Crawling Toward Chaos; Inverting Lovecraft
* Surely, you've all been listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, right? Two Santa Monica film guys bust each other up and talk Lovecraft, story by story, in an engaging and often illuminating fashion. Plus, their narrative and incidental instincts are knife-keen, as befits film guys. If you haven't made a habit of listening, may I recommend the perfect jumping-on place? As those who know me may have suspected by now, it's the one featuring me as a guest: Episode 18, on the prose poems "Nyarlathotep" and "The Crawling Chaos." They've promised to have me back on, and I am eager to return. Plus, they regularly cite Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales during their show (though not during this episode), and they gave me a very nice plug for Cthulhu 101. So listen up!

* In other, non-meta-plug news, mollpeartree and I watched The Ruins tonight, part of my "flood the Netflix zone" plan to make sure there were plenty of horror movie options for Halloween. It's a pretty terrific horror movie, which (like many great horror movies) makes the characters wreak at least as much horror on themselves as the horrors do. Like Lovecraft, it values verisimilitude (even moreso, given the aforementioned character-driven realism), and presents a horror of the Outside come up from Below. But interestingly, the swarthy natives who live Where Horror Dwells are the ones staunchly committed to fighting it; it's the white Americans (and German) who are decadent enough to let the Outside come In.¹ Add a nice eco-noia monster-thing and some excellent sound design and atmospherics (I'd like to see the same production team try and tackle "The Willows," come to think of it) and you got yourself a fine 21st-century weird tale.

1] There's elements of that formula in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," of course -- the Pacific Islanders slaughtered the Deep Ones, while white Obed Marsh married them -- and in "Haunter of the Dark," in which the non-WASP Italians and Poles keep the Haunter at bay while white-bread Robert Blake communes with it. But these stand out as exceptions, and "Shadow" is plenty racially fraught, for all that.