Cthulhu has a reputation on the internet for being a pretty terrifying monster. I can only assume most people haven’t read The Call of Cthulhu wherein you find out that he mostly just lurks under the sea making people worried about whether they flossed or forcing them to have a bad dream where they show up naked to class. That is some bush-league villainy if you ask me.
Oh yeah, and toward the end of the story he is defeated by someone driving a yacht through his head? What a chump. If he tries to terrorize the world again, we can just send the Harvard University crew team out and they’ll put a stop to that nonsense in record time, I’m sure.
Poor Cthulhu, I’m making fun of him and he can’t even fight back being trapped under the ocean and all. Sorry, buddy, I didn’t mean it.
H.P. Lovecraft had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of monstrous fiends clawing their way out of his imagination but only Cthulhu has stood the test of time. For whatever reason, this be-tentacled creature from the dark depths of the ocean has managed to capture the world’s attention, particularly on the internet. Something about the cults that surround him, the strange language uttered by his followers, and this monstrosity from beyond the stars himself continues to call out to people, much as he does in Lovecraft’s works. Nowadays there is a real cult of Cthulhu though they are eager readers of suspense and horror that lap up this strange fictional mythology rather than the psychotic murders and ritualists of the stories.
With the Call of Cthulhu, his first story containing the monster we all know and love, Lovecraft seemed to have no idea that he was penning a work that would stand the test of time and lead him to post-mortem notoriety. Publishers were largely disinterested in the work and Lovecraft himself described it as middling in quality and somewhat rambling. While the story itself may not be the most elegantly written or engaging, what it does present is insight into a powerful fictional mythology surrounding our squid faced friend and his race of star-monsters known as The Great Old Ones. Much of his later work contained references to the beast and myriad other horrific creatures that supposedly haunt the earth. And in many of his works, there is an undercurrent of not-so-disguised racism. But we’ve already discussed that.
Despite the horrific nature of a massive monster with tentacles on his face and wings on his back lurking under the ocean, what really drives much of the terror in Lovecraft’s novels is people. The cult surrounding this monster is responsible for murders and ritual sacrifice as well as for general insanity. It is Cthulhu’s ability to tap into the minds of humans and warp their perceptions with whispered suggestions that is his scariest aspect. Cthulhu is, in many ways, insanity and chaos itself and that’s what serves to make him so interesting.
As long as insanity and chaos remain relevant topics, the Cthulhu stories will likely hold on as powerful cult classics (pun intended). Despite the flaws of the writing and the writer himself, the concepts are powerful and deserve the attention they receive.
Although I’m pretty sure Cthulhu probably would not enjoy knowing about the memes that have been made about him…
…Or the stuffed toys.
It would probably be a waking nightmare for him to know about the stuffed toys.
Well, he is hit by a steam yacht – what we would now call simply a steamship. He reforms his head immediately afterwards, too – it just gives the ship enough time to get away. What saves the world is not the ship, but the new earthquake which sinks his city again until the stars or whatever are again right.
haha Yes, I know. I generally make fun of the topic at hand in the first paragraph or two and then get down to business discussing it with some seriousness.
Which is why I love reading your posts. =D
And the Ghostbusters beat him with an electric roller-coaster.
I once found a soft toy Cthulu in a shop and spent the rest of the time waving it in my boyfriends face and going “Cuddly Cthulu! Cuddly Cthulu! Nothing can destroy his adorableness!”
It was a fantasy bookshop. I mean a real bookshop that sold fantasy book and soft toys. You’d have liked it.
Nice.
I’d extend that quite original notion of Cthulhu as the source of bad dental hygiene, among other woes. It seems to me that the real, lasting appeal of the whole Old-Ones-and-Friends concept is that it crystallizes something we all secretly believe (or want to believe) as things go from bad-to-worse: it’s not our fault, we didn’t screw up, we’re not to blame for the fact that it-all-goes-wrong-eventually, but really
The truth is much simpler: there are things in the dark that mean us harm.
(That’s Neil Gaiman’s phrase, from his weird classic-horror valentine and Shadow-Over-Lon-Chaney story, “Only the End of the World Again.”)
Lovecraft makes a Happletea comeback. Still waiting on a Herbert West vs John P. Necromancer strip.
Personally, I liked his Hierarchy of the Undead. Rather than just using them as similar terms for similar monsters, he made up actual habits and behaviors for the various Ghouls,Ghasts, Ghosts, and Zombies.
Nice, I’ve been waiting!!! Cthulu is obviously lulling you all into a plush toy induced delusion! Only the wise, and aware, will be on the right side of his wrath!!! Chaos lurks in the deep of our subconscious waiting for the opportunity to throw open the doors of our mind. I’m fully surprised that there haven’t been more obscure modern mythos strips…. Watchers(necronomicon), demons & other creepies from crowleyian lore, etc etc.
I’m glad I was able to contribute even the slightest inspiration for this one.
What a coincidence that I just read Call of Cthulhu recently… I still don’t understand what’s so scary about it. I think the way they described it as the ultimate terror and whatnot, only to have it be a green Zoidberg with wings, really didn’t suspend my disbelief.
Yeah I didn’t find it very scary either. Some of Lovecraft’s other works have a little more fright in them, but I still find his contemporary, Robert E. Howard, a much more capable writer and much better at generating a sense of general creepiness. If you’ve never read his stories about Conan the Barbarian, they’re actually quite good!
I think it’s because Cthulhu seems unscary and Zoidbergian when we have the distance of a drawing or story, but if a hundred foot tall creature like that was actually there in front of you, beaming psychic hate-waves into your mind, it would be a different.
Brought to you by Cthulhu Inc.:
Waiting in lines.
Seasonal allergies.
Dropping your change at checkout.
Book reports.
Flight delays.
Family reunions.
Pop sensations.
Ingrown toe nails.
The water temple.
Stripped screws.
Red lights.
Putting bagels in the toaster only to find there’s no more butter.
Putting milk in your bowl before the cereal.
No more ketchup.
(Cthulhu Inc. is in no way affiliated or partnered with The Pandora’s Box Foundation or Loki Enterprises.)
You, have one the Daily Award for Best Comment for today!
Seriously, love the list… but it was the disclaimer that really got me!
I would like to also nominate Zalgo (of the Internet)
and Discord (of MLP:FiM), to add to the list of entities that love strife and chaos.
… God/Goddess wise… Hmm, well you already mentioned Loki…I would add Mars/Ares…. and of Celtic mythology, (The) Morrigan.
and of course Eris (Greek Goddess of of Chaos, Strife and Discord)…
I’m sure I could easily add more…
I got the impression that what was really supposed to be horrifying about Cthulhu wasn’t so much Cthulhu itself as its existence.
As I recall, Cthulhu was a monstrous creature that is both literally and metaphysically “unearthly”, not made of ordinary matter that we’re familiar with nor subject to the same ordinary physical laws as we are, and our very existence is only possible[*] because some cosmic coincidence has temporarily rendered Cthulhu and its like inert, only weakly interacting with the normal human world in dreams. The horror is supposed to be not the monster(s) it(them)self, but the knowledge that our existence and everything we have done is nothing but a temporary accident of fate that will be destroyed horribly and unpleasantly at some unknown time when the temporary cosmic coincidence ends.
I think this sort of thing may have had more “punch” for the minds of the 1920′s, before “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” changed “alien” from meaning something unknown and possibly unknowable to “funny-looking people from a country that happens to be really far away on a different ball of rock than the one we live on”.
[*] Well, that and distressingly alien super-advanced fungus-beings from space who created early humans and other species as amusements and slaves through genetic engineering. At least the alien fungus-beings are made of normal matter subject to normal physical laws though…(I did always think “At the Mountains of Madness” was a better story than “Call of Cthulhu” though).
Oh, right – also not only are we doomed, but there’s literally nothing we can do about it.
If anyone is familiar with the infamous religious tracts of Jack Chick, there are a couple of relevant amusing parodies…
“Why We’re Here”
and
“Who will be eaten first?”
That, if anything, is pretty much the main theme of Lovecraft’s work.
I don’t think it’s rubber forehead “planet of hats” aliens that did it in though. More that the idea that humans are a small part of a huge cosmos, and the idea that we’re insignificant both to and within it has much, much more become mainstream and accepted.
Back in the heady days of Manifest Destiny and other similarly openly egocentric worldviews, the idea of [i]not[/i] being at the center of it all was a terrifying world-turned-up-side-down notion. People read it and were filled with insecurity-provoking existential terror.
Today though it’s pretty much the standard secular worldview. People aren’t scared of that idea anymore. They read the stories and shrug a bit inside, thinking “right, and your point is…?”.
Many of his monsters are cool in their own right though, and still work on a conventional level IMO. Some even transfer well to modern zeitgeists with a few twists. “The Color out of Space” taps into fears of disease and environmental contamination pretty well. “Whisperer in Darkness” and “Shadow out of Time” both tap into a lot of trust-related fears with their angle of leaving the reader wondering how much of what the aliens told the main characters is honest truth, bias/spin, or outright lies, with very different possible outcomes for each.
If I were doing a modern adaptation of “Call of Cthulhu”, I’d probably focus on the ideas of life derailing obsession, floss of self, and the paranoia of an outside agent influencing you through your dreams. Basically flip the hierarchy of plot device and main scare from the story, emphasis wise.
“…in the city of Ry’leh, DEAD Cthulu waits dreaming.”
not Dread. lulz
I know
I changed it intentionally. In The Call of Cthulhu, he rises again to terrorize the world and, through dumb luck, falls back into R’lyeh and is trapped again. When I was thinking about the strip, I thought that maybe he wasn’t technically dead anymore, so it felt weird to describe him that way.
Be careful not to lose points off your artistic licence. They revoked mine for driving a narrative under the influence of allegory.
Cthulhu is nice.
Zalgo is a better beast.
This comic with Goggles.
Hallo, Calypso!
Another one of your quick three liners!
….I must concur Zalgo is a better deity!
To invoke the hive-mind representing chaos.
Invoking the feeling of chaos.
With out order.
The Nezperdian hive-mind of chaos. Zalgo.
He who Waits Behind The Wall.
ZALGO!
I have the strangest desire to laugh with Cthulu! It’s contagious!
K, did you read my comment about Cthulhu? If you did and took it into consideration thank you so much!