Why are there no good Lovecraftian horror movies? They're

>>39052013
A few Masters of Horror episodes in Lovecraft settings are pretty good. Otherwise you're better off just looking for Stephen King adaptations or other modern horror fiction that just outright appropriates Lovecraft's horror themes.

>>39052013
Probably because trying to depict incomprehensible beings in media ruins their ambiguity. Using your imagination is something reserved for the reader and when someone else has to do it for you it takes away from the experience.

>>39052013
The Void is the best I've seen, and that's setting the bar pretty low compared to Lovecraft's actual writing.

I asked a similar question on /tv/ about Ligottian horror movies. Didn't get any replies.

I'm a fan of Lovecraft but I like Ligotti's work even more. I saw a short film based on his story "The Frolic". It was just fantastic.

I don't know why Stephen King got so famous but Ligotti is somewhat obscure. Not to rag on Stephen King, but his work is usually just kind of bland (not to say he doesn't have his great moments).

Ligotti's stories, every single one is amazing. I'd rank him as among the greatest horror writers of all time. Stephen King might somehow get on that list too, but more towards the end.

>>39052165

Also, anyone else here really just not get "horror comedy"?

The only one I actually liked was The Cabin in the Woods. It actually had some Ligottian elements in it.

But most of them, to me, aren't funny at all and aren't scary at all either.

I guess I liked a few as a teenager. "Night of the Demons" was okay, but I think the demon form of Angela should have been played by a woman, not a dude.

There was, strangely enough, a LGBT film based on the mythos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_%282007_film%29

It's not terrible, but it's about as decent as a low-budget film can be. The LGBT themes are only insomuch as the protagonist is incidentally a gay man.

From Beyond was hilarious,

>>39052056
which eps, anon?

Bump.

I would have thought Thomas Ligotti would be very popular on /r9k/.

It seems he isn't as well known as I thought.

>>39052013
Because Lovecraft is complex and subtle and Hollywood isn't about that, or at least the marketers aren't.

>>39052202
Horror comedy is awful. It'd say it's even worse than B-movie action.

What do you like about Ligotti? I haven't heard of him but it sounds interesting.

>>39052013
i kind of liked the 2001 adaptation of dagon but i haven't seen it in a while. its not exactly good though even then.

>>39052013
Depends what you mean by "Lovecraftian." There are movies which create the same feeling of creeping, existential dread without necessarily having the same themes. Session 9, for example, is something I'd consider Lovecraftian. Also Kairo, Tale of Two Sisters, and Kubrick's The Shining.

>>39052013
Lovecraft only works in the written medium.

I read "The Colour Out of Space" the other day. Creeped me the fuck out. But if you look at the literal series of visible events as they are described...it's really kind of fucking stupid.

Film is a very literal medium. Material that works atmospherically in print (where the author has total control) can fail utterly on film.

you can pretend the taking of deborah logan is about yig instead of whatever the hell its about and its a pretty good movie.

>>39054026
A few others I'd consider Lovecraftian after some thought: Carpenter's The Thing, the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Haunting (the film based on Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House -- which is itself Lovecraftian), The Babadook, and It Follows.

>>39054008

I like how his descriptions of the settings of his stories are so vivid and how he's not afraid to use complex descriptive language, unlike a lot of other contemporary horror and fantasy writers who seem like they're hesitant to use more complex language for fear of being seen as pretentious. Even when he's describing dark and depressing locations, there's a certain sensation of melancholic beauty in it. Most of his stories stir up this feeling in me that I could maybe best describe as a sort of uneasy nostalgia. I feel transported to what feels like a world I used to live in, even though I never really did.

I also enjoy how there doesn't seem to be some kind of "cosmic good"/deus ex machina in a lot of his stories, that fixes everything in the end. Stephen King has a way of so frequently imbuing many of his protagonists with amazing power and good fortune due to their resilience and the goodness of their hearts and all that; like there's a mystical force that comes to reward them.

In Ligotti's world on the other hand, there's often an implicit theme that reality itself is not your friend, and isn't necessarily going to come save you or anyone else, even if you work hard or didn't do anything wrong.

I don't know either of them personally, but Stephen King to me seems like, overall, a pretty happy guy, despite the dark subject matter of a lot of his works. On the other hand, Thomas Ligotti has lived for decades with severe depression and anhedonia. It seems like his intelligence (he wrote an amazing book called The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which shows his remarkable understanding of several deep philosophical themes--I almost think the book could fall into some genre like "horror nonfiction" if such a genre could be said to exist) combined with his inability to experience happiness in his own life has given him a style of writing that few people could imitate.

Bumping for more horror discussion.

Discussing it on /lit/ and /tv/ just isn't the same.

>>39052139
not op but is this worth seeing? should i watch it home alone right now? is it scary???

>>39054383
Different anon here, your description was interesting, any recommendations?

>>39052013
because there's a few elements of lovecraftian horror
>the horror is never properly shown or explained (this translates much worse into cinema than literature)
>the protagonists must be totally impotent against the horror monster (this one is fairly common, but cinemagoers generally don't like the usually-bleak endings of Lovecraftian fiction)
>the monsters must be beyond humanity, not simply powerful, but so totally alien and unknowable that mere human logic, ideas and so on simply fail to explain or relate to the creature (again, translates far worse to cinema)
of course Lovecraft himself played around with them a bit but his strongest stories obeyed those elements
predictably, it translates even worse to vidya

>>39055290
>predictably, it translates even worse to vidya

Not in the case of Bloodborne, which I think does Lovecraftian horror perfectly.

>>39055217

You might enjoy "The Town Chairman" and "The Spectacles in the Drawer".

Also check out "The Frolic". This is the only film I know of based on a Ligotti story. I haven't read the story, but the film version is excellent. It's only about 20 minutes long but it's eerier and more disturbing than most full-length horror pictures.

>>39054905
eh okay me again. i just watched it. it was kind of much ado about nothing imo. there wasn't really much to think about or process. it was kind of like a way more spelled out hellraiser.

>>39055566
People often say that it isn't true Lovecraftian because you are able to kill the gods. I'm still not very well read in Locecraft, but I feel like that ignores some of Lovecaft's significant works. Some sailors fuck Cthulhu up by ramming their ship into him in Call of Cthulhu, and some Arkham scholars manage to kill a demigod in The Dunwich Horror.

>>39055715

Hey, I made a mistake. The title of the story is "The Town Manager", not "The Town Chairman".

>>39056786
the thing is, those two books are very out of the norm for lovecraft, and it's really annoying those are what people think of lovecraftian horror
The Mist movie is closer to lovecraftian horror than Bloodborne