Master Thesis

1. FAKULTET ZA PRAVNE I POSLOVNE STUDIJE DR.LAZAR VRKATIĆ
Univerzitet Union Beograd
Studijski program:Engleski jezik
Hauard Filips Lavkraft: Lavkraftovski Elementi u Popularnoj
Kulturi
(Howard Philips Lovecraft: Lovecraftian Elements in Popular
Culture)
Master rad
Mentor: Student:
Doc. Dr. Dorin Drâmbărean Jonela Hromčik M1112055/17
Novi Sad, 2019.

2. ABSTRACT
The purpose of this research is to describe the influence of life and works of the American horror
writer Howard Philips Lovecraft on popular culture – movies, television shows, comic books, music, and
games. Many of his characters are featured in literature, especially in Stephen King’s novels where
Lovecraftian Horror was used as the background plot. Besides literature, Lovecraft’s influence is spread
out in the media where his monsters and the author are presented as fictional characters. The paper starts
with a short introduction of Howard Philips Lovecraft, the Lovecraftian Horror in literature with three
classifications of Lovecraft’s stories which are Macabre, Dream Cycle and Cthulhu Mythos and
Lovecraftian elements in popular culture.
Keywords: H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraftian, Cthulhu Mythos, Weird Fiction, Popular Culture

3. APSTRAKT
Glavna ideja ovog master rada je opisivanje uticaja dela i biografije američkog horor pisca
Hauarda Filipsa Lavkrafta na popularnu kulturu, tačnije filmove, televizijske emisije, stripove, muziku i
igre. Mnogi likovi iz njegovih dela se spominju kod Stivena Kinga, gde se Lavkraftovski horor koristi
kao osnova za sadržainu romana. Pored književnosti, Lavcraftov uticaj je prisutan i u mediji gde su
njegova čudovišta i autor predstavljeni kao izmišljeni likovi.
Rad započinje kratkim uvodom o životu pisca Hauarda Filipsa Lavkrafta, kao i njegovog književnog žanr
Lavkraftovski horor, koji možemo podeliti na tri vrste prema tematici: Priče o smrti, Priče iz ciklusa
snova i Ktulu mit.
Ključne reči: H.P. Lavkraft, Lavkraftovski, Ktulu Mit, Čudna fikcija, Popularna kultura

4. Table of Contents
ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................2
APSTRAKT...................................................................................................................................3
1. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
1.1 .Aim of This Paper ...........................................................................................................1
1.2 .Hypothesis.......................................................................................................................1
1.3. Expected Outcomes and Results.........................................................................................2
2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND.....................................................................................3
2.1. Literary Genres ...................................................................................................................3
2.2. Howard Philips Lovecraft: Biography ................................................................................5
2.3. Lovecraftian Horror ..........................................................................................................11
2.4. Macabre Stories.................................................................................................................16
2.4.1. The Alchemist........................................................................................................................16
2.4.2. The Beast in the Cave ............................................................................................................16
2.4.3. Dagon.....................................................................................................................................17
2.4.4. Beyond the Wall of Sleep ......................................................................................................18
2.4.5. The White Ship ......................................................................................................................18
2.5. Dream Cycle Stories .........................................................................................................20
2.5.1. The Doom that Came to Sarnath............................................................................................20
2.5.2. The Cats of Ulthar..................................................................................................................21
2.5.3. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath .................................................................................21
2.5.4. The Outsider...........................................................................................................................22
2.5.5. Nyarlathotep...........................................................................................................................23
2.6. The Cthulhu Mythos .........................................................................................................24
2.6.1. The Hound..............................................................................................................................26
2.6.2. The Call of Cthulhu ...............................................................................................................26
2.6.3. The Dunwich Horror..............................................................................................................27

5. 2.6.4. The Shadow over Innsmouth .................................................................................................28
2.6.5. At the Mountains of Madness ................................................................................................29
3. LOVECRAFTIAN ELEMENTS IN POPULAR CULTURE .................................................30
3.1. Lovecraftian Elements in Stephen King’s Novellas .........................................................30
3.1.1. The Dark Tower.....................................................................................................................31
3.1.2. It .............................................................................................................................................31
3.2. Movies...............................................................................................................................32
3.2.1. Pirates of the Caribbean.........................................................................................................32
3.2.2. The Shape of Water................................................................................................................33
3.2.3. Howard Philips Lovecraft Adventures...................................................................................33
3.2.4. Hotel Transylvania.................................................................................................................34
3.3. Television Shows ..............................................................................................................34
3.3.1. Supernatural ...........................................................................................................................35
3.3.2. Scooby Doo............................................................................................................................35
3.3.3. South Park..............................................................................................................................36
3.3.4. Game of Thrones....................................................................................................................36
3.4. Comic Books.....................................................................................................................37
3.4.1. Hellboy...................................................................................................................................37
3.4.2. DC Comic Books ...................................................................................................................37
3.4.3. Alan Moore Comic Books .....................................................................................................38
3.4.4. The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West ......................................................................................39
3.5. Music.................................................................................................................................39
3.5.1. Classical Music ......................................................................................................................39
3.5.2. Heavy Metal Music................................................................................................................40
3.6. Games................................................................................................................................42
3.6.1. Roleplaying Games................................................................................................................42

6. 3.6.2. Board Games..........................................................................................................................43
3.6.3. Video Games..........................................................................................................................44
4. CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................1
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................................1
APPENDIX................................................................................................................................................5
Howard Philips Lovecraft complete fiction works ................................................................................5

7. 1
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 .Aim of This Paper
The aim of this paper is to show Lovecraft’s influence on popular culture. As an author, he is
considered the godfather of horror literature, and his stories are used in literature to spread his philosophy
in combination with other authors’ ideas. Many modern horror authors, like Stephen King, use his stories
as the background idea to write their stories. Apart from literature, his stories are lurking in the media
which can be seen in movies, television shows, comic books, music, and games. Unlike other authors,
Lovecraft created a subgenre in literature known as Cosmic Horror. He introduced the cosmic view in
literature, created his fictional world Cthulhu Mythos with his philosophy of how life started on Earth,
created his fictional town Arkham and added aliens as his monsters in his stories. After his death in 1937,
the genre Cosmic Horror was renamed Lovecraftian Horror after him.
Today, many modern authors, film directors, musicians, and gamers borrow Lovecraft’s stories and
philosophy in combination with their ideas to spread the Lovecraftian Horror in the popular culture. In
literature, we see Lovecraftian elements in Stephen King’s novellas It and The Dark Tower. In the movie
Pirates of the Caribbean, the character Davy Jones was based on Lovecraft’s monster Cthulhu. One of
the most famous animated television show – Scooby Doo featured Lovecraft as a fictional character in
the episode The Shrieking Madness. Lovecraft’s fictional town Arkham is featured in the Batman Comic
Books as the name for the fictional asylum called Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
In music, his stories are used as the lyrics for songs followed by melodic sound which can be seen in two
genres – classical and heavy metal music. In games, his stories are used for background action in three
categories, roleplaying, board and video games.
1.2 .Hypothesis
This paper is based on the following hypothesis: The works and characters of Howard Philips
Lovecraft are not recognized enough and are not widely known. A lot of the characters which he invented
were used by other authors, movie directors, musicians, and game creators. The purpose of this research
is to throw light on their real origin and to show how vast is his influence on modern culture.

8. 2
1.3. Expected Outcomes and Results
It is expected that this research will show that Lovecraft’s influence is visible in popular culture
but it is not recognized enough. Many of his characters are present in literature and media but are discrete
because no one mentions the author but only the stories that served as the background plot. At the end of
this master thesis, we expect that many readers will be surprised by which Lovecraftian elements are in
the literature and media.

9. 3
2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1. Literary Genres
Howard Philips Lovecraft was an American horror writer, who introduced the combination of
horror, fantasy and science-fiction genres in literature which gave birth to a new subgenre known as
Cosmic Horror at the beginning of the 20th century. This subgenre combined elements of supernatural,
mythical, and scientific elements that Lovecraft introduced into his stories. He was a self-taught scholar.
His grandfather acquainted Lovecraft with authors like Edgar Alan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Gothic
literature, Greek and Roman mythology, which were the staples in his grandfather’s home collection.
Through school, Lovecraft was introduced to his favorite subjects, astronomy, and chemistry, which he
later combined with the stories he wrote.
His stories are classified into three categories:
• Macabre stories
• Dream Cycle stories
• Cthulhu Mythos
Lovecraft’s life was not favorable. His father died when he was very young. The father’s role was taken
by his grandfather and was the main reason why he was so obsessed with literary and scientific subjects.
He had episodes of breakdowns which prevented him from finishing high school. Eventually, he decided
to live in isolation. Lovecraft had constant nightmares which were the main influence for his Dream
Cycle Stories. Even if he had dedicated his whole life to writing stories, he could not have made a living
out of it. He was diagnosed with cancer and died a terrible death at 46.
As an author, he was not that popular nor famous during his lifetime. His works were mostly published
in Pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. These were amateur magazines where he worked both as an
editor and a published author. Nevertheless, he wrote over one hundred fictional stories during his
lifetime. However, these stories were recognized and praised in the 21st century, when Lovecraft was
considered the godfather of horror literature.
After his death in 1937, his works were published by his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
under “Arkham House” that they had founded. Without them, Lovecraft’s works would have been

10. 4
unknown. To honor Lovecraft's works, the subgenre Cosmic Horror was named after Lovecraft which is
known as the Lovecraftian Horror.
Today, Lovecraft is considered one of the most influential horror writers. The genre LovecraftianHorror,
besides literature, plays a significant role in popular culture. This genre had a strong impact at the
beginning of the new Millennia on different media mediums such as movies, television shows, comic
books, music, and games. No matter if his stories are featured or used as the background inspiration, his
trace is still strongly visible in the media.

11. 5
2.2. Howard Philips Lovecraft: Biography
“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with
brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in
twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave
twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me - to me, the dazed, the
disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling
desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach
beyond to the other.
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider
Lovecraft’s parents got married in 1889 and both of them were in their early thirties, which had been
usually late during that period. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was a traveling salesman of jewelry
and precious metals working for Gorham and Co. Silversmiths in Providence. His mother, Sarah Susan
(Susie) Philips, came from a family known of good stature and was financially well endowed. Her family
could trace their ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630.
About a year later, on the 20th of August 1890, Howard Philips Lovecraft was born in their family home
situated at Angell Street Providence, on Rhode Island. As an only child, he got all the attention from his
family members who lived in their family home. He lived there with his parents, two aunts from his
mother's side, Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips, and his grandparents, grandfather
Whipple Van Buren Phillips and grandmother Roby Alzada Place Philips.
Unfortunately, in 1893 when Howard was only three years old, his father had a nervous breakdown from
being overworked. He was known to be a troubled man and had periods of frequent psychotic episodes.
One of them was in a Chicago hotel room when he was on a business trip. He was brought back to
Providence and placed in the Butler Hospital. The hospital had prior reports of his episodes saying that
he sometimes "said and did strange things" (Fandom , n.d.).Winfred spent five years in that hospital
where he was reported to have suffered from third-stage syphilis from which he died in 1898. His mother
did not show any signs of that illness. She was a closed person and avoided physical contact with her
husband while he took his sexual pleasure while traveling.
His mother avoided bringing young Howard to visit his father while he was hospitalized because she
took the role of the overprotective mother and kept him close. During the time while his father was still

12. 6
hospitalized, young Howard was given full attention and care from his family in order not to feel the
absence of his father. He remained at his family home where he was surrounded by his female persons
but he did not find them very interesting and did not pay any attention to them.
His grandfather took the role of the father figure to young Howard, thus created a strong emotional bond
with his grandson. Due to the fact that his grandfather was a traveling businessman and did not see
Howard for the prolonged periods, he taught him how to write at the age of three to exchange letters and
keep in touch. As a result, he was able to communicate fluently, read and write.
Howard was introduced to authors such as The Grimm Brothers, Jules Verne, Greek and Roman
Mythology and Arabia Nisollasya which his grandfather had in his private library. By the age of four, he
was already speaking and able to write, which was quite unusual for children at that age. Whenever his
grandfather was on a trip, Howard would write about the things he found interesting. At the age of five,
he wrote his first poem titled The Poem of Ulysses which was a rewriting of the Odyssey in 88 lines of
internally rhyming verse.
His grandfather was a very good father figure to Howard. He even forced five-year-old Howard to face
his fears of darkness by walking through dark rooms in the family house because he had nightmares.
Despite all the effort, his nightmares overtook him when his grandmother passed away in 1896. In spite
of their emotional distance, her death had a long-lasting effect on his mind. All the female family
members were wearing black clothing to grieve his grandmother's death which terrified young Howard.
As a result, he started to avoid his family because he had terrible nightmares. The black long dresses that
his mother and aunts were wearing manifested as night-ghouls in his dreams. He was often locked in his
room and was reading the stories that his grandfather gave to distract him from his mother and aunts
while wearing black dresses. This event triggered the influence on his writing by adding monsters in his
future stories.
The same year, he went to Slater Avenue School. He was in and out of school because he was frequently
ill, both physically and psychologically, thus had to be homeschooled to keep up with his studies. At
school, he found his new interest in science, more precisely, chemistry and astronomy, which were his
favorite subjects. These subjects had a very important influence later on in his writing because he used
them in a combination with his stories. While he was at home, his grandfather introduced him to the well-
established authors of the Gothic literature such as Edgar Alan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, which was his
earliest inspiration, and later served as an introduction to his fiction works in Macabre stories.

13. 7
Formal education was not one of his strengths. He was only successful in Astronomy which gave him
other views of the universe. He was well-educated because he read a lot of books at home where he
gained most of his knowledge. Even though he was absent from school, he managed to keep in touch
with his peers. In 1899, he produced several hectographed publications among his friends known as The
Scientific Gazette in 69 issues which dealt mostly with chemistry and astronomy, and later The Rhode
Island Journal of Astronomy from 1903–1907.
In 1904, before Howard started at Hope Street high school, his family went through another tragedy. His
grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, passed away at the age of 70 of a heart stroke. His grandfather's
estate left the family in a poor financial situation, forcing them to leave their family home for a smaller
one. This was his darkest period where he had more frequent breakdowns, lost the will to live, and had
suicidal thoughts. After his grandfather's death, he wrote his first fictional works The Beast in the Cave
and The Alchemist.
High school, for Howard, was one of the darkest periods of his life. After his grandfather's death, his
nightmares haunted him which also caused him to have more frequent breakdowns. He had conflicts with
his teachers. Howard had difficulty in higher mathematics class which caused his headaches. He needed
to master it to become a professional astronomer, the subject he loved the most. In 1908, he dropped out
of high school and could not continue his studies at Brown University which he was hoping to finish.
Lovecraft’s first appearance in writing occurred in 1906 when he wrote a critique letter on an astronomy
column for The Providence Sunday Journal. This motivated him to write a monthly astronomy columns
such as The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, The Providence Tribune, The Providence Evening News and The
Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News. In this period, Lovecraft had the habit of writing and reading during the
night to get his thoughts on paper and slept during the day to avoid people around him.
From 1908 to 1913, he lived with his mother in a smaller house and had difficulty to find a job. His
relationship with his mother was bittersweet because they had to leave their family house, lived in poor
conditions, and she was traumatized about her husband's and father's death, and had to face the financial
difficulties. Howard admired his mother's passion for French literature and language even if he did not
show any interest in that subject and thought it was useless. Instead, he started writing his poems as well
as learning about Organic Chemistry.
In 1913, after reading an early pulp magazine, he found his inspiration to write fiction stories. He was
inspired by Fred Jackson's stories which were published in The Argost. Howard was writing a letter in

14. 8
verse to attract Jackson's attention to what he thought of his writing and later his letter was published in
the same magazine. Meanwhile, his letter to Jackson was noted by Edward. F. Dass, the president of the
United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). A few weeks later, Edward invited Lovecraft to join them
in 1914. During this period at UAPA, he published his first magazine The Conservativein 13 issues from
1915 to 1923. In 1916, Lovecraft published his early fiction works The Alchemist, The Beast in the Cave,
The Tomb, Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Dagon in the main UAPA journal.
Besides writing his fiction stories, he was also writing poems and editing other journals to earn his
money. Later, he became the president and official editor of the UAPA for a short period. He was also
the president of The Rival National Amateur Press Association. While he was working at UAPA, he
became close friends with Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith and his best friend Robert E. Howard – the
author of the Conan the Barbarian series and the two most important people August Derleth and Donald
Wandrei who published his works after his death. After meeting his colleagues, he became more outgoing
after being isolated for a long time.
In 1919, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown which was a sign that they had financial problems.
Her breakdowns were more frequent, forcing Howard to move to her to his aunt, Lillian. Later that year
in March, she was taken to Butler Hospital, the same hospital where her husband had died. She was
reported to have weeping often and speaking regularly about both her family's financial collapse and her
son. According to the medical report, she suffered from hysteria which was common for women of that
period. She and Howard exchanged letters while she was hospitalized until her death in 1921 due to
complicated surgery.
In 1920, while his mother was still hospitalized, Lovecraft was introduced to Lord Dunsany’s works
which were the main influence for his Dream Cycle Stories. This can be seen in works such as The White
Ship, The Doom that Came to Sarnath, The Statement of Randolph Carter and The Cats from Ulthar. At
the end of 1920, Lovecraft began to write and publish his most famous stories known as Cthulhu Mythos.
The first story which was published was The Nameless City in 1921, followed by short stories The
Crawling Chaos and Nyahalontemp. This was the first time that his creation Necronomicon was
introduced to his readership as well as the character of mad Arab Abdul Alhazen.
After his mother's death, he attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston. There, he met his future
wife – Sonia Greene. She was born in 1883 and was of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. Despite being seven
years older than Howard and divorced, they got married in 1924 in their thirties like Lovecraft's parents.

15. 9
They moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City where Sonia had her hat shop. This was the
first time that Howard left Providence.
Soon, the married couple faced their first financial problems. He was in his thirties and could not find a
job because he had no previous work experience except for his writing career. Sonia lost her hat shop
and suffered from poor health. She moved to Cleveland to find another job to support herself and
Lovecraft. While she was gone, Lovecraft lived on his own in their small apartment in the Red Hook
neighborhood of Brooklyn which he despised.
In 1924, while still living in Brooklyn, he became the editor of Weird Tales for a short time, but because
his wife was getting ill and spending time in a New Jersey sanitarium, he quit his job. Despite all that,
he made friends with Frank Belknap, Samuel Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner who published his stories
in the Weird Tales magazine. While he was in Brooklyn, he wrote The Horror at the Red Hook and The
Shunned House. He was inspired by the Brooklyn streets which he described in his stories how are they
different from Providence streets. He referred to the people of New York as strangers which showed that
he regretted his having left the hometown.
A few years after living separately, Howard and Sonia got divorced. In 1926, he returned to his hometown
Providence to live with his aunts during his remaining years. He lived in a spacious brown Victorian
wooden house. In this period he wrote some of his most famous works The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,
At the Mountains of Madness, The Mound, Winged Death, The Diary of Alonzo Typer, The Dunwich
Horror, and his only book The Shadow over Innsmouth which were published after his death.
Despite all the masterpieces which he wrote during his last years, he grew ever poorer. He could not
make a living from the writing. In 1936, he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and also suffered
from malnutrition. He was hospitalized at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. He lived in constant pain until
his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence. He was buried in the Phillips family monument.
After his death, Lovecraft's long-lasting friends – August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were determined
to publish his works in hardcover. They founded the publishing firm “Arkham House”, named after
Lovecraft’s fictional city in New England. Without them, Lovecraft's works and life would not have been
introduced to the popular culture and would have disappeared into the unknown.
Lovecraft’s works play a major role in popular culture and are praised by many modern writers. Esteemed
authors such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Bentley Little, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey
Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Joe R. Lansdale, when asked what influenced their writing, they usually

16. 10
quote Lovecraft as the primary impact on the works they produce. Today, Lovecraft is considered the
godfather of horror literature which gave birth to a new subgenre in the horror genre known as
Lovecraftian Horror.

17. 11
2.3. Lovecraftian Horror
“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those
who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider
During his lifetime, Lovecraft was not popular nor well-known. Not many people knew his name only
his stories that were published in the pulp magazines or his magazines that he distributed among his
friends. His readership was mostly Americans since he did not travel a lot and did not leave the country
far from Providence. He became posthumously once his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
founded the publishing company “Arkham House” and his works appeared in Weird Tales magazine
thanks to Frank Belknap, Samuel Loveman, and Rheinhart Kleiner.
Before Lovecraft, the Gothic era of literature gave us some of the most memorable creatures and it stands
as a proud monument of horror written on pages. The main idea of the Gothic era was to introduce the
readers with darker themes in literature with elements of fiction, horror, and death. This genre was
intended to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle its readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. The
roots of this horror genre are from Ancient Greeks and Romans, who used in their folklore and religion
focusing on death, afterlife, and evil that were manifested in stories of beings such as witches, vampires,
werewolves and ghosts.
In the 19th century, the Gothic genre was renamed into another more familiar genre known as Horror
Literature. In this century, the main idea was the introduction of monsters into stories that were supposed
to scare the readers as well as keeping the traditional horror stories with monsters such as witches,
vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. The most famous works from this century are Brothers Grimm's
fairytale stories, Mary Shelley's story Frankenstein, Washington Irving's story The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow, Jane C. Loudon's story The Mummy, Bram Stoker's story Dracula, Oscar Wilde's story The
Picture of Dorian Gray and the most known horror author from that century, Edgar Allan Poe. The main
difference between the mentioned authors, their famous works and Poe is that he was focusing less on
the traditional elements of horror stories and more on the psychology of his characters as they often
descended into madness.
According to the website Fandom, all the above mentioned elements were familiar to Lovecraft and were
his main inspiration and the basic ideas for his writing. He introduced all these elements into the 20th
century but added his philosophy and passion for astrology and chemistry within the horror genre.

18. 12
Lovecraft also added new elements into literature which were the fear of the unknown, cosmism, how
life on the Earth was created and evolved according to his philosophy and the introduction of aliens as
the monsters in his stories. During his lifetime, all these elements would make a genre known as Cosmic
Horror. However, after Lovecraft’s death, they were renamed to Lovecraftian Horror which is today a
subgenre in the horror literature. The term Lovecraftian is used to emphasize the cosmic horror of the
unknown without the implementation of gore, violence, and terror.
The philosophy behind the Lovecraftian Horror and Lovecraft's view of the world is that human
consciousness, civilization, and values are just layers that surround humans to see the whole universe
and that humans are not alone on this planet. He believed that there were interstellar beings outside
human perception who lived on Earth for millions of years outside human perception which can be seen
in his fictional world called Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was an atheist and had a different view of how
the world was created. Instead of believing that God created life on Earth, he created his view into his
fictional world how life started on Earth. He created his cult, aliens, religion, cosmic view and alienation
which make his stories different from any other horror stories.
Unlike Poe, Blackwood, and Dunsany, who focused more on the psychological appearance of characters,
fantasy, and ghost stories, Lovecraft introduced the element of the unknown to scare his readership. It is
well known that human beings are afraid of the unknown. Lovecraft did a marvelous job by introducing
his readership through cosmic imagery of his aliens which he created and cultist symbolism that follow
the creation of species. The fear of the unknown is quoted by Lovecraft as “The oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (Fandom,
n.d).
The idea that carries the entire existence of Lovecraftian Horror is that life as we know it is just a layer
of the reality that is surrounded by cosmic beings. If one dares to peek behind this veil, he would lose his
sanity in a matter of seconds. The tangible atmosphere that is felt in Lovecraft's works can only be
credited to the masterfully crafted words and expressions that he used in his fiction and short stories. The
sense of helplessness and estrangement is the key element that makes LovecraftianHorror subtle, elegant
and not easily found or accessed.
The monsters in the Cthulhu Mythos are different from other monsters in horror stories because they are
out of this world. They cannot be connected or compared to the living things on Earth that humans are
familiar with. In the book “Lovecraftian Horrors: A Field Observer's Handbook of Preternatural Entities
and Beings from Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is over one hundred monsters illustrated which he described

19. 13
in the stories, when they came on Earth, how they lived and how they evolved as living things on Earth
for millions of years until the 20th century while hiding from human perception.
During 1920 and 1930, when Lovecraft created his monsters and philosophy for his stories, he had the
idea of spreading them by encouraging his colleagues at UAPA and Weird Tales to feature some of his
creations into their writing. As a result, his monsters and philosophy found themselves lurking into other
author’s stories to keep his Cthulhu Mythos within the literature. In the 21st century, his creations could
be found outside literature. His influence plays an important role in popular culture – movies, television
shows, comic books, music, and games.
From Lovecraft’s view of how the world was created, there evolved many theories and views which are
told differently. Whoever reads his stories understands them in a different way. This leaves the
imagination of the readership with a different understanding which makes him unique and different from
other authors. As a result, many modern writers use his philosophy as the background plot for their
writing in combination with their ideas. From the creator Azathoth who coined the first life out of space
in Lovecraft’s fictional world, the arrival of aliens on Earth, their evolution from millions of years ago,
appearance, how they lived outside human perception, his fiction towns Arkham, Innsmouth and
Dunwich, Lovecraft as fictional character, religion, cult until the 20th century makes the perfect
background plot for the imagination of his readership to create their own conclusion how they understood
Lovecraft’s philosophy.
Lovecraft's stories are written in the first person and the narrators are mostly men which are unreliable,
some of them addicted to substances, driven mad, broken or haunted by the witnessed horror. What
happens to them in each story varies. They either go mad, die or it is unknown what happens to them
which leaves the imagination of the reader to presume the real truth. There are not many female characters
in Lovecraft's stories. Their role in his stories is peripheral and has almost no role or importance just like
his female persons in his personal life.
Many of his characters are driven by curiosity or scientific endeavors which are forbidden and dark. The
curiosity of the characters either fills them with regret of what they have discovered, destroying them
psychologically, making them go mad or destroying the person who holds the knowledge and leaving it
to the unknown. The main inspiration for Lovecraft's characters is becoming mad because of Edgar Alan
Poe and his way of writings. Both authors created distinctive, singular worlds of fantasy, and employed
archaisms in their works which were different from other authors at that time. Poe's influence can be seen
in Lovecraft’s story The Shadow over Innsmouth which has a heavy impression of Poe's story The Imp

20. 14
of the Perverse and Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness where he quotes Poe's poem titled
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This was Lovecraft's early writing and falls into the
group of Macabre Stories.
Another group of stories is known as Dream Cycle Stories. In this group, Lovecraft's major influence
was the nightmares that he had and combined with the stories of Lord Dunsany whom he discovered and
idolized in 1919. From this group of stories, we can see another element that Lovecraft introduced into
his stories, his nightmares, which he used as the background plot of his stories which is also different
from other authors and literary genres. His nightmares served him to create his mighty gods existing in
dreamlike outer realms which were resulting in a series of imitative fantasies in the Dreamlands setting.
Lord Dunsany's work The Gods of Pegana and other Dunsany works were used to create some of his
famous works. Because of that influence, Lovecraft wrote his works The White Ship, The Doom that
Came to Sarnath, The Statement of Randolph Carter and The Cats of Ulthar.
Lovecraft's most popular and famous group of stories is, without doubt, his fictional world Cthulhu
Mythos. In this group, he emphasized that mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors are irrelevant.
Lovecraft believed that there were powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth whom he refers
to as Great Old Ones. In this group, he also combined the scientific areas as biology, astronomy, geology,
and physics to make the human race seem more insignificant, powerless, doomed in a materialistic and
mechanical universe.
In the Cthulhu Mythos, the Great Old Ones were powerful beings who were hiding from human
perception. The knowledge of them existing meant insanity for the victim. They were worshiped by
humans for years, but they got imprisoned or restricted in their ability to interact with most people. The
Great Old Ones were hiding beneath the sea, inside the Earth, who fell into a deep sleep in other
dimensions and can be summoned by the Necronomicon, the book of Dark Gods. The Necronomicon and
Great Old Ones were first mentioned in some of Lovecraft's fragment stories where the main characters
were driven by curiosity, and forbidden knowledge in the search of the unknown and in the end madness
awaits them.
The Necronomicon is Lovecraft's fictional textbook of how to summon the Dark Gods. The creator is
said to be the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred who was first mentioned in The Nameless City, the first story of
the Cthulhu Mythos. The book contains an account of the Great Old Ones, their history, and the means
of how to summon them. Lovecraft's inspiration for the Necronomicon was primarily by Robert W.
Chambers' collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The title “Necronomicon” is from the Greek

21. 15
language, which means “an image of the law of the dead”. The mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, was said to
have worshipped some of the Great Old Ones and wrote the book to summon them. From then on, the
book has been translated into many languages and appeared in many counties but the characters either
die or go mad from the powers of The Great Old Ones. In the 20th century, the book was found in
Lovecraft’s fictional town Arkham which is described in detail in section 2.6 of this master thesis.

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2.4. Macabre Stories
Howard Philips Lovecraft's Macabre Stories were written in the period between 1905 to 1920. The stories
are inspired by Edgar Alan Poe’s works and writing style which Lovecraft used as the background to
create his stories by combining them with other authors and his ideas.
2.4.1. The Alchemist
The Alchemist was one of the first Lovecraft’s original fiction stories from 1905 after his grandfather's
death. The story was not published until 1916. This was the year when Lovecraft started to work at the
amateur press.
The story is told in the first person by the protagonist – Count Antoine de C-. He is the last surviving
member of the noble Comtes de C, whose full last name is not revealed in this story. His family was
cursed after an ancestor was wrongly accused and murdered the recluse alchemist named Michel
Mauvais. Michel's son, Charles Le Sorcier, cursed the family, saying that no member of the de C-family
would live beyond the age of 32. For years, all the family members died one by one after their 32 birthday.
As centuries passed, Count Antoine de C lived in a ruined castle with his servant Pierre, who raised him.
His 32 birthday was getting near. As every tower of the castle was falling apart, one tower was still
standing. Meanwhile, his servant Pierre died mysteriously, leaving him alone to analyze the accent castle
tower. After his 32nd birthday, he decided to analyze the mysterious tower and found some interesting
discoveries. He found a trapdoor in one of the oldest parts leading him to a passage with a locked door
at the end. As he was leaving, he heard a noise behind him. He saw a man in front of him who was trying
to kill him. Antoine was faster and killed him first. The dying man was the Alchemist Charles who
successfully fabricated the Elixir of life, enabling him to personally fulfill the curse and kill every
generation for more than 2000 years.
2.4.2. The Beast in the Cave
Another original fiction work that was written is the story titled The Beast in the Cave and was published
the same year as The Alchemist. This story was written a few weeks after his grandfather's death while
young Lovecraft was trying to commit suicide. Instead, he dedicated this story to his grandfather whom
he admired the most.

23. 17
The story is told by a touring man, Mammoth Cave, who lost his guide while exploring the cave. The
only light that he had was a torch to find his way out. As he went deeper into the cave, his torch slowly
extinguished. He was sitting in the pitch black and lost hope that someone would find him. As he was
sitting in the dark cave, he heard strange non-human footsteps approaching him. First, he thought that is
was a wild animal like a mountain lion or something much scarier. He picked up a stone and threw it in
the direction of the sound. Meanwhile, his tour guide found him. Both approached the dying beast only
to find out that it was a man who got lost in the cave for a long time. The man was covered with white
long hair, pale skin and deformed face who looked more like a yeti than a human being.
2.4.3. Dagon
The story Dagon was the first story that Lovecraft wrote in his adult life. The story was published in
1917 in The Vagrant. Dagon was the first fragment of the Cthulhu Mythos and The Great Old Ones. The
story was inspired by one of Lovecraft's nightmares which he quoted as "I dreamed that whole hideous
crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!” (Fandom , n.d.). He combined this nightmare with
the story of Irvin S. Cobb's Fishhead, a tale about a strange fish-like human, thus was Dagon and put on
paper.
The story starts with a narrator who was a tortured morphine addict. He was lying in a hospital bed and
told that his incident occurred during his service as an officer during World War I. The cargo ship, where
he was working, was captured by an Imperial German sea-raider in the Pacific Ocean. The narrator was
escaping on a lifeboat and drifted aimlessly to the south of the equator. He was stranded on a slime –
covered island and saw horribly unspeakable things. After three days of waiting for the seafloor to dry,
he started to climb a hill to seek for help. On his way to the hill, he found some strange things. Statues
of monsters, which were a lookalike of creatures found in the sea. Fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans,
mollusks, whales, who scared him of their appearance. As the narrator approached the hill, he saw a
creature emerging from the water. He was running for his life at the seashore and escaped the island on
the lifeboat. The next day, he woke up in San Francisco hospital, where he was taken after being rescued
in mid-ocean by an U.S. ship. While he was in the hospital, he wrote a testament to the event he witnessed.
In the end, the man rushed to the window, leaving him mad about being hunted by the monster called
Dagon.

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2.4.4. Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The story Beyond the Wall of Sleep was written in 1919, published in the amateur publication Pine Cones
in October of the same year, and later in Weird Tales in 1938 after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft's
inspiration for this story was an article from the newspaper New York Tribune which was reported by the
police. The title of the story was inspired by Ambrose Bierce's story Beyond the Wall and the plot from
Jack London's novel Before Adam.
The narrator of this story is a doctor who examined a patient. The story starts with an inmate called Joe
Slater. He died in a mental hospital a few weeks after being confined as a criminally insane murderer.
Joe Slater was said to be stupid and harmless but had strange hysteric attacks during his sleep so he had
to be tied with four straight-jackets. While he was asleep, he was mumbling something in a strange
language that the doctors could not understand. His visions in sleep included green edifices of light,
oceans of space, strange music, shadowy mountains, and valleys. The doctors could not explain how he
got all those visions. The doctor that examined his case had built a device for two-way telepathic
communication to examine his brain and visions. The device killed him in the end. The doctors managed
to receive a message from a being of light whose experiences were transmitted through the medium of
Joe Slater. The message from the being stated that all men are light beings. As light beings within the
realm of sleep, humans can experience the vistas of many universes which remain unknown to the waking
awareness. That being was Algol, the Demon Star. The night after Joe had died, an enormously bright
star was discovered in the sky, but vanished within a week.
2.4.5. The White Ship
The short fiction story The White Ship was published in The United Amateur in 1919. This story was the
begging of Lovecraft’s writing shift from Macabre Stories to Dream Cycle Stories.
The story is told by a lighthouse keeper named Basil Elton. He engages upon a peculiar fantasy in which
a robed, bearded man is piloting a mystical white ship on a full moon. He runs to a bridge to join that
man to explore the mystical chain of islands. The islands from this story are Zar, a green land where all
the dreams dwell and the thoughts of beauty come to men once and are forgotten. The city of Thalarion
is known for demons to dwell and humans die. Xura, the land of pleasures unattained where humans die
of plague if they get too close. Finally, they arrive at Sona-Nyl, the land of fancy. While traveling from
one island to another, they were following an azure celestial bird until the ship reached the edge of the

25. 19
world and started to sink. Eliot woke up at the bridge where he joined the mysterious man to realize that
it was all a dream. Instead, he witnessed a catastrophic shipwreck caused by the light which had gone
out for the first time from the lighthouse. The next morning, he found the skull of the celestial bird from
his journey and a single brilliant white wooden spar, but all the corpses disappeared mysteriously.

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2.5. Dream Cycle Stories
The Dream Cycle Stories are a group of stories that Howard Philips Lovecraft wrote in the period
between 1918 and 1932. These stories deal with a vast, alternate reality that mortals can access through
dreams known as the Dream Realm. The Dream Realm was described by Lovecraft as a mirror-image
of the universe, which was determined by the same planets, stars, and other cosmic geographical features.
Lovecraft combined his dreams and the influence of Lord Dunsany to write the stories.
2.5.1. The Doom that Came to Sarnath
The short story The Doom that Came to Sarnath was written in 1920 and was published in The Scot. It
was written in a mythic and fairy tale style that differs from other Lovecraft’s stories which were written
in the first person. The story was inspired by Lord Dunsany's story Idle Days on the Yann. The title
Sarnath was named after a historical city in India which was the place where the Buddha first taught.
The tale says that more than 10,000 years ago, there was a race of shepherd people who lived near the
river Ai in a land called Mnar. There, they built the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron. To crave
more land, a group of people migrated to the shores of a lonely and vast lake at the heart of Mnar where
they found the metropolis of Sarnath. On the other side of the river, there was the city of Ib, an ancient
grey-stone city where a queer race lived. They were said to have descended from the moon, having
bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, curious ears, and were mute. These creatures worshipped a strange
God known as Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard. The people of Sarnath despised them for their physical
form. After massacring them, they took their idol as a trophy, putting it in Sarnath's main temple and
doomed the city of Sarnath. The trophy was gone the next day, while the guardian priest died
mysteriously. Ten centuries later, when the people of Sarnath celebrated the victory of destroying Ib the
doom came to the city. The inhabitants were disrupted by strange lights over the lake in heavy greenish
mists. They fled from the city while the king and the people at the feast were transformed into the original
creatures from Ib. Since then, Bokrug remained the chief god in the land of Mnar.

27. 21
2.5.2. The Cats of Ulthar
The Cats of Ulthar is a short story written in 1920 and is considered one of the best short stories of
Lovecraft's Dream Cycle Stories. In this story, he tried to mimic Lord Dunsany's writing style. Lovecraft
borrowed the vengeance motif and the ponderous tone of Dunsany as well as the surface of the text. The
inspiration for this story that Lovecraft took was Dunsany's work Idle Days on the Yann. In this story,
Lovecraft has named one character after the semi-mythical founder of the ancient city of Memphis,
Egypt. That character is named Menes.
The story starts with an unknown narrator who says that it is forbidden to kill cats in the city of Ulthar.
The city of Ulthar is the hometown of an old couple that captured and killed the cats who came near their
property. One day, a caravan of wanderers passed through the city. In the caravan, there was a small
orphan boy called Menes whose parents died of the plague. The only company that he had was his pet, a
black kitten. The wanderers were familiar with the story of the old couple and little Menes was invoking
a prayer to protect his pet cat. The next day, his cat went missing and he suspected that the old couple
took it. After searching for three days, Menes decided to take action. He was meditating to unleash a
prayer that affected the shape and movements of the clouds in the sky. The next day, the caravan left the
city. The people noticed that all the cats, which have gone missing, returned the following morning well-
fed. When the people examined the house of the old couple, they found nothing but two skeletons that
were picked clean. From that day, the cats became the symbol of that city and the people of Ulthar forbade
the killing of cats.
2.5.3. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is one of the longest stories from the Dream Cycle Stories. It was
written in 1926 and finished in 1927, and never published during Lovecraft’s lifetime, until 1943 after
his death in the collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep thanks to “Arkham House”. This story combined the
elements of horror and fantasy that illustrated the scope and wonder of humankind's ability to dream.
The main inspiration for this story was the fantasies of Lord Dunsany and the novels of Edgar Rice
Burroughs. Edgar Rice Burroughs's fiction character John Carter of Mars was the main driving force for
Lovecraft's fictional character and protagonist Randolph Carter. This character is described as being a
melancholy figure, quiet and contemplative. His journey started in this story and continued in Lovecraft's
story The Statement of Randolph Carter.

28. 22
The main character, Randolph Carter, had three dreams of a majestic sunset city which he could not see
up close. To reach the majestic sunset city, he begs the Gods of the dream to take him there, but they
refused. Carter decided to go to the city of Kadath, where the Gods lived, to beseech them in person, but
no one knew how to get to the city of Kadath. In one of Carter's dreams, he descends seventy steps to
enter the Dreamlands and speaks of his plan to the priests Nasht and Kaman-That. These priests were the
Cavern of Flame who bordered the Dreamlands gates and do not allow anyone to enter in their land
without permission. They warned Carter about the dangers, and that the Gods withdrew his vision of the
city on purpose. There on, his quest begins through his dreams.
2.5.4. The Outsider
The short story The Outsider was written in 1921, but it was not published until 1926 in the Weird Tales
magazine. In this story, Lovecraft combined all the elements of the early Horror and Gothic Literature
genres namely horror, fantasy, and gothic fiction to create this nightmarish story, containing themes of
loneliness and the afterlife. The opening of his story was influenced by two Edgar Alan Poe's stories
titled Berenice and the Horror and The Masque of the Red Death.
The story is autobiographical, where Lovecraft himself is the outsider. If we take into account that the
story was written between 1921 and 1926 when his mother died, he got married and quickly divorced,
and had moved for the first time in his life from his hometown Providence to Brooklyn where he felt like
a complete outsider which is reflected in this story. In this story, he described his childhood, feelings,
and breakdowns while he isolated himself from the people to become an outsider in another city which
he despised.
The narrator in the story is in a state of loneliness. He cannot recall the past events since he has lived so
long in insolation in a castle. He explained his origin, memories, but cannot recall any details of his
personal history, including who he was or where he came from. The environment where he lived was
dark, without any natural light or any other human beings. The only knowledge that he had of the outside
world was from the antique books that he owned in his castle. The narrator decided to leave the castle
after a long time of isolation. When he set his foot outside the castle, he realized that he lived in an old
churchyard and continued to walk into the town. He was fascinated by the fact that he was able to see
the place, which he only read about in the books. While walking through the town, he came upon another
castle. There he saw a group of people and joined them to make contact. The people who saw his ran
away from him, while the narrator stood there in the dark to face what was lurking behind him in the

29. 23
dark shadow. It was a ghoul that frightened him. Running away into his caste only to find out that the
ghoul was no other than himself. The narrator remembered that he fled to a valley of the river Nile in
Egypt, where he existed alongside others with outsiders, the undead who tried to forget their past lives.
2.5.5. Nyarlathotep
The Outer God, Nyarlathotep or The Crawling Chaos is one of the most famous Lovecraft’s creations.
Nyarlathotep was first mentioned in the short story under the same title in 1920. Since then, he is
mentioned in many Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos Stories like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The
Dreams in the Witch-House, The Haunter of the Dark, The Whisperer in Darkness and short stories
Nyarlathotep and The Crawling Chaos. He is one of the most borrowed characters in modern literature,
especially in Stephen King’s stories. It is also featured in John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
fictional setting as a demon. He is used in many games as the monster that brings chaos and madness
among humanity. Unlike Cthulhu and other aliens from the Cthulhu Mythos, Nyarlathotep is the only
alien that is near human appearance, since he is a shapeless god and can take any form and can speak
human languages. He is compared to an Egyptian Pharaoh in terms of appearance. His purpose on Earth
is to spread madness, and eventually death like other Lovecraftian aliens.

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2.6. The Cthulhu Mythos
The Cthulhu Mythos is Lovecraft's most famous creation and is considered the masterpiece of the
Lovecraftian Horror. Lovecraft, himself, quoted the mythos as following:
"Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws
and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-
large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and
the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to
other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether
of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good
and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary
race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and
characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing
realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless
and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave
our humanity—and terrestrials at the threshold."
- H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to Farnsworth Wright, 5 July 1927
The term Cthulhu Mythos was coined by August Derleth after Lovecraft's death, who was also his
publisher. The main idea of this mythos is to show how the human world is just an illusion. The whole
Cthulhu Mythos takes place in Lovecraft's fictional city in New England, Arkham. The city is known for
its dark legends that happened centuries ago. The story starts with a mysterious book rightly named
Necronomicon. It contains a dark legend of aliens living among humans. The book also contains dark
cults and legends about them and how to summoning spells. The book was found in the library of the
fictional Miskatonic University in Arkham.
The Cthulhu Mythos started a long time ago when aliens, so-called The Great Old Ones, came on Earth
from distant planets light-years away. Once on Earth, they colonized the planet and started to build huge
cities. They lived in the city of R'lyeah where they ruled the Earth for millions of years. The Great Old
Ones were powerful beings from beyond the stars who were worshiped by the humans on Earth. Another
Elder God was Cthulhu who was the priest of The Great Old Ones. Cthulhu was used by The Great Old
Ones to communicate with humans telepathically, leading them to accent temples that had statues, and

31. 25
artwork out of the planet, made of unknown materials. These aliens lived outside of the human
perception, and the only description of their appearance was in human dreams as nightmares.
One day, the city of R'lyeah sank into the Pacific Ocean. The Great Old Ones were trapped inside the
sinking city. However, the humans who were still under the telepathic communication with Cthulhu
continued to worship them for centuries to come. They are said to still exist on Earth, but in a dimension
that is impracticable to human beings. They cannot penetrate the deep ocean, therefore they remain
isolated from humans until the stars align and the city of R'lyeah will rise again on Earth's surface to rule
anew.
To keep track of The Great Old Ones and how to summon them, a man called Abdul Alhazred, also
known as the Mad Arab, wrote a book known as Necronomicon. This fictional character was created
under the influence of the book 1001 Arabian Nights which Lovecraft read in his youth. According to
Lovecraft's writing, the Mad Arab lived in 700 A.D. in Yemen. He visited the ruins of Babylon to gather
information about the Dark Gods and rejected the Muslim faith over the Cosmic Gods or Dark Gods.
These Gods belong to the order of Gods known as The Elder Gods.
In 730 A.D, he created the book Al Azif to summon the Dark Gods. He kept track of their history,
appearance, statues, cities and everything in connection to them and noted everything in the book. But,
that did not last for very long. Before his mysterious disappearance, he went mad eight years after
creating Al Azif. Some said that a demon from the sky dragged him before ripping him to pieces, while
Arabs claimed that he deserved it because he worshiped the Dark Gods. And with his disappearance, the
book was also gone.
Since his disappearance, the book appeared in various places and was translated in many languages. In
950, Al Azif appeared in Greece where it was translated into Necronomicon. Because of the dark content,
the book was burned by Christians in 1050, and once again was lost. In 1228, the book was translated
into Latin from the Greek language, but the Arabic version was forever lost like its creator. Somewhere
in the 1400s, one copy of the book was found in Germany and in the 1600s in Spain. Finally, the book’s
resting place came to be the Miskatonic University in Arkham where the Cthulhu Mythos continues.
The whole Cthulhu Mythos is about the main characters discovering the Necronomicon and summoning
the Great Old Ones and Other Elder Gods. The Cthulhu Mythos is based on fourteen stories which are
the following: The Nameless City (1921), The Hound (1924), The Festival (1925), The Call of Cthulhu
(1928), The Dunwich Horror (1929), The Whisperer in Darkness (1931), The Shadow over Innsmouth

32. 26
(1936), At the Mountains of Madness(1936), The Dreams in the Witch House (1932), The Thing on the
Doorstep (1937),The Shadow out of Time (1936), The Haunter of the Dark (1936), History and
Chronology of the Necronomicon (1936) and Fungi from Yuggoth (1941).
The five most popular Cthulhu Mythos stories are described in the following section.
2.6.1. The Hound
Lovecraft's short story The Hound was printed in 1924 in Weird Tales. The story was inspired by the
time while Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn. He and his friend toured the Flatbush Reformed Church, a
Dutch church, which had a graveyard. Lovecraft glimpsed at a gravestone that had an epitaph with the
year 1747 written on it and the background for the story was created. The plot of his story happened in
Holland on a cursed graveyard. As an inspiration for his story, he used Joris-Karl Huysman's novel À
rebours translated into Against the Grain. In this story, he mentioned Karl Huysmans and Charles
Baudelaire as the main source for his inspiration. Since Edgar Alan Poe was a role model for many stories
and Lovecraft loved his writings, he used similar motives for characters and their behavior. The main
character, who suffers from overzealous boredom, leading him to imagine things like, being hounded
and eventually goes mad. In this story, Lovecraft quoted Poe’s most famous poem The Raven. Another
notable author that Lovecraft loved and was inspired by his stories was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
specifically the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles which helped Lovecraft to create the monster in this
story. Lovecraft’s inspiration for the curse in this story was Ambrose Bierce's work The Damned Thing,
The narrator is one of the two grave robbers who make their living by stealing from the dead that contains
gold in their coffins. One day, they robbed a crypt to seal an accent amulet that a monster in the form of
a hound with dragon wings guarded for years. With that robbery, they marked themselves as cursed.
They heard howls of wolfs in the distance. Later on, the monster killed one of them while the other was
robbed while trying to return the cursed amulet. In the end, the men who robbed the narrator ended up
dead. The narrator was digging the cursed crypt from which he stole the amulet only to find the monster
covered in blood and the amulet in his hands. He ran to save his life but is unknown whether he survived
or committed suicide.
2.6.2. The Call of Cthulhu

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The Call of Cthulhu is one of the most famous works that Lovecraft created and is the source that has the
biggest influence in popular culture. It was written in1926 but was first published in the pulp magazine
Weird Tales in 1928. The inspiration for this story that Lovecraft used to craft the Cthulhu monster was
Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Kraken and Lord Dunsany’s work Price is The Gods of Pegana, where
a God is constantly lulled to sleep because if he awakes, it will be the world’s end. The awakening of the
monsters is the element that Lovecraft used to put his monster Cthulhu in a deep sleep underneath the
Pacific Ocean in the sinking city of R’lyeh and if he awakes, the world will be doomed. Another
significant inspiration was Arthur Machen's story The Novel of the Black Seal, which served as the
detective in the story to clip the newspaper articles to solve the mystery of the horrific ancient surviva l
called Cthulhu. The inspiration for the atmosphere for this story was brought by James Frazer's story The
Golden Bough, Margaret Murray's story Witch-Cult in Western Europe and W. Scott-Elliot's story
Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria.
The story is divided into three chapters in the form of manuscripts and news reports. A detective searches
the mystery behind his late uncle’s death, the unsolved case of the missing women and children being
butchered for sacrifices as well as a dead Norwegian fisher’s widow who holds the final clue. He
discovers that a great sea monster known as Cthulhu, one of The Elder Gods of an underwater city of
R'lyeh, a Kraken like a monster with dragon wings was released from his prison. He was awakened by a
group of people from his dream to take over the Earth again. Once Cthulhu arises, the humankind is most
likely to be doomed.
2.6.3. The Dunwich Horror
The story The Dunwich Horror was written in 1928 and was published in 1929 in Weird Tales. The story
takes place in the Miskatonic Valley which is northwest of Arkham. The place is known for several old
New England legends which took place. The name for the fictional town name, Dunwich was inspired
by the town of Greenwich which was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. The name is also
associated with the terror that refers to an English town where a black cloud is formed to bring sparks of
fire that appear in the sky to scare the people. The literary sources for this story were from Myths and
Legends of Our Own Land by Charles M. Skinner. Lovecraft mentioned a Devil's Hop Yard which was
used as a gathering place for witches and described as having noises emanating from the Earth. He also
mentioned the Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen whose stories The Great God Pan, The Novel of the
Black Seal and The White People served Lovecraft to create his characters and to reveal them to be only

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half-human in their parentage. He also used Margery Williams's story The Thing in the Woods – the story
about two brothers who live in the woods and are no human in appearance. The monsters were inspired
by Algernon Blackwood's story The Wendigo, Ambrose Bierce’s story The Damned Thing, and Anthony
M. Ruud’s story Ooze, Lovecraft’s favorite horror stories which served him to create his monster
invisible to the human eye that is secretly lurking in a house away from other living beings.
The narrator starts the story of a weird family. A man called Wilbur Whateley, who lived in a house on
a hill, is said that the house’s foundation was previously a graveyard. He is assumed to be a wizard who
has no contact with other people from the town. He tried to steal the Necronomicon book from the
Miskatonic University Library in order to summon a demon from the sky. He lived in that house with his
black albino daughter who gave birth to a boy whose father is unknown. The boy was strange in
appearance because he was three times the size of an average child. One day, his mother died
mysteriously, leaving his grandfather to look after him. One day, his grandfather got the Necronomicon
and performed a forbidden ceremony. It had to be done among the ancient stones of the Devils Halyard
on the hill where their house stood. The boy's appearance changed from human form to a tentacle
monster. The narrator tried to stop the curse, but he was attacked by a monster from the sky that is
assumed to be the father of the boy from another dimension.
2.6.4. The Shadow over Innsmouth
The novella The Shadow over Innsmouth was Lovecraft’s only published book. The story was written
in1931 but was published in 1938 after his death in Weird Tales. The town of Innsmouth was based on
Lovecraft's impression of Newburyport in Massachusetts, which he visited in 1923. His literary sources
were inspired by Poe's story The Imp of the Perverse, Robert W. Chamber’s story The Harbor-Master
and Irvin S. Cobb’s story Fishhead. These works served Lovecraft to create the creatures that lived five
miles from the Atlantic coast. They were men with round, fixed, fishy eyes and soft salty skin with a
long history behind them.
The fictional city of Innsmouth was founded in 1634. The town was located on the coast of Essex County,
Massachusetts, south of Plum Island, and north of Cape Ann. The locals were mostly sailors and fishers.
Lovecraft described the locals of Innsmouth as having queer narrow heads, flat noses, and bulgy, starry
eyes. This town hid a dark secret that happened in 1840 when a plague was brought by sailors and the
locals started to die. To save the town, the locals performed the Esoteric Order of Dagon to save the city.
As a result, their fish industry increased, and the city was safe. With this curse, there came a sacrifice

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where the locals had to worship the Deep Old One God called Dagon. Dagon turned the men of the city
into amphibian monsters, who mate with female humans to spread a new sort of species and to keep the
peace between the humans and monsters.
The narrator, who went on a sightseeing tour, heard a legend that came from the coastal town of
Innsmouth, where people avoided visiting the city because of a curse known as The Esoteric Cult of
Dagon. He went into the town in which he planned to spend a few hours, but his bus broke down, so he
was forced to stay in the city for a whole day until dawn. He spent that day checking into a musty old
hotel at the Gilman House. During his stay at the hotel at night, someone was trying to enter into his
room He tried to escape through the window but failed. He came across the locals, who brought him to
the Devil’s Reef, where the locals summoned Dagon, the Deep One God whom the locals worship. In
the end, the narrator found out that he was a descended of a local from Innsmouth and was turned into a
Deep Old One.
2.6.5. At the Mountains of Madness
The story At the Mountains of Madness was written in 1931 and published in 1936 in Weird Tales. The
story was inspired by W. Clark Russell’s story The Frozen Pirate, which Lovecraft read when he was
nine and had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. Again, Edgar Allan Poe's literal writing
continued to dominate Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft used Poe’s story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket which he quoted in the story. The monsters were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
story At the Earth's Core, used to create The Great Old Ones. This is the first time they got the proper
description of their appearance. The discovery of the accent city was inspired by Abraham Merritt's story
The People of the Pit and the description of the strata of the Earth is from Katharine Metcalf Roof's story
A Million Years After.
This story starts with the narrator Prof. Danforth followed by a graduate student who led an expedition
at the Miskatonic University to the Antarctic, where most people do not return home and disappear
mysteriously. They found living fossils but that fact was not introduced until the end. The fossils are
known as The Great Old Ones. They looked like a squid, but the heads were in the form of stars, just like
the ice castle that they found on Antarctica. When they were chased by the monsters, they escaped by an
airplane, never returned to that place, and the expedition did not continue.

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3. LOVECRAFTIAN ELEMENTS IN POPULAR CULTURE
The Lovecraftian Horror is not only popular and known in the literature, but also other varieties
of media. In this master thesis, the term Popular Culture is used to emphasize his undeniable influence
in the media. In Popular Culture, Lovecraft’s works and life have a major influence and impact in the
following categories, which are:
 Lovecraftian Elements in Stephen King’s Novellas
 Movies
 Television Shows
 Comic Books
 Music
 Games
The term Element is used to emphasize which Lovecraftian elements are present in the media, which
could be his stories that were used as the background inspiration, Lovecraft is represented as a fictional
character in some of these categories, his monsters can be found lurking in the media while his philosophy
is often implemented in any of the categories mentioned above. There are more than 500 movies and
television shows filmed based or inspired by his stories and in some cases, the author appears as a
fictional character. Comic books feature some of his works drawn in ink on paper sheets. Music features
his works in melodic singing, followed by a scary melody, which is predominant in specifically two
genres, Classical and Heavy Metal. Games feature Lovecraft’s stories as the background plot to engage
the players with the given rules to play the games which can be found in three categories: Roleplaying,
Board, and Video Games.
3.1. Lovecraftian Elements in Stephen King’s Novellas
One of greatest horror writers in the 21st century is without any doubt the American horror writer Stephen
King. The Lovecraftian elements are visible in King’s novellas – Revival, From a Buick 8, In the Tall
Grass, N, The Sun Dog, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, The Mist, I Am the Doorway, Jerusalem’s Lot and Crouch
End.
The greatest Lovecraft’s influences are visible in King’s novellas that are turned into movies – The Dark
Tower and It.

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3.1.1. The Dark Tower
Lovecraft’s fictional monster Nyarlathotep is presented in Stephen King’s series The Dark Tower as a
necromancer villain called Randall Flagg. The personality of Randall Flagg is similar to Nyarlathotep.
Both characters aim to destroy human civilization, bring chaos, and madness among humanity. The only
difference between the characters is the appearance. Nyarlathotep is a shapeless alien God and can take
any form while Randall Flagg is presented as a human with magic abilities in this novellas.
3.1.2. It
In this novella, three Lovecraftian elements were used by King to create one single character known as
It. These elements are again Nyarlathotep also known as The Crawling Chaos, the famous creation of
Lovecraft Cthulhu and Lovecraft’s fictional town Arkham. In this novella, Lovecraft is featured as the
author through King’s fictional character Bill Denbrough, who is an author in this novella, and uses
Lovecraft’s stories as an influence for his writing.
First, Nyarlathotep found himself crawling as the appearance of the monster. Both characters share the
similarities of the appearance of shapeless alien Gods. In Stephen King’s novella, the shapeless alien
God from outer space, who came on Earth on a meteor millions of years ago, took the form of a clown –
Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The difference between the two characters is that when Nyarlathotep
came on Earth, he brought chaos and madness among humans, while It feeds on humans, and scares his
victims until they go mad, and get scared until he is ready to feed on human flesh where the fear is felt
and tastes better for the monster.
Second, the monster It, in King’s novella, is described to go hibernation every 27 years and again
awakens to scare and feed on humans. This element is taken from Lovecraft’s fictional monster Cthulhu
since he sleeps in the city of R'lyeh beneath the Pacific Ocean, where he waits to be awakened from his
sleep once the stars are right, and rule the world. With the monster It is different. Once he goes to
hibernate, he waits 27 years to pass, and continue his hunt on humans.
Third, King used Lovecraft fictional town Arkham as the background fictional town for his story where
his novella It, and other stories take place. That city in King’s novellas is called Derry, located in Maine.
Both towns are known for their dark legends that happened centuries ago, and monsters are featured as
the villains that bring terror among humanity.

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3.2. Movies
Movies are words that associate every person with a mental image in their heads. Unlike books, movies
serve as a presentation on the screen based on a story that was written. But what happens if you add
Lovecraft's life and works in movies to present the audience the picture of this author? You will get
horror movies that give shivers down your spine and nightmarish dreams. Since many people love to
watch movies, it would be better if they are based on a book, they will get the whole picture of the story,
and all the mental images are projected to the audience. The Lovecraftian Horror covers elements of
cosmic horror, gothic, science fiction, and fear of monsters just like in literature, but on screen.
According to IMDb, from 1940 up to now, there have been more than 500 movies filmed based on
Lovecraft's works or served as inspiration to make other moves. Movies like From Beyond, Re-Animator,
Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, Necronomicon, The Dunwich Horror, The Unnamable, The Color Out of
Space, The Whisperer in theDarkness, The Lurking Fear, Cool Air are just a few movies which are based
on his stories. Some of them served as the basis for inspired movies. Below are some popular movies
from the 2000s that are inspired by Lovecraft stories.
3.2.1. Pirates of the Caribbean
The franchise movies Pirates of the Caribbean used one of the most famous characters of Lovecraft's
creation, Cthulhu. That character is featured and introduced for the first time in the movie Pirates of the
Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as the character Davy Jones, the captain of the Flying Dutchman. The
character was a seaman before he gave his heart to a woman as a token of their love. But, his love instead
to be returned, he was cursed and became the main villain in the movie. His human face that was covered
in a long silver beard turned into a squid face, and his beard is turned to tentacles which he can move.
His face is silverfish-green, his arms are replaced by crab hands, and instead of normal legs, he has
wooden legs. The appearance of the monsters is inspired by the Cthulhu monster which is seen in the
appearance of this character. But, it is not the only Lovecraftian element from this movie. Another
Lovecraftian element that is noticeable in this movie is Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Kraken which
served Lovecraft to create his monster Cthulhu and is also used in this movie as Davy Jones’s monster
to destroy other ships when his crew of the Flying Dutchman calls him, which is discrete with Lovecraft's
work Call of Cthulhu.

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3.2.2. The Shape of Water
A Deep One has found himself lurking in the Oscars winning movie The Shape of Water from 2017. The
character is a humanoid amphibian creature that was found in the Amazon forest and was captured in a
laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland, for examining. The movie is set in 1962, and the creature is said to
have healing powers. The main character is Eliza, a mute woman, who was abandoned as a child by the
side of a river with wounds on her neck. The only communication is through sign language, which she
uses to communicate with her friends and co-workers in the laboratory where she works and meets the
monster. One day, when she found out that the monster was about to be euthanized, she took it into her
apartment, and later released it in the river. Eventually, she fell in love with the monster, and in the end,
when she released the monster, she was turned into a similar monster, and they lived together in the open
waters.
This movie was inspired by The Shadow over Innsmouth and Dagon where two Lovecraftian elements
are present. First, a Deep One found itself lurking in this movie. The amphibian creature was inspired
based on Lovecraft’s story Dagon, which can be seen in the monster’s appearance. Second, the love
between the main character and the monster is the influence of that story The Shadow over Innsmouth,
where fish hybrids mate with female humans like in the legend of Innsmouth.
3.2.3. Howard Philips Lovecraft Adventures
In 2016, the first animated movie, which featured Lovecraft's life and works, was filmed. The movie is
called Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom from 2016 and is continued by two other movies
called Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom from 2017 and Howard Lovecraft and theKingdom
of Madness from 2018. In the movies, the main character is none other than Lovecraft as a fictional
character along with his mother, with whom he lives, and father, who is in a mental hospital and gets
visited by them. His father gave Lovecraft the Necronomicon book to continue his research of a fictional
dimension. All the movie titles that are mentioned are followed by some of the most famous works that
Lovecraft wrote. Just like his famous work Call of Cthulhu, in this movie Cthulhu, is not left unnoticed.
Cthulhu is presented in these movies as Lovecraft's pet that protects his from dangerous wizards and
monsters.

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3.2.4. Hotel Transylvania
Another movie, where Lovecraft's inspiration can be found, is the modern animated comedy horror movie
Hotel Transylvania 3. Here, some monsters from horror literature are featured characters. Mary Shelly's
Frankenstein monster, Jane C. Loudon's story The Mummy, the werewolf monster, the invisible man,
and Bram Stocker's monster Dracula with his family, daughter Mavis, son-in-law Jonathan, grandson
Dennis, and the Romanian vampire Vlad, who is here presented as Dracula's father. In this part of the
movie, another Bram's fictional character took the role of the villain, known as Abraham Van Helsing,
the famous vampire slayer. If someone was following the previous two parts of this movie, they would
probably notice that Cthulhu was in the background, a squid monster who has a tentacle mustache, and
Italian look. Now, in this third part, when all go on vacation on a cruiser, he is present again in the
background. Cthulhu is not the only Lovecraftian element that follows through all three parts of this
franchise movies just by showing up in the background. In this part, we can see a few other Lovecraftian
elements. First, the crew on the ship, where all the monsters go sailing on vacation, are fish monsters.
The fish that appears in this movie can speak and has human legs, which could be said that are amphibian
hybrids of fish, and humans. This element is inspired by Lovecraft's story The Shadow over Innsmouth.
The second element that can be seen is the lost Atlantic City, which is presented in this movie as a casino
where all the monsters go gambling. There, we can see a temple arising from the deep waters which is
inspired by Lovecraft's short story The Temple. That temple plays a significant role in the movie where
Van Helsing appears on the top of the temple to summon an underwater monster to take revenge on
Dracula. Since Lovecraft's Cthulhu is already part of this movie, he was replaced by another squid
monster in the movie, which under the hypnosis of music arises to destroy the monsters. That element is
taken from Call of Cthulhu but instead of performing rituals from the Necronomicon to awake the
monster, the summoning of the monster was replaced by playing a mysterious melody where the squid
was summoned to kill the monsters which Van Helsing commands.
3.3. Television Shows
Just like movies, television shows have the same purpose, to entertain the viewers with their favorite
characters. The main difference between movies and television shows is that movies show the main
characters in an adventure that can be divided into one or more sequels. Television shows are filmed in

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more detail and follow the main characters through the seasons. Here, Lovecraft's influence also left his
trace in the horror genre.
3.3.1. Supernatural
One of the most famous horror series that runs from 2005 up to now features all horror stories and
monsters from all around the world. The series is known as Supernatural. The main characters in this
show are two brothers, Dean and Sam, who are hunting down supernatural beings. This television show
has 15 seasons where some of Lovecraft's works and monsters are present. To honor Lovecraft's influence
in this show, we can see the writer as a fictional character in season 6 episode 21 under the title Let it
bleed. The episode starts with Lovecraft's fictional character who typed a story on a typing machine on
the 15th of March. Like mentioned before, that is the date when he died. In this episode, he died as well
but not of cancer like in his life. Instead, he was killed by an invisible creature that ripped his throat. All
that is left behind was his last work covered in blood in the typing machine, and the main characters have
to solve the mystery.
3.3.2. Scooby Doo
Speaking of mystery, there are also animated television shows for younger viewers that contains
Lovecraftian elements. One of them is the famous television show called Misery Incorporated or what
most people know it under one name, Scooby Doo. The main characters in this show are a Danish dog
called Scooby Doo, and his four companions: Shaggy, his owner, and friends, Velma, the genius, and the
brain of the crew, Daphne, the pretty girl with fighting skills, and Fred, the leader. Just like the previous
mention television show, this show also features some of Lovecraft’s monsters and mystery-solving from
all around the world. In 2017, in the episode The Shrieking Madness, Cthulhu was featured as the monster
that scares humans. The main characters are led to a novelist who works at Darrow University, and his
name is H.P. Hatecraft, which is Lovecraft as a fictional character. The character has the same appearance
as the writer, short black hair, dark circles under his eyes, and his personality is rather depressed than a
cheerful person, like the author.

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3.3.3. South Park
The American adult animated sitcom, South Park whose main characters are Stan Marsh, Kyle
Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick also welcomed Lovecraft’s influence. This show
welcomed Cthulhu in the episode Coon 2: Hindsight. In this episode, Cthulhu was dug up from another
dimension and terrorized the citizens of South Park. One of the main characters, Eric Cartman, befriended
with the giant monster and Cthulhu became his ally. Cartman ordered Cthulhu to attack the things he
found evil, which in his view were Hippies, San Francisco, and Justin Bibber. In the end, they were
defeated by Mint-Berry Crunch, who found out how to send Cthulhu back where he came from.
3.3.4. Game of Thrones
The American writer George Martin used Lovecraft’s elements in his famous works, which are known
as the collection of The World of Ice and Fire. In the television show, Game of Thrones, which is based
on the mentioned collection, the viewers are introduced to some Lovecraftian elements which can be
noticed. The most prominent Lovecraftian element in this show is the Greyjoy House, who worship the
Drowned God of the Iron Islands, which is inspired by Lovecraft’s stories Dagon and The Shadow over
Innsmouth. The name “Dagon” is mentioned in Martin’s work which is used as a common name for the
Greyjoy house and Lovecraft’s monster Dagon was used as the main inspiration. In this show, the
Drowned God is described as a “squamous fish-headed God” that can be seen on the house flag and is
the appearance of the monster is inspired by Lovecraft’s story The Call of Cthulhu. Martin also used
Lovecraft’s quote for the Greyjoy house saying which is from Lovecraft’s story Nameless City and is
quoted as:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange eons, even death may die.
which Martin used as a quote for the Greyjoy house as:
Let your servant be born again from the sea, as you were.
Bless him with salt, bless him with stone, bless him with steel." Drowned God Priest:
"What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.

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3.4. Comic Books
Lovecraft's trace can be found in the darkest corners of the comic books universe. His monsters are
featured in some comic books and used to scare, entertain the readership, and are usually defeated by the
main hero of the titled comic book. Besides the monsters from Lovecraft's stories, in some cases,
Lovecraft was used as a fictional character is some comic books.
3.4.1. Hellboy
One of the heroes that found himself on the sheets of the comic books is the superhero from hell known
as Hellboy. The creator of this comic book, Mike Mignola, who added his imagination, based on
Lovecraft's stories, created his hero Hellboy. In the comic book Seed of Destruction, he created a demon
called Ogdru Jahad which is inspired after The Great Old Ones and Cthulhu. This demon was released
from his prison and aims to destroy humankind which Hellboy has to prevent from happening. Lovecraft's
influence is recognized here not only by the inspired monster but how insignificant humans truly are
which reflects Lovecraft’s writing through the imagination of Mike Mignola.
3.4.2. DC Comic Books
Lovecraft’s fictional town Arkham plays a significant and important role in the D.C. Comic Book
Universe. One of the main heroes in this comic book is Batman, also known as Bruce Wayne, who saves
Gotham City from his arch enemies. The city of Gotham is designed in the Gothic style, with the grim
atmosphere which is inspired by Lovecraft's descriptions of his fictional cities like Arkham, Dunwich,
and Innsmouth.
The most prominent Lovecraftian element in this comic book is the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the
Criminally Insane named and inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional town Arkham. This asylum is located on
the outskirts of Gotham city. The asylum does not only feature Lovecraft's fictional world Arkham but
also his life. Both of Lovecraft’s parents died in an asylum, which is reflected in the fictional asylum as
madness, where the criminals are brought. There are overlaps between Lovecraft's life which is reflected
through the fictional creator of Arkham Asylum, Amadeus Arkham. Lovecraft's mother, who died of
mental illness, is reflected through the fictional character Amadeus Arkham who built the asylum, and

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named it after his mother who died of mental illness. In the end, Amadeus got mad in his asylum and
was executed in the electric chair.
This comic book also features some Lovecraftian stories, which can be found in the comic book Batman
the Doom that came to Gotham. The comic book is issued in three volumes in 2001. In this comic book,
the action takes place in the 1920s and combined Batman’s adventures in the Cthulhu Mythos.
3.4.3. Alan Moore Comic Books
The English writer Alan Moore is one of the greatest graphic novelists known for his famous works
Watchmen, V for Vendetta,The Ballad of Halo Jones, SwampThing, Batman: The Killing Joke and From
Hell. He works for both, DC and Marvel comic books. Some of his comic books feature Lovecraft's
works which Alan used to create his comic books which are:
 The Courtyard
In this comic book, Moore used some Lovecraftian elements from his Cthulhu Mythos to create
his plot for his comic book The Courtyard. The main character is an FBI agent called Aldo Sax
who has to solve a mysterious case. The action in this comic book takes place in “Red Hook”
which was inspired by Lovecraft’s story The Horror at the Red Hook. The main character’s
investigation led him into a night club where a band called The Cats of Ulthar play a song called
The Music of Erich Zann which are Lovecraftian elements from his works under the same title.
In the end, the investigation is continued in Innsmouth where the agent found out a dark secret of
a drug that leads the users into another dimension called the “Dreamland” where the God Dagon
ruled. These elements were inspired after Lovecraft’s stories The Shadow over Innsmouth and
Dagon.
 Neonomicon
The comic book Neonomicon is the sequel story of the comic book The Courtyard.The FBI agent,
Aldo Sax, ended in a psychiatric hospital from his previous investigation. He gets visited by his
colleagues, FBI agents Lamper and Brears, who continued his investigation. The clues lead them
in the city of Innsmouth where they found themselves in the orgy ritual of the Esoteric Order of
Dagon and discovered the dark secrets of the city where the monsters The Deep Ones mate with

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humans to produce hybrid species. These elements were taken from Lovecraft’s story The
Shadow over Innsmouth.
 Providence
The comic book Providence is prequel and sequel to the above mentioned comic books. In this comic
book, a journalist called Robert Black is the main character who helps the FBI to investigate
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with his reports which are issued in twelve comic books and follow their
adventures.
3.4.4. The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West
The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West is an inspired comic book based on Lovecraft’s fictional character
Dr. Herbert West. Just like his story, the main character is the undisputed brilliant medical student Dr.
Herbert West who created monsters from corpses. He used a serum to bring back corpses to life. He does
that secretly in the Miskatonic University where he was studying, but without success or varying degrees
of success which becomes his obsession. In the comic book the author Jeffrey Combs, introduced West’s
girlfriend, Megan, to humanize the main character. Both make secret experiments on corpses after
finishing their studies on their residencies in a hospital. One day, West’s nemesis, Dr. Stein, kidnaps
Megan, to get his revenge on West, and so his chronicles begin.
3.5. Music
When literature is combined with music, the art of words can be expressed in the melodic voice projecting
the influence of literature with melodic sounds. Both literature and music have ancient origins and fulfill
each other to provide widely popular leisure activities in everyday life. Lovecraft's influence can be found
in music in two genres Classical Music and Heavy Metal Music.
3.5.1. Classical Music
Classical Music is one of the eldest forms of music. It is divided into subgenres like a symphony,
concerto, fugue, sonata, opera, cantata, and mass. Lovecraft's trace in Classical Music can be found in
the subgenre which is known as The Music from Another Dimension. This subgenre is inspired by
Lovecraft's work The Music of Erich Zann combined with Giuseppe Tartini's sonata Devil's Trill.

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Composer, Ryan Ingebritsen, composed a Lovecraft inspired work named Reparametraization 5: The
Music of Erich Zann. This piece was composed with a baritone violin and the effects were controlled by
a computer to give the scary effect of Lovecraft’s fictional character Erich Zann. Ingebritsen also reflects
Lovecraft's main idea of the world not being as simple as humans see it, and that there are gaps that lead
to madness if we try to explore them.
The French composer, Guillaume Connesson, used Lovecraft's Macabre Stories to create his composed
Macabre tone poem Les cités de Lovecraft. This music piece is 23 minutes long and projects Lovecraft's
Macabre Stories in melodic sound. Since Connesson was fascinated by Lovecraft's works, one thing that
he looked up to Lovecraft was writing his dreams, but in melodic sounds to create his music.
The website and YouTube channel H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society features carol songs, which are
composed, based on Lovecraft's stories. This website contains Solstice Carols which are rewritten to
contain some of Lovecraft's stories like Have Yourself a Scary Little Sostice, Great Old Ones Are Coming
To Town, Silent Night, Blasphemous Night, It’s the most horrible time of the year!, .Away in a madhouse,
and other. The album The Curious Sea Shanties of Innsmouth Mass is dedicated to Lovecraft's works The
Shadow over Innsmouth and contains songs like Innsmouth Sailor,Paddy Lay Back, Old Captain Obed,
Undying Ladies,Haul 'em Below, and more. The album A Shoggothon theRoof is a combination of music
with Lovecraft's works and has songs which are sung in parody and contain songs like Tentacles, If I
Were a Deep One, Victim of Victims, Do You Fear Me?
3.5.2. Heavy Metal Music
The Heavy Metal genre is the fastest developed music. The roots are from blues-rock, psychedelic rock,
and acid rock which developed in the 70s. The sound is thick and massive and has a lot of distortion,
which some people would describe as noise. Even if this genre is relatively new, it is one of the fastest
and most developed music genres. The main genres from this group are Avant-GardeMetal, Celtic Metal,
Viking Metal, Troll Metal, Gothic Metal, Grindcore, Hair Metal, Metalcore, New Wave of British Heavy
Metal, New Wave of American Heavy Metal, Nu-Metal, Power Metal, Progressive Metal, and Thrash
Metal.
Lovecraft's works have found themselves lurking in the darkest and most aggressive genres of this music
genre such as Death Metal, Black Metal and Doom Metal which are popular genres in Scandinavia and
Japan. Here, the musicians use his stories for the lyrics and combine them with the melodic sound of the