Mythos Madness

Jeff made a great post over at Grubb Street regarding what he sees as six stages (or categories) of development of the Cthulhu mythos. His first five seem pretty spot-on based on my understand of the mythos' history. The sixth (Generation 5: The Gamers II?) - the one I would be a member of (or, the one preceding me) - is everything Jeff describes, but with an interesting added bonus: there have been a variety of mythos-inspired video games and interactive fictions that have taken story development into new places.

I don't want to get into a video games vs. pencil & paper games debate, but I can say that video games have had an influence on the mythos in my mind. True, I read every Lovecraft story I could find in the Granville Middle School library in the sixth grade, but the narrative graphic adventure games I played in my younger days had as much of an impact on my developing creativity than the books I read and the movies I watched.

Rather than write an essay, here are some mythos-inspired games that jump out in my mind:

• Alone in the Dark - Started the survival horror genre. Investigators enter an old house, discover secrets, end up dealing with a pissed off demon.
  
• Phantasmagoria - Created by Roberta Williams (of King's Quest fame), a full motion video graphic adventure spanning seven CDs (!) about a demonic presence let loose in a New England house. Fun fact: fellow Allit Lorelei Shannon wrote the sequel.
  
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - One of the five or so decent Gamecube games, Eternal Darkness was a hell of a trip and featured an insanity system I haven't seen duplicated anywhere else. It would often break down the fourth wall, telling you your controller was unplugged, pretending to delete your save file, and screwing around with your sound settings.
  
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth - And here we have the only 'real' Cthulhu game (by name anyway) on the list. Dark Corners of the Earth was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in interactive form, and if it weren't for an absolutely impossible 20-minute stretch where you're being hunted and cannot save your game and die if you so much as screw up once, it would probably be one of the best 1st-person games ever made.
  

Those are the four that leap to mind. Silent Hill should probably be on the list too - does anyone have any others?

The Old Ones Were, The Old Ones Are

A couple of weeks ago, Roger and I were having a conversation about the nature of the Cthulhu mythos based on this post on his Livejournal, and why exactly Lovecraft's writing was considered "horror." At the time, I did a pretty crummy job summing up the ideas of extreme existential horror in the mythos, but I found a passage this morning (in the d20 Call of Cthulhu sourecbook of all places) that does a great job articulating it:

The cosmos is everything: the universe, the stars, the planets, all forms of life, the physical laws that govern them, and the agendas at work that affect us all. Unfortunately for us, humans didn't create the cosmos, and neither did anything we commonly know. There is no God, no Allah, no Buddha. Humans do not possess immortal souls, and when we die, we are but dust.

Worse, the cosmos does not exist to give us an interesting place within it. It exists to exist. Oiur role within the cosmos is only what we make of it, for in the grand scheme of things, we are irrelevant. Even when we live, we are but dust.

Our vague conceptions of things such as gravity and subatomic particles are but the barest verge of a vast, unknowable whole. Like blind sailors marooned atop an iceberg, we fumble to understand our terrain without guessing the truth: the bulk of our reality lies occluded beneath the surface. More terrible still, it is but a solidary mass drifting without direction in an infinite ocean of mystery. And the ocean is full of monsters.

Fifteen Days Late...

Pictures of Halloween pumpking carving, 2006, including Shub-Pumpkinroth, the Black Pumpkin of the Woods.

Tales from a Sport Cthutility Vehicle

Last night, I was driving from my office to our weekly D&D game. I'm stopped at a light, waiting to turn left, and I notice the person in the car behind me is having a very animated discussion with her passenger. It looks like a mother and a young daughter. Never one to pass up a chance to people-watch, I keep an eye on them in my rearview mirror. The mom looks like she's trying to explain something, as she keeps using her hands.

Then, she points at the back-left corner of my truck. Talks some more, and makes a gesture like she's showing her daughter something really big. It clicks immediately what they're talking about: the back-left corner of my truck is adorned with my Cthulhu for President bumper sticker.

Now I'm watching them outright, and the mother notices me looking in the rearview. She gives me two big thumbs up. Grinning like a Cheshire cat, I turn around and give them a thumbs-up too. They laugh. I laugh.

Later, she passes me and I wave.

Nothing like the Great Old Ones to liven up your day and remind you how cool people can be.

T-Shirt Marketing: Go To Hell(boy)

This weekend at Costco I noticed a pair of geeky-looking chaps walking in while I was walking out. Their geeky looking T-Shirts had a certain red comic book character on them, but it was the back that interested me: a website hawking an upcoming Animated Series - gotohellboy.com. A quick look through the site confirms that it's not an animated series per se, but it's going to be a series of animated film releases not unlike the Ultimate Avengers films Marvel put out this year. Feature-length, direct-to-DVD, and featuring the voice talent from the Hellboy motion picture including Ron Perlman and Selma Blair.

Some quick Google-fu yielded the production diary of the movie's producers, which hints at a pre-release or sneak preview at the upcoming HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland. The festival is also showing some good horror fare, including Dead Birds, a great little creepfest that's worth paying to see.

Wonder how my work schedule looks that weekend.

The Stars Are Right

This morning, we had a contractor out to give us an estimate on what it would cost to replace most of the insulation in our house. On his way out, he remarked that recognized my Ash bobblehead, and we agreed that Evil Dead is one of the best movies of all time. He then said "yeah, I saw your truck on the way in, and I thought the bumper sticker was great! Most people wouldn't even know what that was."

My bumper sticker? Cthulhu for President.