Every year, when October rolls around, I try to highlight at least a few spooky shows. This year, I wanted to give particular attention to those few anime outings that have, whether directly or through their vibes, touched upon the Cosmic Horror genre or that adapt or seem inspired by the works of the author H.P. Lovecraft.
Because of what I’ll likely be getting into, I decided – as a little bonus – to provide something of a primer on Lovecraft and “Lovecraftian” fiction
Lovecraft is an… interesting literary figure. Nowadays, his work is fairly famous. Cthulhu and Cthulhu-esque works exploded as internet fandom took off. But broad acceptance and even recognition of Lovecraft is fairly recent compared to decades in which his brand of horror and the mythos he created spent inspiring those few creative types who discovered his work. There are references to Lovecraft in sources as divorced from his general audience as Disney’s animated Little Mermaid, and in the works of several authors more famous and widely read than the man himself. I remember discovering Lovecraft in my early teens, and then seeing his popularity take off as the 2000s wore on.
In a sense, it might seem odd that Lovecraft’s work would at all speak to a foreign culture – the man had many opinions that would not even begin to fly today and that even in his own time may not have been entirely politically correct, and there are degrees to which, though usually channeled well, his rampant xenophobia underscores his horror stories. But there seems to be some synergy between Lovecraft’s thought on one side and themes of Japan on the other. The man himself is recorded to have greatly appreciated the works of Katsushika Hokusai (among others), and native Japanese media is no stranger to a fear of the other, the inscrutable outsider, or the terrifying and incomprehensible divine.
So, in another sense, it might be odd that there’s actually fairly little in terms of anime that uses Lovecraft’s mythos directly. He’s even been adapted to Manga, with some truly great versions of his stories given imagery by Gou Tanabe… but then, even in the West, Lovecraft’s work has been infamously difficult to put to screen. When even Junji Ito’s work has been infamously troubled, going a step further for the Lovecraftian root of cosmic horror is, let’s face it, a bit of an ask.
What Is Cosmic Horror?
These days, Lovecraft is usually credited with founding the Cosmic Horror genre, along with other contemporaries, members of his circle, and successors. Lovecraft himself more saw his work as belonging to the family of “weird fiction” that would stretch back to Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, or Edgar Allan Poe among others. Cosmic Horror often borrows from more traditional supernatural horror, fantasy, and science fiction… but of course Lovecraft wrote in a time somewhat before Tolkien and the first major codification of Fantasy and well before the concept of the Science Fiction genre had really crystallized. Not that there wasn’t plenty of Fantasy and even Science Fiction back then, but it didn’t have the same understood shared language of tropes it would have by later in the century.
To put things most simply, Cosmic Horror is a sub-genre of Horror (Scary stories) where the horrific element is grand and/or alien in nature. It’s distinct from supernatural horror in that the entities rarely resemble myth and legend and that while they may flout the laws of nature as humans understand those laws, it’s more the understanding that is lacking (or even impossible). The horror is a violation of human sensibilities, not against a higher order.
Cosmic Horror depicts a vast and largely indifferent universe. Part of the scare, especially to the turn-of-the-century through interbellum traditionalist audience Lovecraft wrote for, is in the meaninglessness of human achievement and struggle. Usually, while people might be able to escape, bottle up, or ram a boat into a particular manifestation, the real “evil” is the whole of the universe that’s inherently and uncaringly hostile to mankind. And that doesn’t really change.
Contrast this with, say, religious supernatural horror. There’s an odd comfort to having the Devil as your antagonist. That entity still values human souls, still lets the reader and/or protagonist imagine that they are worth something. It predicates its actions on the postulate that humans are special and valuable. And to an extent, it implies its natural opposite, allowing characters and viewers alike to take comfort in their beliefs in a higher power that loves and vindicates them. Azathoth (to name one of Lovecraft’s heavier hitters) doesn’t do that. Azathoth doesn’t care. Azathoth won’t even notice you. It won’t notice your town, your civilization, or even your planet as it crushes them all to dust in the blink of an eye. There is no protection, no vindication, and no kind opposite to go crying to.
Even in the smaller scale, things like Mi-go or the Great Race of Yith that operate on the same scale as humans… they tend to have their own agendas. You? You’re not special, you’re just in the way. And nothing you know, nothing you comprehend, will protect you like all the charms that might be effective on the likes of ghosts and vampires. The Cosmic Horror universe is not human-centric and does not care. Further, while the mere idea of “an alien” no longer holds the horror it might have in the 1920s, Cosmic Horror entities that could be described as such are usually alien in the extreme, being nothing like humans or humanoids and having unknown or unknowable goals not easily reduced to the basic fear of violence from a hostile advanced civilization or dangerous animal.
An Abridged Lovecraft Theogeny
I’ve alluded to some of these, but Lovecraft invented many entities of great power and scope in his writing, and later writers have added more or refined the categorizations. What follows will be an account of a few of the most popular. I’ll try to stick primarily to the sense Lovecraft himself gave, though there is at least one entry that must be discussed that is more apart from the man’s own work. Because of that, I’m not going to quibble over or strictly define if these things are Gods, Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, or some other classification, as those roles weren’t really set until August Derleth re-spun the Mythos more in the image of Classical mythology, with lineages and intermarriages of divine beings across generations.
Azathoth: The “Daemon Sultan” Azathoth is, in Lovecraft’s lore, essentially the first mover; all we know as reality was created by Azathoth… accidentally. Azathoth is a “blind, idiot god” who has not noticed creation and will not. Azathoth is maintained in a pacified state by an orchestra or piping madness, or perhaps that just tends to exist around Azathoth. Eventually, Azathoth will probably wake up and crush all that is to dust with the same lack of care that went into its creation.
Nyarlathotep: The “Soul and Messenger” of Azathoth, and the being in the Lovecraft mythos that has most often played a devil-like role, at least seeming to exhibit some deliberate malice and therefore interest in individual humans and humanity, most notably in the story Dreams in the Witch House but also in the novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Nyarlathotep is known as the Crawling Chaos… and by countless other aliases as one of Nyarlathotep’s most referenced traits is having a vast number of aliases, avatars, or “masks” and interacting with the world through said veils of falsehood. Perhaps it’s not that Nyarlathotep cares, but rather that it plays arbitrarily many roles, some of which require acting like it.
Yog-Sothoth: As the title of this article references, Lovecraft himself didn’t refer to the “Cthulhu Mythos”, but rather to “Yog-Sothothery”, referencing the entity that stood as the closest thing the Mythos has to a proper top dog. Yog-Sothoth (known by many titles, as is common for Lovecraftian entities, the most notable of which is “the Key and the Gate”) oversees, controls, or simply is space and time. It’s not really referenced as being strictly less primal than Azathoth, and unlike Azathoth is a thinking being. Though vast beyond comprehension, both sides of the Yog-Sothoth/Human equation can at least try to understand each other, most notably in Through the Gates of the Silver Key and The Dunwich Horror – in very opposite roles, reinforcing both the vastness and the inscrutable nature of the entity.
Shub-Niggurath: The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, Shub-Niggurath seems to be strongly associated with the concept of life itself, and is a frequent object of worship for Lovecraft’s various cults and alien races. Lovecraft gave few details regarding this entity, but all the same what details are given seem to construct the image of a primordial mother deity with a wide following.
Cthulhu: Cthulhu is, with little doubt, the most overrated entity in pop-cultural understanding of the Cthulhu Mythos, if appropriating the name from Yog-Sothoth wasn’t enough of an indication. Cthulhu is perhaps the best described of Lovecraft’s more potent entities, and the story The Call of Cthulhu does an excellent job of painting the creature as a true Cosmic Horror. Cthulhu has a physical form, which we even see can be harmed or “killed” (a boat is rammed into him at the end of said story, which seems to put the monster to bed for the time being) but seems to be conceptually immortal, while also being worshiped by a world-wide cult of the lost and the damned. Cthulhu, in Lovecraft’s own writing, exists on something of a border-line between things that are analogous to gods and things that are “just” big aliens. For those who have not attained this knowledge through osmosis, Cthulhu is described as a humanoid giant with green, scaly skin, clawed hands, leathery wings on its back, and a head like the body of an octopus, with innumerable tentacles. It is said to exist “dead but dreaming” in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the south Pacific, and is associated with dreams that drive folks insane.
“Hastur”: The entity for which I must go beyond Lovecraft, there has been a general acceptance into the same canon of the Mythos of an entity conflated from several sources and small references. Most of those references are credited best to Robert W. Chambers, who wrote short stories referring to (and collected as) The King in Yellow. The King in Yellow refers to both an entity, and to a cursed play in which that entity appears in Chambers’ stories. Later, Lovecraft would include, at times the “Not-to-be-named-one” in listings of gods or god-like beings. Later creators have welded these two together, along with the name “Hastur” (A name from Ambrose Bierce that Chambers would use ambiguously and Lovecraft referenced with similar ambiguity), ultimately creating Hastur the Unspeakable, the King in Yellow – a being of unknown (or inconsistent) scope and scale, who tends to drive mere humans insane and whose name one should not say aloud lest Bad Things happen.
An Abridged Lovecraft Bestiary
Lovecraft did not only create gods and god-like beings, but also a plethora of monsters and alien races, many of which have been messing with earth since long before humans started mucking up the place. To list all of them would be a fruitless endeavor, but here are some of the more commonly referenced or better described.
Elder Things: Appearing primarily in the story At the Mountains of Madness, these are a race of beings that could be best described as giant tubers with star fish for heads, wings, a variety of arms, and a sort of molluskoid foot. They are also at least mostly extinct, at least on Earth. They once had a powerful, technological civilization and warred with other entities like the Star Spawn of Cthulhu, but when you look at them on the most basic level, they’re seen as being… not that different from humans. They were individual creatures with individual lives and they had society and culture, at least until their use and abuse of biological sciences bit them in the rear.
Shoggoths: Creations of the Elder Things. The Shoggoths are described as sort of blob monsters the size of a subway car, given the ability to produce whatever limbs or organs they need for a given job and then reabsorb those cells when they are no longer necessary, leading to most depictions being roiling masses of eyes, mouths, and feelers. They were produced to do dumb labor, but eventually rebelled and slaughtered the Elder Thing colonies on Earth. Lovecraft implied that their later imitation of the culture and language of their former masters is nothing but unintelligent mimicry, but many later depictions treat them as significantly more intellectual shape-shifters.
Deep Ones: Biologically immortal fishy humanoids most notable for their role in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. They can interbreed with humans, and the hybrids will eventually mutate into full-fledged Deep Ones. Doesn’t seem like that bad a deal; sure you’ll be ugly and smell bad, but that already describes me on a bad day so the immortality and undersea empire are just kind of free. But then, recall, Lovecraft wrote as an interbellum man deeply uncomfortable with other races and heritages (some exceptions seemingly applying) as well as immigrants in general, so finding seafood in the family tree was supposed to be pretty awful on its own. Later depictions tend to up the villainy of these guys to keep them scary.
Mi-Go: Physically, Mi-go have the body plan of an ant, wings of a bat, claws of a crab, a mushroom for a head, and humanoid size and scale. Like the Elder Things, they’re a race of technological aliens (referred to as the “Fungi from Yuggoth”) who have some colonies on Earth. They mostly seem to want to be left alone by humans and seem inclined to dissuade most interactions. Their most notable technology is a special case that they can use to allow other species, including humans, to travel the stars… sort of. Meat bodies can’t make the trip, but a living brain kept aware and alive in a Mi-go brain case can. Their… guests can be afforded add-ons to see, hear, and even speak. They seem to mostly take those willing to go. Mostly.
The Great Race of Yith: A group of entities notable for their ability to swap minds with other beings across time. They existed on Earth in the bodies of an odd conical fungoid animal species, and eventually when their worst enemies showed up migrated en masse to a race of roach-like humanoids far in the future after the extinction of mankind. They’re curious and scientific, however, and may swap minds temporarily with other intelligent beings (including humans) as a sort of non-consensual cultural exchange, as seen in the story The Shadow Out of Time.
Byakhee & Shantaks: Creatures notable for being used by flying steeds – Byakhee are leathery-winged horrors that live in interstellar space and can fly anywhere in the cosmos, though their appearance in Lovecraft’s work is debatable, the name and lore having been codified by later authors. Shantaks, an absolute Lovecraft creation, are much larger (larger than elephants, with horse-like heads and scaly bodies) but are more conventional fliers native to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands fantasy setting, typically as steeds of ill repute.
Night-gaunts: Jet black winged humanoids with horns, tails, and totally blank “faces”. Appearing primarily in Dreamlands stories, they tend to snatch people, subdue them by tickling, and deposit them elsewhere for no discernible reason most of the time. However, at least some seem to work for pro-human forces and will provide a lift to a worthy hero-type in need or spar with monsters more associated with the other side of things (such as Shantaks)
And Another Thing…
The Necronomicon is one of the most enduring of Lovecraft’s creations. I addressed it when it was a main character in Demonbane, but this is an artifact, specifically a book. Penned by author avatar “The Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred under the title Kitab al Azif and later translated to Latin and (inaccurately) English as the Necronomicon, in-character this tome is the most accurate and authoritative source you could hope to find on all manner of magic, secret histories, dark theogenies, and basically anything associated with the Mythos. Memetically, it drives insane those who read it, but in Lovecraft’s stories most of the more scholarly characters are at least passingly familiar with the book — it’s realizing that everything written in there is true that tends to get people, and it’s clear that the book itself provides only knowledge, able to be used for good or for evil. It might tell a darker character how to call up all manner of horrors, but there’s also probably a page somewhere on how to put them down for those inclined to do so.
Conclusion
Now that I have this down to reference some of what Lovecraft created, both in terms of a genre and in terms of some more specific creations that might appear in Lovecraft-inspired media, it’s time to knuckle down with some shows that came to me on recognition of their Lovecraftian nature. It may not be the usual Halloween fare of ghouls and ghosts, but hopefully at least something along the line will be properly horrifying, so I hope you’ll join me in ringing in the Halloween Season with more squamous spooks than usual this year.