Lord Malaphus wrote:Here's my follow up vid about Cthulhu monsters.
Finally got round to looking at this, and your earlier one. Some interesting artwork in there, nicely collected. But a great variety of takes on the various entities, which makes you wonder which, if any, come anywhere near to approaching what Lovecraft had in mind.
If, indeed, he had anything in mind at all. With the exception of a detailed passage about the Old Ones in Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft rarely, if ever, does anything more than hint at the physical forms of his various creations. He's fond of words like Blasphemous and Nightmarish; and often has recourse to Unnameable and it various synonyms, but avoids being specific. Here, for instance, is the bit from Call of Cthulhu when His Nastiness makes his big entrance. "It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway ..." With the exception of a later reference to "Flabby claws," that's all you get.
Which, I think, is pretty much the whole point. Lovecraft is a master because he forces the reader to fill in the gaps; to create the horror in his or her own head. It's a neat trick, and damn hard to pull off - and is the stumbling block on which so many of his would-be imitators (yes, including me, I'm sure) come total croppers. I might add, that Lovecraft could do strange things with words, which is also damned hard. The Haunter of the Dark ends with a reference to the (otherwise un-described) monster's "Three-lobed burning eye." It's a memorable phrase, and it's only some time later that you realise that it doesn't make any sense (well, not in THIS reality, which is probably the point). And can claws actually BE flabby?
Working in a different genre, Ridley Scott pulled off the trick in Alien. For ninety-five percent of the film you never get anything more than the odd hint about what the monster looks like, which makes it DAMN scary. So much so that the end, though dramatic, is almost a let-down. By comparison, James Cameron's Aliens, whilst being a fun and suspenseful shoot-em-up effort, lacks the earlier film's ability to generate real visceral fear.
There's a neat bit in one of Leeman Kessler's "Ask Lovecraft" you-tube posts (and if you haven't checked them out, you really should) in which he addresses this point. I forget the exact words, but in essence - "If you say the monster looks like a giant lizard, all the reader will see is a giant lizard. If you say it looks like a creature out of a nightmare; well, each reader has their own particular nightmare, and will conjure up an image peculiar to themselves."
Hmm. Possibly I should get out more.
Other stories of that era are all there, but that one is suspiciously missing.