Supernatural Horror in Film: Introduction
In Homage to Horror Master H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Oct 3, 2008
The above quote comes from American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, specifically from an unfinished essay that was first published in 1927.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, as you probably know, is most famous for his creation of the Chthulu Mythos, including the tales Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, At the Mountains of Madness, and many more.
His essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, looked at the development of horror throughout literature and is one of the most comprehensive and perceptive records of it’s kind.
A History of Horror Films
Inspired by Lovecraft’s agenda – and criteria – this series of articles aims to provide an overview of the development of horror films, from their Pre-20th Century beginnings through to the modern day, covering every major release and innovation, including as many of everybodies favourites along the way as well as the not-so-favoured and obscure.
The point of this introduction is to remind ourselves of Lovecraft’s own definitions and criteria, which are better presented here in his own words. For a full transcript of Supernatural Horror in Literature you can visit Here.
It’s a highly recommended read and an ideal guide for anyone interested in exploring the subject.
Lovecraft’s introductory passages give a perfect insight into the underlying nature and psychology of mankind’s enduring fascination with unnatural subject matters. His words – as he says of the genre itself in his essay - are relevant today and always will be, irrespective of what the future holds for mankind.
What follows is a brief selection from that work.
Excerpts From Supernatural Horror in Literature
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
“These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
“But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.
“But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
“There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.
“With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.
“This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.
“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
- H.P. Lovecraft.
See the next article in this series: Supernatural Horror in Film: Pre-20th Century.
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