Can someone explain to me how in the fuck Lovecraft is supposed to be scary in the least?

Can someone explain to me how in the fuck Lovecraft is supposed to be scary in the least?

you have to be a total neurotic for it to make any sense at all

To me, the appeal of Lovecraft doesn't lie on his ability to spook the reader. He developed a very atmospheric and dark style that really gets you into the story filled with horrendous creatures from outer space in a time when spooky skeletons and ghosts was all there was.

Oh it makes sense just fine. It's not that fucking deep. A bunch of shit from outer space have asymmetrical bodies and lived on Earth a long time ago and stuff and that's "scaaaary".

I guess. He seems like a boring fucking author to me.

i don't know if this was meant to be snarky, but i think it's a pretty good answer. the horror you're supposed to feel is something like your own insignificance or lack of control.

i think the beginning of the call of cthulu is a pretty good summary of lovecraft's main thesis:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

if you're the kind of neurotic who reads that and can despair over the idea that there is a true, vast, sinister nature of the universe that would fuck you up if you look for it, then you're the kind of neurotic who would be scared by lovecraft.

>the horror you're supposed to feel is something like your own insignificance or lack of control.
I don't feel that at all. Did he write horror for narcissist egomaniacs or something? Look out your fucking window. Nobody has any fucking control. How is that news?

You're supposed to see the monsters as a metaphor for non-whites, then it gets terrifying

Maybe it just isn't your author, or maybe you'll understand it in a different momet of your life. It is not supposed to be a deep and life-changing read and you should not make an effort into liking it if you don't. Some people just find it stupid and that's okay.

Has literally anything at all scared you in recent time?
Because that might be where the real problem is

dude, it sounds like it just might not be your thing. some people harbor internal fears about their mortality, their control, their very tiny, insignificant place in the universe. it's called existential dread.

you saying something like "how is that news?" about work written in the '20s is kinda silly in my opinion. like, yeah--no shit. horror, existentialism, prose, and fiction in general have all been explored more fully and in more contemporary, more surprising ways since the '20s. would you read something by shakespeare and be like "yeah, wow--unrequited love sucks. how is that news?"

I'm not white so I try not to lol

For me is less jumpscares and more the dark atmosphere.

I don't read Lovecraft to be scared. If the idea of being alone in a godless unheeding universe is fine by you (it is with me), then just read it for fun. How often do books scare you anyway?

desu

You have to be able to suspend your disbelief.

I definitely need to read more but has anyone here actually been really scared from reading something?

The closest thing i've felt is tension. Which is good. But I haven't ever read anything that made me terrified. It's not like you have visual or auditory stimuli with a book as you do with a film.

Cults are really spooky. These people that give all of themselves to another that can ask anything of them.

Are you honestly trying to claim that Lovecraft could ever possibly be scary? Why? Because Cthulhu has an octopus for a head and cartoonishly small wings? A summer C movie has scarier shit in it than Lovecraft ever wrote.

I understand it fine now. I see what Lovecraft was going for. I just think it's literature for stupid people. Lovecraft is the Big Bang Theory of his day. It's what stupid people think "big thinking" looks like.

>It is not supposed to be a deep and life-changing read
Then he's a failure as an author, isn't he?

>some people harbor internal fears about their mortality
What does this have to do with Lovecraft? Jurassic Park deals with mortality and it's scarier than Lovecraft. Constantine is much scarier than Lovecraft.

>it's called existential dread
Yeah I'm thinking I got my question answered. Lovecraft is horror for stupid people who literally are terrified of thinking. I genuinely think that's it. The entire schtick of Lovecraft is "forbidden knowledge" that will make you CRAAAAAZY Oooo scary! This must be what it's like for idiots to read a science book.

>If the idea of being alone in a godless unheeding universe is fine by you
You mean the universe we live in? Lovecraft's universe is BETTER than ours. AT least there ARE fucking gods.

>How often do books scare you anyway?
It's ostensibly HORROR. Isn't it supposed to be scary? Isn't that what it it's all about?

Oh I can do that fine. I can fully except Lovecraft's universe as 100% real. I'd be okay with that. Better than this shit hell.

Why? Humans are too stupid to be frightening.

*accept

Be less obvious

>look at me I'm a STEM brainlet rick and morty fan who thinks everyone around me is an emotional ape I'm too smart for existential dread

Kill yourself you emotionally stunted autistic robot. You are quite literally damaged in thinking

>Jurassic park deals with mortality and is scarier than lovecraft

I don't even like lovecraft but nigga what

>Yeah I'm thinking I got my question answered. Lovecraft is horror for stupid people who literally are terrified of thinking. I genuinely think that's it. The entire schtick of Lovecraft is "forbidden knowledge" that will make you CRAAAAAZY Oooo scary! This must be what it's like for idiots to read a science book.
>14 year old atheist confirmed

I've never read him, but I've always found the idea of a mad god like Azathoth terrifying. Ie, that meaning is just an entity purposelessly flailing around in anger and pain.

Is there are any horror fiction that does scare you? If so, what?
As for Lovecraft, his stuff rarely scares me, but I know that if would be terrifying if it was actually real. But there are other authors who scare me more. The main reasons I like Lovecraft have little to do with whether he scares me or not.

OP is gay

New topic, whens the last time a book genuinely got you frightened

Honestly, Pickman's model genuinely spooked the shit out of me.

>Yeah I'm thinking I got my question answered. Lovecraft is horror for stupid people who literally are terrified of thinking. I genuinely think that's it. The entire schtick of Lovecraft is "forbidden knowledge" that will make you CRAAAAAZY Oooo scary! This must be what it's like for idiots to read a science book.
>You mean the universe we live in? Lovecraft's universe is BETTER than ours. AT least there ARE fucking gods.
>Why? Humans are too stupid to be frightening.
>I understand it fine now. I see what Lovecraft was going for. I just think it's literature for stupid people. Lovecraft is the Big Bang Theory of his day. It's what stupid people think "big thinking" looks like.
wew lad
how's 9th grade going?

>it struck me that [Lovecraft's] style of horror loses something when read from a modern standpoint. Good ol' H.P. sauce was writing during a time when the march of science and astronomy was mapping the universe, and humanity was finding it increasingly harder to overlook the fact that it seemed less like we were God's special chosen ones and more that we were a freak patch of grime clinging to the side of a rock floating through nothing. The whole notion of "cosmic horror" refers to a sense of dread and hopelessness brought on by the mere idea that aliens could exist. That we are almost certainly not the only form of sentient life that's ever existed and probably not even in the top ten. There are a few Lovecraft stories - like The Shadow Out Of Time - where the reader is expected to be horrified at the existence of aliens who actually come across as quite courteous and obliging.

>And I don't think that has quite the same impact now most of us have basically accepted the depressing fact that we're an accident of random chaos in the godless miasma of existence. I like to think that we've been sufficiently conditioned by fiction and scientific theory, and if a crack in space-time popped open in Leicester Square tomorrow and a bunch of formless shoggoths marched out with suitcases in tentacles asking to apply for immigrant housing, then most of us would eventually be able to deal with it without tearing our eyeballs out and booking a stay in Arkham Asylum for the bank holiday weekend (the Lovecraft one, not the Batman one).

How true is this?

It's not a horror of some boogeyman thats going to pop up behind your computer and spook ya
It's intended to circulate around the cosmic horror of our own ignorance and lack of importance on the greater scale of the universe
Like
We have no idea what great horrible beings lie just beyond the observable fields of "our" universe
We have absolutely no clue what's out there or what it's capable of

You're rationalizing that you don't have any control.
You don't actually behave like that or really believe it at all.

Eh, sorta true.

Lovecraft coincides with and is inspired by expressivism and late romanticism, which were part of the collapse of intuitive Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism in the cosmos, for sure, and with the rise of the all-encompassing scientific-materialistic worldview.

But the author is so deep in that worldview, which has now become normal and reflexive (as William James would say, "we're almost born scientific" these days), that he thinks in very whiggish terms. He thinks that science and the materialistic/naturalistic view of the cosmos are just objectively correct, and that Lovecraft's generation was just uncertain about their newness. He reads Lovecraft and goes "aw poor quaint guy, he's scared of an indifferent cosmos!"

In reality, precisely what is valuable about Lovecraft is that it's way of denaturalizing naturalism, it's a window OUT of the intuitively materialistic view of the world, a window back to an era when the God of naive anthropocentrism was dead, but we hadn't replaced him with the God of scientism and iPhones yet.

The whiggishness of the author is in reading his own worldview as correct, and only understanding its historicity in terms of
>What did people do before they learned the truth?
>What did people do when they learned the truth, but it was still new?
>How do people nowadays, who know the truth, feel about it?
Naturally, the "truth" you know by reflex is comfortable. But the author thinks it's comfortable because it's true - not that it's comfortable because it's known by reflex.

Reading Lovecraft is fun because it pries back the reflex. It allows you to see the possibility of another view of the cosmos, one that is still facing the problem of indifference, but that responds to it in another way - or more precisely, that actually sees it as a problem. The author is CERTAIN of the mundane indifference of the unanthropocentric cosmos. He has ironically anthropomorphised it, by assuming it will conform to his humdrum expectations, just like the pre-Lovecraftian, pre-romantic, pre-God-being-dead people assumed the cosmos conformed to their own theological expectations. By contrast, Lovecraft's entire achievement is to look at the indifference of the cosmos, and resist anthropomorphising it.

Lovecraft flips the awe of the romantics in their encounter with Nature, their appreciation for the ineffable mysteries of the universe, on its head. If the romantics restored dignity to nature by restoring its mystery, by making it autonomous, then Lovecraft is saying: "What if that autonomy isn't something beautiful and calming, but hideous and terrifying? What if instead of meeting a spooky ghost in that old medieval castle and experiencing a quaint frisson, the realm of ghosts is something so horrifying that it snaps your mind in half like a twig?"

I thought the colour from outer space was really scary, when the mother did some crabwalk and was grimacing, I feel like every modern horror movie has copied from his works.

There's nothing wrong with thinking your own worldview is correct.

>Naturally, the "truth" you know by reflex is comfortable. But the author thinks it's comfortable because it's true - not that it's comfortable because it's known by reflex.
He seems to imply the opposite by saying people are more comfortable with certain views now that they're raised and conditioned with them.

think of movies like Wolfman and The Mummy being scary

a product of their times. only lovecraft requires more non-euclidean madness

Eh, I enjoyed it until around the end. I feel like he could have done more.

>Dude grabs a gun for "rats"
>Sounds like a fight in the other room
>"Got it bro"
>"Ok cool"

Nigga wut

It clearly doesn't make sense to you if that's all your taking away.

try Nick Land faggot, he took a lot of Lovecraft ideas about technology and irrationality

Most of it is just a bit unnerving, But stuff like Polaris or The Doom That Came to Sarnath, while not spooky, I find pretty haunting. Color out of Space is pretty disturbing. I think Rats in the Walls is the one I found most scary, and my favorite story overall.