Let’s get the now-standard disclaimer out of the way: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a virulent racist, anti-Semite, and xenophobe even by the standards of his time. His formative contributions to the worlds of horror, sci-fi, and weird fiction don’t excuse his reprehensible personal beliefs (indeed, it’s these beliefs that directly informed many of his classic tales). Even before he croaked, though, Lovecraft’s “mythos” was growing beyond him, in part because he liberally borrowed from and paid tribute to his predecessors and peers. Unlike, say, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, who are alive and well(ish) and continue to earn accolades and financial gain from their work, I don’t think it’s that complicated or controversial to denounce Lovecraft the man while still enjoying and building on Lovecraft the author.
Of course, most Lovecraft derivatives and adaptations are absolutely dreadful. I’m far from the first person to say it, but the scary thing about Lovecraft was never tentacles and fish people on their own, but the idea that we are incomprehensibly small and unimportant on the cosmic scale—that the gears of the universe turn with no regard for our insignificant lives, full awareness of the world around us will always be out of our reach, and our fate is not ours to control. Lovecraft protagonists don’t lose their grip on sanity because they can’t fathom a sea creature that walks like a man, but because they are confronted with knowledge their feeble human minds can’t reconcile with what they’ve been taught about the natural world. Especially in Lovecraft’s era, coming off of the industrial revolution, manifest destiny, etc., man was god’s chosen creature, and Lovecraft’s stories often knocked us down a few billion pegs.
It’s no surprise that this sort of horror is hard to replicate and depict in other media. For all that our species is still steeped in (willful) ignorance, we know much more about the world today than we did 100 years ago. There are fewer mysterious places left on the planet (in part because we’re actively destroying them), and “fear of the other” is motivated less by genuine lack of knowledge than by hatefulness and selfishness. Even many of Lovecraft’s creature descriptions (which were, on average, quite vague anyway) seem quaint now, after a century of wide-ranging and inventive monster design. It’s not as easy to describe the indescribable in 2020 than it was in 1920.
Visually depicting the incomprehensible is even more challenging. This past week, I finally caught Richard Stanley’s admirable The Color Out of Space adaptation, which was warmly received by Lovecraft scholars and casual fans alike. Stanley stays relatively faithful to the main thrust of the story, in which an alien “colour” (in Lovecraft’s original) comes to a farmhouse on Earth and turns things asunder, but updates it for the modern day. Nic Cage (who really needs to be taken seriously as an actor again after this and Mandy, at least in genre circles) utters a throwaway line about how the colored light he saw wasn’t like any color he’s seen before, but we as the audience see…pink, purple, and fuchsia. After all, our cones can only see the colors within the human spectrum of sight. What can be indescribable in text is rendered very, very describable on film. Stanley eventually takes the body-horror route, to good effect, but it’s a modern spin on the horror in Lovecraft’s original, veering away from the tools H.P. used in prose as a way to adapt the terror to the visual medium. I’ve seen reviews that call it “camp,” which, even more so than last year’s miscarriage of a Met Gala, makes me question what people think “camp” means. The Color Out of Space is an earnest take that gets pretty damn close to what one of Lovecraft’s most beloved stories was all about.
For my money, comics have a leg up over movies and TV when it comes to capturing the Lovecraftian. Unlike film, in which CGI or special-effects wizardry is called in for heavy lifting, the visual world of comics is completely controlled by the artistic team. An artist like Providence’s Jacen Burrows, for instance, can choose exactly when, where, and how to break from the reality he has established, and can move as boldly or subtly as he likes. One of Providence’s greatest strengths is the restraint Burrows and writer Alan Moore show; the book is jam-packed with Lovecraft allusions, but its moments of terror and confirmed supernatural phenomena are paced with great patience. There are a great number of fantastic horror comics, but Providence is one of the very, very few I consider actually scary. The reader may ultimately control the pace at which they read Providence, but Moore and Burrows provide a strong underlying suggestion, allowing them to punctuate our comfort at just the right moments. And because the entire world of Providence is crafted by Burrows and the rest of the art team, there is never a chance for CGI, wonky practical effects, or camera trickery to give the reader a safe “out.” Once you buy in, you’ve bought in for good. And by the time Moore and Burrows reach a certain body-swapping scene, your investment in the story being told is so complete as to be viscerally upsetting.
Black Stars Above, which wraps next week from Vault Comics, is one of the few cosmic-horror tales I’d place alongside Providence in effect and execution. Written by Lonnie Nadler, drawn by Jenna Cha, colored by Brad Simpson, and lettered by my good buddy Hass Ostmane-Elhaou, Black Stars Above owes as much or more to writers like Clarke Ashton-Smith, Arthur Machen, and especially Algernon Blackwood than to Lovecraft, as it dwells on the terrors of the untamed world in ways that Lovecraft, frankly, seemed too cloistered to tap into. Like Providence’s Moore and Burrows, Nadler and Cha favor carefully considered panel grids, solid storytelling and framing over flash, and a tight control on the pace of reading. Cha and Nadler also throw some of that out the window to impressive effect as the cosmic horror begins to ramp up, especially as they break established paneling rhythms. There are sequences in Black Stars Above where Cha carries your eyes along with the breakneck pace of the best-cut A24 trailers, which is the kind of control over the reading experience that threatens to elevate a good horror comic to a great, even scary one.
About a decade ago, it felt like we hit peak Lovecraft. The era of adorable Cthulhu merchandise may be on the decline, but surprisingly solid attempts from filmmakers like Richard Stanley, inventive recontextualizations like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (soon to be a TV series), and confident new cosmic-horror tales like Black Stars Above are a good sign that, a century after weird fiction’s biggest boom, we might finally be figuring out how to translate that terror of the unknown into worthwhile stories in all sorts of media.