Category Archives: HP Lovecraft
End Of The World & Beginning Of Yuggoth In ‘Providence #12’ On The Wednesday Run
Let’s get to the point: it’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it?
Two years next month, in fact.
That’s when the first issue of Providence, the first of twelve bi-monthly issues, dropped into the pulpy hands of eagerly anticipating readers who love horror-themed graphic fiction. May of 2015.
But Providence is much more than just horror. It’s a fascinating take on American outsider culture during the early part of the twentieth century, on the eve of the war to end all wars, written and illustrated by two of the comic book industry’s greatest.
Finally, the series comes to a head: Providence #12.
And it is both the end of days and the beginning of a new, stranger, world!
Holiday Gift Guide 2015: Fangirl Accessories
I am a girl who loves to wear her fandoms. You can keep your gold and your Louis Vuitton. I’ll take a pair of TARDIS earrings and a Totoro purse any day. Thankfully with the rise of geek culture, the internet is rife with fun, amazing, fangirl accessories.
Jewelry
Diamonds may be a regular girl’s best friend, but fandom themed jewelry is a fangirl’s best friend. Ragged Fox creates delightful jewelry. Whether you fancy some mini-Lego Hulk earrings or Lumpy Space Princess earrings, there is something for all fandoms.
I think a perfect gift would be a set of Jayne’s hat earrings matched with a Serenity necklace.
A New Way to Carry Your Books
Like many bibliophiles, I’m often overwhelmed by my books- to- read pile, so instead of gifting that reading obsessed girl in your life another book to add to the pile, you could give a purse made from a book instead.
Novel Creations has an array of purses for all reading genres.
There are HP Lovecraft and Stephen King purses for the horror reader.
For Fantasy readers, every Harry Potter book is available, or you can opt for a Game of Thrones purse.
There are even a couple of Walking Dead purses perfect for carrying small zombie fighting paraphernalia.
A Little Flavor
Lips can get extremely dry in the winter. I myself keep a lip balm in every coat pocket and bag that I own. Lip balm is great, but it’s even better when it’s flavored with fandom.
Bubble and Geek creates some tasty balms.
Game of Thrones fans can keep their lips moist with Winter is Coming.
Harry Potter Fans can enjoy Butterscotch Brew and Pumpkin Pasties.
Whovians can apply some Sonic Screwdriver or Jammy Dodger to their lips, and my absolute favorite, Bubble and Geek has created a tinted lip balm set based on The Doctor’s female companions.
I’d be happy to find any of the above items wrapped, bowed, and with a gift tag with my name on it. They are things that can’t easily be found in stores, and are perfect gifts for fangirls who love to wear their fandoms.
Holiday Gift Guide 2015: Bloodborne
Playing Bloodborne is like smashing your head against a wall, a very gory, slimy wall, again and again and again and again. It’s hard. You cry out like a Canadian curler on the ice screaming to the heavens, “HARRRRRRRRRRD.” Fighting a Bloodborne boss is your own private Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise learning by dying over and over, you as Tom in a blood-slicked waistcoat, axe in hand, repeatedly crushed and beaten and mauled. But sooner or later, mostly later, the patterns click, strategies emerge, and at last you vanquish the horrific beast before you, gouts of blood splaying through the air. When it happens, the feeling is pure ELATION. The sheer dopamine rush of joy when you pound that fucker out of existence is immense, a wave of happiness bigger than Kanye’s ego suffusing your entire being. And then it’s onto the next and the gruelling hunt begins anew. Exclusive to the PS4, Bloodborne is one of the best games of the year. But for the horror-loving gamer on your Christmas list, is it all masochism?
Lucas Mangum’s Hidden Horror Gems – Mariano Baino’s Dark Waters
“I am she that liveth and was dead,
and behold,
I am alive forevermore
and have the keys of Hell and death.”
I get chills every time I hear that tagline. It’s a downright crime that many horror fans might not know where its from and might not have even seen this early 1990s Italian horror film. The film in question is Dark Waters, from writer/director Mariano Baino and its one of the best horror movies you’ve never heard of.
31 Days of Horror – Cosmic Horror In The Buffyverse and Angel’s “A Hole in the World”
Joss Whedon’s triumphant summer of Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers follows a line of thought that leads all the way back to the good old “Buffyverse”. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is all about the inversion of horror conventions. A diminutive blonde cheerleader is chased down a dark alley by a monster… only to pause, turn, raise an eyebrow, pull out a sharp object, and invert the monster’s conventions directly. In that vein, Angel takes the question in another direction: he *is* the monster, fighting other monsters, trying to make up for more than a century of chasing blonde cheerleaders down dark alleys.
Obviously, Buffy isn’t invincible. Lots of things can challenge Buffy: high school politics, standardized tests, the Patriarchy as represented by the Watchers. Eventually, these are overcome by the use of force, the support of friends, and a firm belief in one’s self. Angel uses a similar approach, though he is also conveniently immortal, and consequently emotionally insulated by 200 years of insight into the human condition. What is horror to a vampire?
This is obviously a question Joss Whedon asked again and again, but in the fifteenth episode of season 5 of Angel, “A Hole in the World”, he may have found the definitive answer.
Find out more after the jump!
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March Madness – Glenn Walker Takes A Tour Of Arkham Asylum
Arkham Asylum. Now that’s a name that provokes fear and terror for many. Officially named the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, the hospital/prison is where many of Gotham City’s, and the DC Comics universe’s, most dangerous deranged criminals are incarcerated. From a minor reference in one comic book, it has become so much bigger, most recently with two huge selling videogames and what looks to be a major plotline in one of this summer’s surefire blockbusters, The Dark Knight Rises.
H.P. Lovecraft Week: JW Ward on the Lovecraft film you need to see
You want to know why it’s so hard to adapt H.P. Lovecraft stories to film?
It’s simple: the concepts of Lovecraft’s stories are too big for most people to see and believe.
If you read a story like “The Call of Cthulu” and create in your own mind a vision of R’lyeh (where dead Cthulu waits dreaming), that vision is likely to be far more terrifying than anything that Hollywood could give form to. Buildings and hallways with impossible angles in a slime-covered city risen from the bottom of the ocean tend to be hard to bring to life on a budget, even with CGI.
There is one film, however, that did Lovecraft right. If not literally, then certainly in keeping with the spirit of the material.
It’s a film that deserves your attention, and a space in your collection.
H.P. Lovecraft Week – David Ward Wrestles with Madness
From the outset, I wish to claim, with no small significance, that this piece is less a review, bound in reflective passages of indiscriminatory minutiae and personal indulgences, then it is a paen of prose for that scribbler of things bizarre, mutable, and altogether otherworldly, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Here you will find not the voice of the balanced, or dare I claim, sane, writer, but rather the utmost praise and . . .
H.P. Lovecraft Week: This Is Not Reality – Andy Burns on In The Mouth of Madness
I’m going to let you in on something. One of my biggest fears is that one day I’ll come across something supernatural. A zombie, a vampire, a werewolf, ghost. Whatever. One day I’m going to come across one of these spooky things that are only supposed to exist on the page or the screen or in our nightmares and I’ll tell you and you won’t believe me. I’ll tell you that somebody I met didn’t cast a reflection or that I saw something walking the halls of my house, only to see it dissolve and you won’t buy it. You’ll say I’m seeing things or accuse me of playing a bad joke. Or you’ll think something worse. You’ll think I’ve gone mad, lost touch with reality.
But what happens if my reality and yours don’t match up.
H.P. Lovecraft Week: Ian Rogers on The Real Ghostbusters — The Collect Call of Cathulhu
My first exposure to H.P. Lovecraft didn’t come from his stories, but rather a cartoon that aired back in the 1980s called The Real Ghostbusters. This was, of course, an animated series based on the popular film about a band of ghost-hunters-for-hire operating out of an old firehall in New York City.
