 You can find out a lot about a society by looking at what sort of entertainment it produces, what they value, what they vilify, what they're scared of, all of those are reflected in the tales that they tell. That last one is what interests me the most, because what someone is afraid of stems from what threats or perceived threats they face. And that brings us to horror. When you hear that, you probably think of the litany of cheesy, low-budget movies that hit theaters every year. Or maybe you think of Stephen King's enormous bibliography. Just like all other genres, horror is around 70% crap, 29% good but forgotten in 10 years, and 1% stuff with staying power. No one remembers fantasy schlock like The Fifth Sorceress anymore, except me apparently, and older stuff like Dark Crusade is even more obscure. So that 1% is absolutely fascinating to me. It must be doing something right if multiple generations all find something worthwhile in it. The works of HP Lovecraft are over 9 decades old by now, yet you can still find collections of them in every bookstore. There are still fans all over the place, and there are still people trying to get film adaptations of them made. Why is that? What did Lovecraft do so right? Just like every other genre, the horror genre has gone through many different iterations over the decades. The march of technology has obviously made it possible to do more in the realm of film and video games, but besides that, the methods and manners used to frighten people have been refined over the centuries too. Many early legends and fairy tales could be classified as horror. Things like Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood were all about the horrible sorts of things that can happen to you if you go out into the woods. Their cautionary tales meant to frighten children into not being stupid, and they used the fear of the wilderness, e.g. the unknown, to hammer that in. But societies change, and in doing so, the audiences for entertainment change too. In just a few hundred years, the world went from a place where most people would be born, live, and die in just a few square miles to a place where the average person can travel across continents. Thus, horror tales went from being self-insert stories about the dangers of thinking for yourself and breaking the rules to stories with real characters that touched upon deeper anxieties that people suffer from. Hey, did somebody say communism? Because Americans were terrified of that in the 1950s, they were paranoid that their friends and family might secretly turn out to be people who thought that their government shouldn't be invading other countries so that corporations can set up tax havens. People like Joseph McCarthy were on a witch hunt all across the country, firing people from their jobs, blacklisting them from entire industries, even getting them hounded out of their homes. And Americans were fine with this because they were afraid of communists, the anxiety that they felt cannot be overstated. That anxiety and paranoia came out in the form of things like invasion of the body snatchers. The movie is all about humans being replaced with identical copies of themselves that are plotting to overthrow the American way of life. That movie is over 60 years old and we still talk about it because it was huge at the time and it gives such a clear insight into the minds of people back then. During the 80s, slasher movies experienced a huge boom and it's no coincidence that this happened at the same time the United States had a religious resurgence. The Christian right was in power in most every level of government and they were terrified of their kids drinking, doing drugs or having sex. So movies about teenagers doing all that stuff and then being killed because of it was genuinely horrifying to a lot of people back then. Nowadays it's a punchline that teens and horror movies always die when having sex but that wasn't always the case. In response to this, horror about the dangers of religious fanaticism like Children of the Corn popped up or carry or needful things. Basically Stephen King's entire bibliography. To the people that didn't fit into the religious rights view of how the world should be tales like these would have been much scarier because of what was happening around them. The Reagan administration refused to deal with the AIDS crisis properly allowing thousands of Americans to die because they thought it was God's punishment for homosexuality. That's a lot scarier to modern minds than a witch in the woods who eats children. Something that's stayed a staple in horror throughout its long life is isolation. Things are scarier when you don't have anyone else to rely on for help. Which is why every horror movie nowadays has that scene where one character has to mention that they don't have a phone signal. Around 10 years ago we had an insane glut of zombie related media. Some of it was action or comedic or even romance but most were horror or horror adjacent. Before we all got tired of them we wanted to see shambling corpses eat brains. We wanted to observe the collapse of society and we wanted to observe civilized people learning the harsh realities of survival. And indeed apocalyptic fiction continues to be popular in different forms. Zombies became such a hit because they're the ultimate other. Similar to how people tend to view groups they don't like whether that's black people, Muslims, Hindus, the Chinese or socialists as one unthinking monolith that wants nothing more than to kill them and wreck their way of life. Zombies are just that. They're impossible to reason with and have no friends or loved ones so you don't have to feel bad about killing them but they're still a threat. And due to the vague nature of their mindlessness they can be projected onto just about any existing group. We aren't afraid of zombies, we're afraid of other people. In the modern day, horror like A Quiet Place and Final Destination might look like they're about monsters or bizarre accidents but it really deals with our fear of things like mass shootings and terrorist attacks. The anxiety that comes from trying to live your life while the specter of random death hangs over your head is something that we've been dealing with for a while now. Get Out deals with systemic racism. Green Room is about neo-nazis. It's uh pretty straightforward, there's not much subtext there. And a Serbian film boldly declares war on things like good taste and professional quality writing. Horror changes because the things that scare people change and the things that scare people change because society changes. A ghost of a little girl on a rocking horse might have frightened us when the only thing to do all day was farm and read the Bible but we have more complicated lives and higher standards today. Anyways, back onto the main topic of this video, Howard Philip Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft was a writer who was active during the 1920s and 30s. His published works are almost exclusively short stories and novellas in the horror genre. Specifically Cosmic Horror or Lovecraftian Horror as it's sometimes called since he pioneered it. He's most famous for creating the Cthulhu mythos which has been used in countless other works. Even if you've never read The Call of Cthulhu, you probably recognize his tentacle visage. If horror mainly deals with contemporary issues, why are works from 80 years ago still so popular? If slasher films are seen as comedic schlock, why are we still afraid of Nearlethotep and Cthulhu? There aren't any real elder gods, right? I might have to rewrite that, I'm starting to feel like the skeptical protagonist at the beginning of a horror movie. Lovecraft's works mostly deal with humans somehow coming across beings from space known as great old ones or creatures related to the great old ones. The characters will at first try to fight whatever threat they're presented with only to slowly discover that it's impossible. The great old ones and the other beings are so powerful that humans can't even comprehend them or their motives. The universe is so vast and so full of such impossibly large terrors that the characters are forced to accept that humanity is weak, that humanity is tiny, that humans are less than ants on the cosmic stage. Often they'll be unable to cope with that and they'll go mad from the revelation. His works are repetitive and the language can be dense, but overall I enjoy them. They do a great job at making you feel small and wish that you were ignorant of the true nature of the universe. They stick with you after you finish. There are tad depressing, leaving you to wonder what kind of person would write something like this. It's not hard to figure out when you examine the context in which they were written, though. Around the time Lovecraft started publishing his short stories, a little thing we call World War I happened. It was the biggest conflict the world had ever seen. Millions of people were killed in a myriad of horrible ways, entire countries collapsed, extreme ideologies like Bolshevism and fascism popped up, and those who had survived the war were often saddled with crippling PTSD for the rest of their lives. You'll often hear people remark on how things like nihilism and art, that is, for lack of a better term, depressing exploded in popularity after the war. People had seen many of their friends die for little or no reason and they saw little points in anything after that. Then, ten years later, the entire world economy collapsed in what's now called the Great Depression. Over 25% of the US population was unemployed and forced across the entire country to get shitty jobs and things like railroad construction or farm labouring. Others lost all their money in the stock market or bank closures. Life sucked for a lot of people. Even setting all that aside, Lovecraft's personal life was depressing and he spent his days in poverty. His work wasn't appreciated until after he died either, so it's easy to see how he might have a bit of a dreary outlook on things. His wife even left him because he wouldn't stop going on anti-Semitic rants despite the fact that she was Jewish. He was kind of a weird guy. During this time, humanity had come to realize, both on an individual and societal level, that we are very small and powerless. When the tides of history start to push you in a certain direction, you can fight all you want, but nothing is going to change. When many people tried to stop the war or tried to steer it in a desirable direction, in the end it was just a chaotic mess that wrecked the world. Just as they started to think that maybe things were okay, they lost their jobs. Then their government used tanks and live ammunition on military veterans, women and children who asked for help. Immersed in that, it's impossible to feel like you're powerful. In the following decades, astronomy took great strides. The true size of the universe finally revealed itself to us. The Elder Gods aren't real, but humans are still infinitesimally small in the grand scheme of things. Our solar system is 11.8 billion kilometers across. That's 7.3 billion in freedom units. There are over 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The observable universe has as many as 2 trillion galaxies, and there's still more beyond that. The universe is over 13 billion years old, and the Earth is nearly 5 billion years old, and yet we haven't experienced even a tiny fraction of that. We are so small in terms of size and time that we can't even truly comprehend how small we are. Lovecraft's work came out at a good time, and his lack of success was due to bad luck. But the more time goes on, the more relevant his work becomes. Not just due to our knowledge of how small humanity as a whole is, but our increasing knowledge of how small we are as individuals. This subtlety is why none of Lovecraft's stories have had a successful movie adaptation. There have been a few, but they've always failed to understand the thing that makes the source material work. From beyond was one such adaptation. The original story is about a man using a machine to experience alternate dimensions outside of the human scope of reality. He sees some horrible creatures there, and several others are killed by them. But the horror doesn't come from that. The horror comes from learning how powerless humans are. The film adaptation tried to make a standard monster movie with that premise, and it just didn't translate. You can make a decent movie that way, sure, but you can't make a good Lovecraft adaptation that way, because the instant you actually show the monster, instead of explaining that it's impossible to describe and beyond human understanding, the mystery is lost. In fact, this is one of the greatest strengths that literature has over video media. You can get away with describing things in vague terms there. In a movie, you have to either show the monster or keep it hidden somehow. There are some adaptations that come closer to capturing the spirit of the original work, like Daegon, which is based on Shadow over Innsmouth, but they fall apart due to incompetent filmmaking or constrained budgets. I'm excited for the upcoming The Color Out of Space movie for all the wrong reasons. I fully expect all the subtlety to go out the window and to just enjoy watching Nicolas Cage lose his mind for an hour and a half. Cosmic horror just doesn't work in film, and that means that if you want to get a fix of it, you have to go somewhere else. And since Lovecraft is the best known example, that's where people go first. It really is that simple. There's one final reason that Lovecraft's following has stayed consistent, and if anything, it's been gaining steam in the past few years. Like I said earlier, horror deals with issues that scare us in a symbolic manner, and modern horror deals with modern problems. Cosmic horror manages to encapsulate them all at once. Racism, war, economic collapse, terrorists, sexism, government corruption, police violence, the suicide epidemic, income inequality, and about 12 million other things are all causing severe problems in our lives on a daily basis. Individually, they're bad enough. When you put them together, they seem like a monstrously powerful, impossible to overcome or even fully understand, abomination. If this were the 90s, I'd call these systems the man and try to stick it to him. Finding out about how unjust the world is can drive anyone to the brink of insanity, almost like finding out about the great old ones. That's the true horror of Lovecraft's work, though. The characters were happier before they knew the true nature of the world. In their blissful ignorance, they could live out their lives focusing on whatever mundane interests tickled their fancy. Now they have to deal with increasingly worse existential dread. Unlike the people of the Cthulhu mythos, though, we don't have the luxury of going mad to escape our problems. We have to deal with them somehow. Humans are less than insects to the great old ones, but think about how powerful insects really are. Mosquitoes give us malaria. Beastings can kill us if we're allergic. Black Widow Venom is deadly. Locusts eat all our crops. The list goes on. And like insects, we can kill the society that represents the Elder Gods using our... This metaphor is getting weird now. The point is that you still have some power, and if you see injustice in the world, then fight it. Don't give in to the madness. Be the mosquito that gives malaria to the man. Guess I'm ending on that note. Thanks to my patrons for supporting me and for voting on this episode. A big thanks in particular to Abrahaj Singh, Apo Savalanen, Christopher Hawkins, David Martinez, Joseph Pendergraft, and Melanie Austin. If you want to participate in polls, get early access to my content, or just help support my channel, then check out my Patreon page and consider donating. If you can't do that, then liking and sharing the video helps it spread and supports my channel too. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.