a strange stone of a color that nobody saw before. After that, a lot of strange and terrific things are going to happened to the family until the dramatic ending. With this short story I want to speak about how different media can show this kind of non-anthropomorphic horror.

Indeed, in this novella, the horror came from this strange and unknow color, out of the classical spectrum who seems to make people mad. He uses the system of the story into the story where someone explain the event with the meteorite, like that the reader and the main character are at the same place, we live the same thing that this scientist. This allows to place the tale of the events in the mouth of a human. Someone narrate his memories, everything is taken from the human point of view, making the horror closer of us, even if the events of the story date of 1880. Most of the adaptation are going to choose to don’t use this process and to put us in the center of the action. For example, in the film “Color Out of Space” out in 2019, director by Richard Stanley, he mades this choice. In this film they choose a very frontal approach of the horror, with the utilization of a very shiny pink to illustrate the unknown color and some very graphic image of corpse or malformation cause by the meteorite. Here, the horror is less atmospheric, the director uses more sensational processes for keeping the spectator stick to his seat.

The director Huan Vu, choose another process to give rise to the horror. In the film “Die Farbe”, he put the action in Germany and he use the black and white to highlight the color. Here to, he uses a flashy pink/purple to illustrate this color beyond the human comprehension. The film is more slow, more contemplative, more like the novella. I find really funny that both directors chose to represent this color by some really bright pink. I think it have something to know with the fact that pink doesn’t exist as a natural color (yes, yes, if you check the optic, it’s only a variation of red, a pale version of it). Another common point between the two is moving the action closer of the spectator: Stanley put the action of the film in our year and Huan Yu in his country, Germany. Like that we feel closer to the action and characters.

Another really important adaptation is the manga draw by Gou Tanabe. He is really famous for his adaptation of Lovecraft’s shorts stories and his drawing style is unmistaken. For this adaptation he chooses to stick to the novellas but the part with the scientist is really short, barely two or three pages. All the rest is center on the meteorite and the Gardner’s family. I’m really in love with how he represents the color, by the ties of the manga, he only draws in black and white so he plays with the transparency, like some drapery. It’s really difficult to describe by words (how clever it is, difficult to describe by words the representation of a color who doesn’t exist!) so I leave you with some picture of the drawing. With this manga, he uses the same technic than Lovecraft to create horror in the reader: everything slides slowly toward the nightmare. The last plates are just so graphic and continue to stick into my eyes when I think about them. It’s just beautiful how terror goes from really diffuse and atmospheric to graphic and frontal, I think it’s all the talent of Lovecraft that Gou Tanabe succeed with flying colors to show through his manga. It’s not just an adaptation it’s really a new interpretation of the original short story.

For me it’s, by far, the most interesting and efficient work about the representation of this non anthropomorphic nightmare, because it let to the reader a lot of places for his imagination and it’s all the point of the horror in Lovecraft’s novellas. Nothing is perfectly described and a lot of his creatures are not described at all. He let a lot of space to the reader to make his own picture and it’s, for me, what’s make these short stories so terrifying.

I hope I have made you want to discover more about this author, his continuators and his adaptations. Enjoy your coffee and watch out for what crawls in the shadows.

- Anaëlle M.