Bibliomania Meets Weird Horror Fiction

Many thanks to Tartarus Press owner and author Ray Russell for this fine mini-documentary on his book collection. Bibliomania strikes when least expected, even though it has become more expected in weird horror than in many other genres. Undoubtedly a product of limited print runs and deluxe editions, the average literary horror devotee is also a lover of well made books and obscure tomes.

Russell's video is the first known video record of this phenomenon. His intense collecting interest in Arthur Machen and other writers is discussed at length, while handsome shots of the books in question materialize. Rare volumes by Thomas Ligotti, Mark Valentine, and Edgar Allan Poe with Harry Clark's celebrated illustrations sit not far from the Machen books. An impressive collection, without question.

It's little wonder that Tartarus has always carried a strong sense of identity. The rich history behind their operation seems to be standing the test of time, especially if the latest developments are any indication. Just recently, Tartarus issued the latest short story collection by Reggie Oliver, Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories, which met out-of-print status at a breakneck pace.

-Grim Blogger

Bibliomania Meets Weird Horror Fiction

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The Earth Rejects Him by Jared Skolnick

An eerily minimalist trailer for The Earth Rejects Him has been uploaded by Lovecraftian film producer Jared Skolnick. Details about this new production are scant, but the inspiration is unsettling enough:

A young boy discovers a corpse while biking in the woods, then faces unexpected and macabre consequences when he tries to bury it.

Jared Skolnick previously created an excellent adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's tale, "The Music of Erich Zann." Look for this latest Lovecraft driven effort to appear sometime in the next year. Although HPL is likely the artistic tip of the spear for this movie, Skolnick states it also takes its cue from the films of Guillermo del Toro and Werner Herzog.

-Grim Blogger

The Earth Rejects Him by Jared Skolnick

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Automatic Monk From Medieval Times

This automated monk from the Medieval era begs many questions, many of them right in line with the weird. Consider it a freakish construct, where Ligottian puppet nonsense collides with Lovecraftian Cosmicism, and the devout faith embodied in writers like Arthur Machen. Would an artificial monk have an artificial faith? Or is it a vicious, mocking reflection of a monastery universe?

-Grim Blogger

Automatic Monk From Medieval Times

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Current 93, Thomas Ligotti, and Jan Svankmajer Combined

Imagery that accurately reflects the grim and surreal vision offered by Thomas Ligotti is difficult to find. However, Youtube user aluminiumface recently posted a video that combines a lengthy excerpt from "I Have a Special Plan for this World" with scenes from Jan Svankmajer's short film, The Ossuary. With little modification, the dark audio collaboration by Ligotti and Current 93's David Tibet really comes alive.

These scenes, produced by the Czech Republic's "militant surrealist," lend sight to dark incantations that could previously only manifest inside our minds. Although many will doubtlessly continue to prefer the natural route, this short production effectively shows the flexibility of Ligotti's hallucinatory words in the visual medium.

-Grim Blogger

Current 93, Thomas Ligotti, and Jan Svankmajer Combined

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At the Mountains of Madness Animated Film

In the wake of Guillermo del Toro's inability to produce a Hollywood version of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," others will inevitably step forward and try. Cthulhu Films is one contender. This half hour animated adaptation of Lovecraft's infamous story mixes 3-D and 2-D effects to recall the ill fated Antarctic expedition. The dialogue is in Italian, so English listeners need to turn on the subtitles.

Animated representations of this story have been on the rise in recent years, probably due to the extreme difficulty of faithfully reproducing the harsh environment and strange beings in live action. This film's aesthetic is reminiscent of Ian Culbard's handsome At the Mountains of Madness graphic novel.

-Grim Blogger

At the Mountains of Madness Animated Film

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HP Lovecraft Video Promo

Youtube's directors have offered up many strange tributes to H.P. Lovecraft over the years. Most videos, however, are really an appeal to those who are already into his fiction. If you've ever wanted to find a video that amounts to Lovecraftian propaganda, then this is it. By splicing together clips from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's 2005 Call of Cthulhu, Stuart Gordon's Dagon, and others, a visual summary of Lovecraftian themes has been created.

As digital media's tendrils lengthen, this is just the type of video that can be used for reaching new audiences. Soon, Lovecraft and other weird writers may owe more to well crafted Youtube videos than to literary journals, rave reviews, or social networking.

-Grim Blogger

HP Lovecraft Video Promo

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Late Bloomer by Thom Little

Though Thom Little's Sundance Film Festival short has made the rounds elsewhere online, it seems remiss if it wasn't shared here. "Late Bloomer" is a well made, humorous, and tense exploration of human sexuality through Lovecraftian horror.

The film is an obvious jab at HPL's own puritanical habits. Media like this runs the risk of encouraging too much probing into Lovecraft's personal life for insight into his fiction, overshadowing far more important factors like the ideological principles he embodied.  With that said, the film's overtone, if not viewed humorously (I know - it's not easy), highlights the strangeness of biology. Perhaps Lovecraft's own odd habits, best documented by S.T. Joshi in I am Providence: The Life and Times of HP Lovecraft, were more justified than they initially seem, unveiling the terrible grip of nature that's inescapable for most of us.

-Grim Blogger

Late Bloomer by Thom Little

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Mannequin Horror in China's Ghost Malls

Fans of the mannequin and corporate horror pioneered by Thomas Ligotti and his successors should experience a familiar chill in these scenes from China's stillborn shopping centers. Though lacking in the derelict aesthetic seen in corporate horror from collections like Teatro Grottesco, these spectral commerce palaces capture the same haunting, sometimes oppressive feel. In places, it almost seems certain stores were built solely for their mannequin residents.

Once again, mannequin horror enjoys a bizarre uptick in reality mirroring its expansion in books like Mark Samuels' The White Hands and Simon Strantzas' Beneath the Surface. Is life merely imitating art behind the wall of coincidence? Or is it a far more sinister phenomenon?

-Grim Blogger

Mannequin Horror in China's Ghost Malls

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Drawing a Shoggoth

An artist known only as Corax or Rick recently uploaded a very impressive video showing the creation of a Shoggoth on paper. What's more, it seems the artist was armed only with a humble pen and pencil. No mere amorphous blog, the Shoggoth depicted here is an intricate obscenity. The thing is also at the height of its ferocity, ablaze with the sharp teeth, eyes, and other strange organs detailed by H.P. Lovecraft.

Artwork like this will always have an underground or guerrilla/grassroots quality. Lovecraftian artwork continues to gain attention, but the widening pool makes exposure for less known pieces harder to get. Still, perhaps one day this type of content will appear in art volumes such as, The Art of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, alongside the work of the seasoned professionals.



-Grim Blogger

Drawing a Shoggoth

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Winter Horror: White by Patrick Boivon

As the winter season is still upon us, there's no time like the present to take in expressions of wintry terror. Patrick Boivon's short film, White, contains no overtly supernatural element. However, its endless wintry visuals, macabre and desperate measures for survival, and overall bleak atmosphere perfectly capture the season's frightful heart.



-Grim Blogger

Winter Horror: White by Patrick Boivon

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Tartarus Press Launches Promotional Videos

Tartarus Press appears to be exploring a new venue for promoting its books, one rarely seen with other weird horror publishers: Youtube. Short promos have appeared for the recent Robert Aickman reprint, Sub Rosa, as well as Angela Slatter's Sourdough and Other Stories, created by the author. Marketing by online videos has proven successful for many other products, but can it work for supernatural literature?



This is a tricky question that hides many others, much like one of those Russian nestling dolls. In the pro-Youtube column are facts about its ability to rank well in searches and the complete lack of content for many writers. The Sub Rosa video, in fact, is probably the most relevant Aickman item ever uploaded there. The site's ability to throw up "relevant" videos to viewers may also help lead a small, but significant percentage of mainstream horror fans to discover weird fiction for the first time.

On the other hand, Youtube can be particularly fickle. Giving a video the wrong tag or category may place it in a no man's land with few viewers, or worse, one with a high bounce rate (where viewers searching for the same term that has nothing to do with the video content end up clicking the back button once they realize their mistake). Youtube has cracked down in recent years on direct links due to spam-bots too. This makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to direct users to a website or online store where they can actually see more details about a book.

Though the list of pros and cons is long, Youtube and similar video websites have a chance to prove their worth to promoters of weird fiction. Right now, room for experimentation is enormous, and only more strange artists and publishers testing the black seas of digital media will learn whether or not they can be harnessed to their advantage.

-Grim Blogger

Tartarus Press Launches Promotional Videos

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The Lurking Fear Animation

Eric Koenig's animation The Lurking Fear is a mixed, but worthwhile view. The story is an original take with Lovecraftian elements, not at all related to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear." Though the narrative feels a bit rushed, it employs unique artistic techniques to give the cartoon an unmistakable look - much like a series of living sketches. Particularly interesting is when Koenig shows R'lyeh being bombed in a prehistoric age. The Cthulhu Mythos entities are, at their roots, nearly omnipotent extraterrestrials, but it's curious to see how seldomly sci-fi like technology is used in their appearances. R'lyeh's structures also look modern and sophisticated rather than like ancient masonry, the way they are normally shown in Lovecraftian adaptations. In this regard, Koenig's The Lurking Fear is a rare stylistic exception in this to the popular view.





-Grim Blogger

The Lurking Fear Animation

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Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo, Abbreviated

The clip below is an abbreviation edition of Algernon Blackwood's classic story, "The Wendigo." While there are certain atmospheric elements that can never be re-captured in shortened audio readings, this one comes closer than most others to doing Blackwood's story justice.

If you haven't yet experienced this unusual tale, then this brief recording will give you some idea of what you're missing. In fact, it's the perfect season to do it as well, with snow and frigid temperatures now so fierce in certain parts of the world that you may wonder if a Wendigo is about to come swooping downward from your own skyline. Read "The Wendigo" online, or check it out in Ancient Sorceries with these other fine Blackwood tales.



-Grim Blogger

Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo, Abbreviated

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The Old Man & The Goblins

This highly enjoyable short film used to be featured on one of the Lurker in the Lobby: The Best of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival VHS tapes, an early exercise in promoting Lovecraftian cinema. Luckily, it seems to have been back for some time thanks to Youtube. While it better reflects weird, rather than overtly Lovecraftian, imagery, this picture is an outstanding example of how puppetry may be used to communicate outre terror.



-Grim Blogger

The Old Man & The Goblins

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Weird Fiction and the Great War Fire Bath

The passing of the armistice agreement that ended the First World War should not go unnoticed by folks today, but especially those who enjoy weird fiction, classic and contemporary. The horrors and glories that sprang from Europe's bygone conflagration left a profound mark on weird scribes now acknowledged as masters. While it didn't consume their output, wartime impressions are easily found in stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and many others. One need only look at stories like Lovecraft's "The Temple," or Machen's "The Bowmen," to uncover specimens directly based on WWI.

The conflict did more than fire the fears and awesome imaginations of early twentieth century horror writers. A tiny handful were taken into the blackness, unable to escape the grim statistics hanging over several generations alive during 1914-1918. Britain's strangest able bodied authors followed a drum beat that led them into some very hot and very modern steel jaws. Lord Dunsany suffered a serious combat injury in 1916. Worse, William Hope Hodgson lost his life at Ypres during the war's last year. On the other side, Hanns Heinz Ewers directly participated in the conflict, placing his intellectual faculties in the Kaiser's service as a spy and propagandist.

The war had titanic consequences for weird fiction and the world, probably more than can be realized by today's scholars, who are increasingly segregated from the trenches and gas clouds by time's veil. The breakdown of older aesthetic models that occurred in the conflict's wake opened a trajectory for this era's supernatural literature. Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, D.F. Lewis, and other ultra-modern innovators would not have emerged without studying the direction Western literature stomped off in after the dust settled. Weird fiction, like most literary legacies, is today a bastard child of the Great War, with participants (present company included) who happily gnaw on the dark, psychic fruits sewn by a real world bloodbath.



-Grim Blogger

Weird Fiction and the Great War Fire Bath

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Scooby-Doo! and the Shrieking Madness with H.P. Hatecraft

In another signal of H.P. Lovecraft's surge into mainstream culture, the latest Scooby-Doo incarnation recently aired a Lovecraftian episode. "The Shrieking Madness" appeared on Cartoon Network as part of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, and centers around a villain named H.P. Hatecraft. Besides the hilariously named Hatecraft, we're shown a cartoon Harlan Ellison, Mythos names, Cthulhu symbolism galore, and scenery extracted right from Lovecraft's fiction.

The makers of this episode have certainly done their homework. Unlike the usual Lovecraftian adaptation that throws in a few garbled, multi-syllabic names and tentacled monsters, there are inside jokes that dig into HPL's legacy. Perhaps the funniest moment is when the cartoon Harlan Ellison berates Lovecraft as "a literary fraud," echoing the weird writer's vicious assessment at the hands of critics like Edmund Wilson.

Several clips from the episode are embedded below, and it can be watched in full as well. Altogether, this is a strong indicator of Lovecraft's rising visibility. It may also turn on a new generation of readers in another decade or so, when children seeing this today pick up a Lovecraft book as adolescents and experience that "A-ha!" moment, connecting a parody seen in childhood to a severe literary presence.





-Grim Blogger

Scooby-Doo! and the Shrieking Madness with H.P. Hatecraft

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W.H. Pugmire's Latest Interview with S.T. Joshi

The always entertaining and informative Wilum Pugmire has uploaded a video of his latest talk with weird fiction scholar S.T. Joshi. Here, Joshi talks about his current projects in the weird realm, his mystery novel, and Lovecraftian writing today, among other things, including tentative plans to do a fiction work about H.P. Lovecraft. Pugmire's easy to digest video interviews also show how the weird can be explored with newer technology, a trend one hopes to see more of in the future.



-Grim Blogger

W.H. Pugmire's Latest Interview with S.T. Joshi

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New Masque of the Red Death Trailer

A trailer for a new short film based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" has appeared on Youtube. The picture is directed by Guillaume Moiton and appears to closely follow the story's course, when a vengeful plague victim crashes a decadent refuge walled off from a dead wasteland. Judging by the trailer, this is an amateur effort, but it appears to capture the atmospheric component of antiquated decadence that Poe sought to cultivate in his tale. The masks worn by these revelers are also strangely alluring. Keep an eye out for the full short.



-Grim Blogger

New Masque of the Red Death Trailer

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Lecture on M.R. James and The Romance of Scholarship

A lecture given by Dr. Edward Bridle of Australia's Newcastle University has surfaced online. In it, Bridle discusses the well noted scholarly atmosphere dear to the heart of most ghost stories by M.R. James. The English weirdscribe's ominous tomes, erudite travelers, and ghastly knowledge are covered in their own right, and compared with other literary creations, in the weird and beyond. Bridle concludes by taking questions about James from the audience. Professorial talks on weird fiction are still not terribly common, despite the high reputation of writers like James, Poe, and Lovecraft, but they are a definite treat to those interested in unraveling the macabre's resonate depths.







-Grim Blogger

Lecture on M.R. James and The Romance of Scholarship

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Tenebrous Tales Promotional Video

A promotional video for Tenebrous Tales, one of Ex Occidente Press' latest titles, has surfaced on Youtube. The short is based on the story "The Tableaux," which appears in the collection. Its author, Christopher Barker, also shows up here. He's the man propelled toward the strange mannequins (I cannot comment on how accurate the video is, not yet having read the tale it's based on). Barker is notable for several essays on weird fiction, and for his previous work publishing the short lived Weirdly Supernatural journal, as well as Reggie Oliver's first two story collections. This is his first collection.



-Grim Blogger

Tenebrous Tales Promotional Video

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