HPL in the Screaming Room

© 2006 Robert M. Price

H.P. Lovecraft, as is well known, was not much impressed by the horror movies of his day. He dreaded the prospect of having any of his own fictions adapted to the screen. So it is all the more striking that one of his brief prose poems reads like an allegory of effective horror movie making. I am thinking of "Nyarlathotep," which centers on a scene in a darkened room in which the abashed audience is shown some sort of projection on a screen and is then sent out into the night in a hypnotic march of doom. They find themselves on a decaying earth, the fabric of its space-time continuum worn threadbare and open to frightening vistas beyond.

By my reading, what has happened in the brief tale is that Nyarlathotep has revealed to his hapless audience the terrible truth that it is their accustomed life in the mundane world of three dimensions that is in fact the shadow-play, the trivial fiction, the momentary illusion. He has emerged from centuries less a dream than this we know to ring the curtain down on a play that has already run too long, so long in fact that its characters and actors have forgotten that it is all a play. But now they must go home, back to the darkness that spawned them as half-detached shadows.

In all this I think we have, in effect, Lovecraft's prescription for a good and effective horror film, the kind he never thought to see made. Like his stories, such a film would catch up its audience in a rare mood of strangeness in which their complacent anthropocentric worldview would be cast aside and forgotten save as a lingering hint of regret for comfort forever lost.

Viewers of such a film would file silently out of the screening room only to find that they had brought the horror with them. Never again could they rest secure in the undisturbed assumptions about a cozy world and their nested position in it. There would, to be sure, be a momentary thrill of isolation and dislocation, but like Henry Wayland Thurston, narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu," and the similarly dumbstruck protagonist of "The Strange, High House in the Mist," the viewer would henceforth see every moment of mundane life under a cloud of cosmic futility and subtle dread born of a clutching realization of one's insignificant place in the scheme of things.

As a horror author, Lovecraft himself played the role of the Mephistophelian Nyarlathotep, and he found the projection screen of the blank white page an effective enough medium for his projected revelations of apocalyptic despair. But in "Nyarlathotep" I believe he has created an oblique manifesto and agenda for would-be film-makers to follow in his train. And though I have not yet found a Lovecraft-inspired movie to have the effect I am discussing, I have on occasion left the theatre, only to take a bubble of dark atmosphere with me. Your list will be different, and neither of us may be able to explain the lingering effect of a particular movie, but I will confess that my list contains The Ring, Psycho II, Lord of Illusions, and Hellraiser I and II.

There is a new technique of eerie subtlety in horror films today, several of them inspired by Japanese horror cinema. I believe that these currents will soon provide us with the first truly effective, truly atmospheric Lovecraftian vehicle for cosmic horror on screen.