H. P. Lovecraft and the Castle Freak

castle freak is a movie about a freak who lives in a castle and i don't know if there's ever been a more aptly titled film it is also one of my favorites and is something that i revisited a lot in the past year we begin with an old woman who after feeding her cat slices some bread and some meat only to take that down to her dungeon underneath the ancient castle that she lives in to sit it aside while she grabs a whip to beat the man that she has trapped down there she leaves the food locks the door behind her and goes upstairs and dies in her sleep over the next few weeks the man gets by with what little he has wailing and screaming in ignorant hatred and anguish at his circumstances living off of cats and other rodents that he manages to drag through the small trap door of his cell until one day he can't take it anymore and he breaks his thumbs so he can slide his mangled hands through his wrist shackles and escape our stage is set the freak is loose and the film can begin if you haven't figured it out by now stuart gordon who wrote and directed this is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time this is the fourth video in which i've covered one of his films on the channel which i think is more than any other creator at this point i imagine that by the end of all this i'll have talked about everything he made look out for my review of the wonderful ice cream suit coming soon the story is about the failing marriage of jon and susan riley who have moved to italy after jon mysteriously inherits a castle from a relative he didn't even know that he had jon is an alcoholic and we learn through flashback that he is at fault for a wreck that killed his son and blinded his daughter who the couple now have to take care of and susan hates him for this they live separate lives in separate bedrooms trapped within a marriage that neither of them wants out of a feeling that a divorce would be too much for their dependent daughter to bear and actors barbara crampton and jeffrey combs really sell their performances here in a believable and tragic way making it the third in a somewhat lovecraft trilogy of films that they star in together all directed by stuart gordon being comprised of reanimator from beyond and castle freak one thing you can say about this movie even if you don't like it is that it's at least very memorable and part of the feel of the film is based around the parameters that it was shot in i love these long takes almost every shot in the movie lasts through the whole scene there's very little cutting away very few camera setups and this wasn't really an intentional style decision but i think it ended up helping the film working for full moon pictures in this time was a bit of a double-edged sword the budget and time to produce the film was next to nothing but you also had almost unlimited creative control which to some is a very appealing thing the posters and titles for full moon films were thought up usually by charles band before the scripts were ever written and as long as you delivered a film that matched the poster and title that was assigned to you on time and under budget you could pretty much make whatever you wanted and since the films were going direct to video you didn't even have to try to stay within the requirements of the r rating it didn't even matter if they were good or bad as long as it was cheap and match the assignment filmmakers were largely left up to follow their wildest crazy ideas and they often did we talked about this process once before with the dolls poster and i think it is something that really added to charles band's early success it seems a little backwards creatively when you first think about it but would be an interesting exercise to have to write a story based on a cover and title that is already created for you and say what you will about the quality of these films but you can't deny that posters like the dungeon master necropolis the alchemist transmutations and robot holocaust wouldn't stand out in a movie theater lobby or video rental store and seeing as at this point he has worked on over 300 movies there must be some creative and financial success there in that process and while i don't ever think that forcing people into crunch or rushing projects for profit is a good thing i will also say that those hindrances will occasionally force a hyper-creative energy that through the right type of personality can bring some really interesting ideas stuart gordon said on the creation of the movie that the thing that was kind of amazing was that i met with charlie about it in february and we were shooting it in june it was very fast and we shot the first draft of the script which is something that you never do the crew began filming in june of 1994 in the italian castle that was owned privately by charles band that has been used in a lot of different full moon films and other films that he produced including stuart gordon's own pit in the pendulum that had been shot here several years prior to this they filmed through the rest of june but had fallen a few days behind schedule by july things that the team thought would be quick to do actually ended up taking a great deal of time for instance giorgio's character design is so recognizable that even when filming his shadow cast upon the wall or the sheet draped around him he had to be in full makeup because it didn't look right without it and little unexpected things like that began to add up and by this point they were several days behind the plant that they had set out to follow band had wanted to use the castle for a family reunion and showed up on july 8th himself and told the crew that they had to be gone by the next day and so they were actor jonathan fuller who plays the freak in the film wrote the following in his diary about these events we were told in friendly but no uncertain terms that we have to finish by saturday the 9th and be out couldn't they put us in a hotel for a day i asked unanswered stewart rushes to finish as many of the remaining shots as he can focusing on helen during the long night i pack my bags in full makeup while wearing my two inch nails helen and i joke about the glamour of the film world as she whips me with the fake cat of ninetales but this limited time led to the film being done almost exclusively in long takes that were only done a few times each which gives a very raw tone that could have easily wound up being bad but somehow works here to build an effective world and as a result you get to see these actors talents shine as you get to watch them progress through these scenes together without cutting or interruptions much like you would in a play i imagine that this film was a harder acting job than most higher budget films tend to be for that reason the actors are frequently framed far away like they are being watched by someone from a distance and we ourselves through this camera placement often times are positioned within the role of the freak staying out of view and at a distance it is a style that was largely placed onto the film and not one that they purposefully decided to use for themselves but for the most part it benefits the production and works for the story that they are trying to tell here also because of the location and equipment they had to use because of the narrow budget the film has a very grimy and uncomfortably realistic tone to it it's a very dirty feeling movie to watch and that texture of authentic ancient filth is something that i love to see in a movie the ugly side of this unfortunately is a tale that can be found all too often and that in trying to keep the film as low budget as possible many of those involved in the production were not paid the amount that had been agreed upon full moon co-produced this with italian producer maurizio maggie and after the film was shot there was some financial troubles on both the italian and american sides of the film and part of this can actually be placed on the content of castle freak being as extreme as it is because up to this point full moon had a financial deal with paramount pictures who would handle the distribution of the films that they made by all accounts they were very hands-off and didn't really care what full moon was doing because the films they were making brought in so little money that they didn't even warrant the attention fullmoon would make movies paramount would put them on video without really knowing what they were in some cases and small amounts of money would be made by both parties by this point they had been doing this for years but for some reason castle freak which is the darkest and most violent movie that full moon ever produced got their attention and they were so upset by what they saw in the movie paramount ended their relationship an act that wouldn't really harm them at all but would financially ruin full moon and as a result the italian actors one of which was a holocaust survivor ended up being paid only about a half to three quarters of what had been agreed upon and none of the american actors were ever paid for the overtime crunch that was required to finish the movie before ban's family reunion in jonathan fuller's case at the time he claimed that this amounted to about six thousand dollars of unpaid labor this resulted in a standoff between the cast and full moon in which they would not come in to finish recording the audio that was needed in order to properly release the film unless they were paid this ended in stuart gordon stepping in to convince them to record the needed lines so that their work could at the very least be shown and appreciated by audiences and to my knowledge none of them were ever paid what was owed to them but i might be wrong there i personally couldn't find any information indicating that they had been just because there was a very limited schedule for them to work with that doesn't mean that they weren't trying to do some cool things here which wasn't always the case with full moon films because to be honest a lot of them were kind of low effort trash but that certainly wasn't the case here this was at this point in time one of the only films to ever attempt a full body form-fitting prosthetic based makeup for a main actor like this covering all skin from head to toe in creature design in the following years right after this works like the grinch the lord of the rings and x-men would attempt similar in-depth makeup designs but at this point in time a creature like this in design was not really something that was done other similar monsters like freddy krueger would actually have makeup covering limited parts of their body but with him being nude through the whole film it made this a very different type of job it took a large team six hours every single day to turn jonathan fuller into giorgio the freak and the makeup mixed with the excellent physicality of his performance is the highlight of the film for me just the way that he moves is fascinating to watch it's like seeing an animal try to pretend that it is human and even the smallest of steps that the creature makes is an interesting acting decision giorgio has no tongue you see and even if he did i doubt he understands language and all this extreme misery loneliness and sorrow that he has experienced throughout his entire life has to be portrayed entirely through his physicality to which he does an amazing job one of my least favorite aspects of 80s horror is how women were treated both on and off screen but i really appreciate how that is played with here as it feels as if it is in conversation with a similar scene in reanimator in this scene giorgio has dragged rebecca the couple's daughter off to do with her as he wishes he tears at her clothes and bites her to the point of drawing blood and you feel as if you're about to watch the same assault scene that you've seen a thousand times before from this era of horror but then susan barbara crampton's character who was in this exact same situation in reanimator steps in and puts her daughter's safety before her own she recognizes what he wants and then exposes herself to distract him long enough for her daughter to escape but never at any point in this exchange is she turned into the place of the helpless victim she has total control here and is using her body as a weapon and then on top of that she puts a long knife that she has hidden in his back right as he reaches out to touch her it's a great subversion of this type of exploitative scene and i really love seeing this moment that allows her to take power over him and that things don't turn out like you think they will but then unfortunately it turns into a chase scene with both of them running away screaming through the castle being pursued by giorgio and then once they are on the roof jeffrey combs steps in to save the day just like he does in reanimator so it's not all great as crampton doesn't get to fully take in that hero moment for herself for very long and isn't allowed to be the one who finishes him off although thematically it works as in fighting the monster as a team shows why these two were ever good as a couple and killing the freak together in one brief moment before combs falls to his death heals their relationship as they remember the connection that they once shared which to me makes the final funeral scene all the more tragic as you've watched crampton this whole movie reject her husband for his faults only to realize what she had originally loved about him after he has gone and it is all too final and late and in that i'm not excusing anything that combs does in the film he is playing a really terrible guy who is horrible to his family on multiple occasions and shows off a lot of jack torrance-like tendencies and she's probably better off without him especially now that she owns this cool castle that is officially certified freakless but human emotions are complicated and this film recognizes that and is willing to play with that and go to darker places to explore it and i really appreciate it despite the struggles that they were forced to overcome they obviously felt good about what they had created that they felt like they were doing important work with gordon saying at one point to fangoria during the production of the film this monster has great potential and if this movie is successful we might even try to further exploit the character like they did with jason or freddy and this obviously never happened but it actually strikes me as an odd thing to say creatively because out of all the horror movies that you could spawn a franchise out of castle freak doesn't seem to be one that would work well in that way and i'm curious to see where he would have taken that because to me it's kind of an interesting idea i guess we'll have to see with the 2020 remake because it seems that they intend to do the same thing here but the sad fact of the matter is that while ultimately it made more money than most full moon films did at the time not that many people ever saw it fullmoon's business model was to make as many films as possible as cheap as possible and hopefully some of them will be marginal successes that will allow them to fund even more cheap movies until the end of time but at any other studio castle freak would have been regarded as a bit of a disappointment stuart gordon seemed to be a little bit sad about this saying in 2011 almost 20 years after had been made i don't think there was any money to do one sheets there are no posters of that film but it did find its audience anyway it's a slow process people are just beginning to realize that it's out there and i hope that more people are led to discover this because people always talk about the other two lovecraft films reanimator and from beyond as high points and this time of horror cinema but castle freak rarely gets that same attention and i've been happy to see more and more finding out about it as time goes on as it slowly gets recognized more as a great movie because not only do i think it's a great movie but i think it's fascinating in relation to lovecraft as a man more so than any other adaptation of his work i think that it is intrinsically connected to who lovecraft was as a person and how he thought and felt about the world and himself stuart gordon said about the inspiration of castle freak that there's a story i read some time ago which inspired this film it's about this guy who has been locked up for years and when he finally escapes his reactions to the outside world are obviously unpredictable that story of course is one of lovecraft's most well-regarded the outsider it tells of a man who has been trapped for as long as he can remember in a castle that is surrounded by dark forests that are so high that they block out the sun from ever reaching him a being who knows not where he came from to his knowledge or at least his memory he has always existed down in this horrible castle in the grounds that have surrounded it he cannot speak and he believes that he has never met another soul save for the bones that litter the halls around him he can recall a distant image of a woman who he believed at one time nursed him who was old and shriveled as the decaying castle that they find themselves in but she may or may not have been a delusion brought on from the isolation all he knows comes from the many books in the castle library that he has taught himself to decipher over the years anything that came before that he cannot remember he has always lived in the castle the language that lovecraft uses here is typical of what you would find in many of his more fantastical stories it is big bold and atmospheric in a way that forces you to focus deeply on every word to fully understand what he is trying to convey to you it is a style decision that uniquely feels like him and demonstrates his impact on other works of art beyond just giant cosmic beings and tentacles i think this story for instance shows that not only did from software take ideas from lovecraft to make bloodborne but also that the very linguistic style that he used in his fantasy stories was intrinsic to the process in creating the unique tone of the world of dark souls and should be very much considered as well to be lovecraftian wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in cast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books or upon odd watches and twilight groves of grotesque gigantic and vine encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft such a lot the gods gave to me to me the dazed the disappointed the barren the broken and yet i am strangely content and cling desperately to those seer memories when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other narrator has tried to leave of course but the few attempts that he has made ended in failure the forest is too dense and dark and full of terrors to be traversed and soon after embarking unto it he would always inevitably find himself back in his labyrinthine prison until one evening he can take it no longer up the spiral stairs he climbs up to the highest tower in the crumbling stone monstrosity further up into the castle than he has ever gone before up into the pinnacle that reaches beyond even the trees and after breaking through the trapdoor and escaping through the tower he sees the moon the stars and he is filled with indescribable emotion he is bathed in light for the first time and its wonderful glow burns his eyes with its brilliance after a moment he is shocked to find the area around his exit to be instead of treetops solid earth he follows down a long forgotten road taking breaks along the way to swim or to play in meadows populated only by trees and long forgotten ruins built by men whose names will never again be spoken and after some time he comes to the end of the road only to find his castle only it isn't his castle the design is the same but towers that should be there no longer are either having been demolished or not constructed yet and life can be seen and felt and smelt and heard everywhere around him he sees a window and through it he gazes upon a crowd of people having a party for the first time in his life he sees real actual breathing people sees the type of things that he has read about in his books for a lifetime sees the type of companionship and love that has before this moment to him only existed as ink on the paper in his books as paint on the canvas in the halls and as an abstract concept of the mind and he wants more than anything to join in climbing through the window in his own words he says scarcely had i crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat flight was universal and in the clamor and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions many covered their eyes with their hands and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors his tragic first thought is that there must be a monster behind him that he had not seen creep up and that he is about to die i tremble at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen he tells us and slowly and carefully he begins to search the house for this creature when up in the alcove the two lock eyes and freeze the creature he tells us had the look of all that is unclean uncanny unwelcome abnormal and detestable it had eyes of glassy orbs that stared back at him loathsomely its body was an abhorrent travesty of the human shape for what seemed like forever they stood and stared at one another and after a long while once deciding that the creature seemed despite its hideous appearance to intend him no harm he reached out his fingers to touch its out-turned paw only to feel the cold and unwieldy surface of polished glass we will return to this in a moment as with any lovecraft story i think to fully understand what he is trying to say thematically you must first understand him as a person and feel the things that he felt at the time or at least be exposed to those feelings of sadness and isolation from people that he felt for most of his lifetime i think if anything the past year and a half has been an excellent time to be in the right mindset of revisiting lovecraft and his work locked away in our homes apart from one another in particular with the outsider you've got to know how he felt about the world i think about how he felt about other people and how he felt about himself and before i really begin here i will say up front that much of what follows is going to be an exhaustive look at lovecraft as a person including things he said in private about himself and what others said of him i'm going to be trying to build as accurate of a psychological profile of him as i can based on his own words but i wanted to say that if you're familiar with him or his works then you will know some of the things that are going to be covered here and they will all be covered here some of the language that he used is violent much of it is exceptionally hateful and racist and most of it will be depressing as well as in addition to this lovecraft not only talked about his hatred of others but also of himself and occasionally spoke of wanting to harm himself i present to you h.p lovecraft unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood only bring fear and sadness born as a single child to sarah and winfield phillips lovecraft on march 15 1937. howard phillips lovecraft was from a young age provided with an affluent environment in which he could learn from many resources his grandfather was a wealthy businessman who owned much of the land in the town and surrounding areas and was well known for his status within the freemasons after a public psychotic episode in april of 1983 howard's father was committed to butler hospital and providence when howard was only three years old he would never be released and died in confinement five years later he would be left to his mother and her two sisters and her parents to be raised all of whom were themselves seen as outsiders in their own way within their community and although wealthy were considered by most to be quite strange they fostered a love of the arts in howard and seeing as he was an only child without a father they spoiled him constantly giving him anything that he wanted and constantly reaffirming within him how smart and gifted he was his grandfather whipple van buren instilled in him an importance of history classical and modern literature philosophy and the value of a creative life and quickly filled that role that winfield left behind as a father he also at night would tell him his own original stories that he made up about winged creatures that made deep low moaning sounds when they moved something which lovecraft would later admit was the spark of inspiration for much of his later body of work and while this was excellent for his development as an author right here is where his shocking lack of social skills began as he was raised as an only kid and spent almost all of his social time around adults that were by all accounts awed and rarely spent time with other children he would later say amongst my few playmates i was very unpopular the children i knew disliked me and i disliked them their romping and shouting puzzled me and i hated mere play and dancing about as an adult this mentality would grow into agoraphobia and then progress into xenophobia until finally manifesting as outright racism but not only did lovecraft fear the world outside his walls he himself was seen as a mysterious and eclectic individual his entire life that was feared by many for his strange behaviors one of his neighbors when reflecting on her childhood said of the adult hp lovecraft who lived nearby as a little girl i was scared to death of him for he used to walk rapidly up and down angle street at night just as a group of us were playing hair and hounds at the quarter of angle and patterson streets his appearance always frightened me he was certainly the neighborhood mystery he would never speak to any of us but kept right on with his head down once in a while i would pass him in the day but never could get him to say hello another neighbor clara l hess recalled a visit to the lovecraft home when howard was a child in a letter to august durleth which if not based in reality would read as a horror short story unto itself although of a younger generation i knew lovecraft's mother better than i knew howard who even as a young boy was strange and rather a recluse who kept by himself and hid from other children because as his mother said he could not bear to have people look upon his awful face she would talk of his looks it seemed to be an obsession with her which would not have attracted any particular attention if he had been normal as were the other children in the community they because of the strangeness of his personality kept aloof and had little to say to him i first remember meeting mrs lovecraft when i was a very little girl at the home of the late mr and mrs theodore phillips on engle street where i visited often at the time mrs lovecraft then susie phillips was living on the corner of angle street and elm grove avenue she was very pretty and attractive with beautiful and unusually white complexion she was an intensely nervous person later when she moved into a little downstairs flat on the house on angle street around the corner from butler avenue i met her often on the butler avenue cars and one day after many urgent invitations i went to call on her she was considered then to be getting rather odd my call was pleasant enough but the house had a strange and shut up air and the atmosphere seemed weird and mrs lovecraft talked continuously of her son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk the streets where people could gaze at him when i protested that she was exaggerating and that he should not feel this way she looked at me with a rather pitiful look as though i did not understand about it howard used to go out into the fields back of my home to study the stars one early fall evening several of the children in the vicinity assembled to watch him from a distance feeling sorry for his loneliness i went up to him and asked him about his telescope and was permitted to look through it but his language was so technical that i could not understand it after a time one did not meet mrs lovecraft very often sometimes when going around the corner to mail a letter on an early summer evening one would see a dark figure fluttering about the shrubbery of her house and i discovered that it was mrs lovecraft i remember mrs lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures they rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told her story despite being raised in a household that encouraged his studies and was pretty much ideal for a person like him his mother's fixation on his looks instilled in him from a very early age and extreme self-consciousness that lasted through his entire life evidence can be found from all periods of his career of him talking about how much he hated the way that he looked by the time he was an adult when going down the sidewalk he never stopped to talk to anyone he always walked with his head bent down and his hands in his pockets not making eye contact with anyone hating when people looked at him and hating the people that he looked at he thought that thinness was a symbol of the aristocracy and purposefully starved himself to the point of appearing gaunt he also thought that the starved brain was better for writing and as a result of this he would frequently pass out at public social events that he went to because he would be in a situation where he would eat more than usual and have an insulin spike that would cause him to fall over muscle spasms in his face caused him to have occasional ticks and would often force him to unwillingly grimace at people he had poicolothermism which is a condition where the body struggles to regulate its temperature and as a result it was reported that touching him often felt like touching a corpse people who shook his hand often reacted in unpleasant ways that upset him as a result of his upbringing and the way that he perceived that the world had treated him and the way that he felt about his body by the time he was 20 he completely fell into a state of outright agoraphobia and had zero confidence in himself and even though this period would eventually fade away and he would even become a well-traveled man who had acquaintances and correspondences all over the world right here in this early period of life is when the seed was planted they would eventually grow and result in his hatred of himself and his body the world around him and most everyone in it in relation to all of this there is at least in my opinion compelling and convincingly strong evidence to at least argue that lovecraft was possibly trans or at the very least queer he wore his hair in long golden locks as a child they were his defining feature and his nickname by the adults around him was little sunshine he dressed in femme clothing with a favorite of his being lord falten roy suits but he was also known to frequently wear dresses in this time of course it wasn't uncommon at all for boys to wear gowns but from what i understand not often as feminized in design as those that he wore and certainly not as far into childhood as he wore them this is often placed on his mother who was always open about the fact that she had always wanted a daughter and was displeased that she only ever had a boy but when people called howard a boy for the first years of his life he would insist to them that he was a girl but stop doing this sometime before the age of 10. this is where his interests and periods before his time began which would become the setting of many of his works and influence his grammar and spelling of words that would become a trademark of his style as he became fascinated by paintings of the baroque era depicting men with long elegant hair and regal gowns he would often speak of having felt that time had passed him by even before he was born that he was a shadow out of time and space from a world before our own when living in new york he told his wife who herself was jewish although we are americans we seem like strangers in a foreign city i do not like to think that it is setting the style for the future if it is i believe the world is going mad that we are reaching the end of an era it is hard to find a lot of evidence in modern writing to support this about lovecraft's gender and sexuality it seems to be a fact largely lost to history or ignored by history and i imagine that this is probably news to a lot of people who are watching this but going back and looking at a lot of older information that came out soon after his death you can find this mentioned by multiple sources from those who knew him one of which was his cousin and contemporary author robert h barlow lovecraft went for an extended visit to his home near the end of his life barlow mentions in his writings that lovecraft appeared to be in poor health and that his hair was gray and thinning and that he had put on weight and after his passing barlow began working on a short book or essay about that visit and the ideas that lovecraft discussed while at his home but before this could ever be completed he took his own life and all that is left of this work today is a collection of notes that he had taken over the course of that visit in preparation to write that book one such note reads mrs gamewell told of how hpl when young for a while insisted i'm a little girl and wrote how he would be set up on the table to spout tennyson's mod on into adulthood there are many written instances of different people who knew him personally commenting on how feminine his voice and mannerisms were and how he spoke in the upper register of speech in a way that didn't match what you would expect based on his outward appearance and that he spoke even in a way that seemed uncomfortable for him and ultimately this could all be nothing but if this were true i think it would in part recontextualize a lot of the things he said and did and wrote about in his lifetime not excuse them mind you but would certainly add a bit of understanding to a possible psychological motivation for some of his acts or emotional mindsets it would certainly explain why he hated his appearance so much which is an undeniable fact the outward appearance of his body caused a constant emotional turmoil for his entire life that he spoke about in letters to everyone that he knew lovecraft is always described as being a vehemently anti-queer author which fair he kind of was or at least in what he directly said about it one of the most overt statements on sexuality that he made in his lifetime reads although of course i always knew that pederasty was a disgusting custom of many ancient nations i never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till i was over 30. many nowadays overlook the fact that there are always distinctly effeminate types which are most distinctly not homosexual i don't know how psychology explains them but we all know the sort of damned [ __ ] who plays with girls and who when he grows up is a chronic cake eater hanging around girls doting on dances acquiring certain feminine mannerisms annotations and tastes and yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations but to take him at his literal word is kind of ridiculous here a world traveling and exceptionally well-read man like himself who spent a great deal of time in social circles in new york not knowing about homosexuality till he is over 30 is pretty silly to entertain even in the 1930s samuel loveman who had been a best friend of lovecraft since 1917 was gay he was also jewish two other very close friends of his his previously mentioned cousin robert h barlow and hart crane were also gay and when confronted about this near the end of his life lovecraft insisted that he had never suspected them before finding out the truth also after learning of crane's sexuality and proclivity to drink alcohol in excess lovecraft said the following to his aunt lilian poor crane a real poet and a man of taste descendant of an ancient connecticut family and a gentleman to his fingertips but a slave of dissipated habits which will soon ruin his constitution and is still striking handsomeness i'm including a lot of quotes in this video particularly from lovecraft because he really did not understand how people around him perceived him and the way that he acted he had no self-awareness in that regard at least in an outward sense and didn't understand how he came across and i find many of his quotes interesting because he can frequently be found demeaning things that he himself did or that his friends would confirm were aspects of his personality not just in talking about life and the way that people acted and behaved but also in art and the creative process in writing i think most people who have read some of his work would find it kind of funny to know that he once said of other people's stories representing evil as complete monsters is a little childish they must be more fully described than mere formless shadows they must be handled very carefully how he actually truly felt about sexuality is something that only he and a few others in his life would know it's something that we can never be sure of today as they have all long passed in his own lifetime behind his back several of his close friends speculated on his ambiguous sexuality as he never showed much of an interest in romantic relationships i mean just listen to the way that he describes the concept of marriage here i have always regarded marriage as composed of friendly regard mental congeniality social foresight and practical advantage to which at first the element of biological eroticism is added to be honest it wouldn't surprise me a bit to learn that he never once slept with his wife who he was only married to for two years she insisted they did but that could easily be a lie in 1953 she told august derleth that howard was entirely adequate sexually but he always approached sex as if he did not like it each time i had to take the initiative by the second year of their marriage she didn't even live in the same house as him but sent him a monthly check to help him pay his rent the couple never got formally divorced but the marriage in any real sense was over within two years of its beginning she said of their sex life once that he was reared more like a girl evidently instead of being reared like a man yet he was far from unsexed as someone has stated but it was this sort of upbringing i believe that made him squeamish and prudish about perfectly natural functions the very mention of the word sex seemed to upset him and not only that but if you examine his body of work as a whole it is distinctly not sexual or romantic in the slightest the characters in his books have high aspirations for their careers but not for each other as people no one in his work really relates to anyone else which i think is a big tell on lovecraft's personality he essentially crafted a world populated almost exclusively by asexual male scholars and fishermen i always feel that an interesting thing about prose fiction is that if you read a couple books by an author you more often than not will essentially know what they're into by the end of it it's like reading their private diary in a way fiction authors tell on themselves all the time with this after reading a song of ice and fire or the books of blood you will know exactly what interests george martin and clive barker in that regard but lovecraft not so much and i just think that this aspect of lovecraft as a person is one that is overlooked too often in discussions of his work and trying to understand more about that part of him could help in unraveling some of his views both about himself and of others as well as the themes present in his stories and why he possibly saw himself as a man-shaped monster hiding among men it is undeniable that he hated both his physical appearance and aspects of his personality and that he probably suffered from a major depressive disorder for most of his adulthood it is almost impossible to find evidence of him saying anything good about himself or about something that he had done he was known to write and rewrite stories over and over again because he thought they were terrible and destroyed a great number of projects that he started in fact there are almost no unfinished works by him because he destroyed so much of what he started to demonstrate some of this what follows are different ways he described himself and his mental state throughout his life in his own words i am not thought any particular credit socially i am awkward and unpleasing i have always had a sort of sensation of unpopularity knowing how odd and utterly boresome i am i am only about half alive a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking my nervous system is a shattered wreck and i am absolutely bored and listless save when i come upon something which particularly interests me as for my fiction whether or not there's anything potentially in it i know that it needs a damn thorough overhauling it is excessively extravagant and melodramatic and lacks depth and subtlety my style is bad too full of obvious rhetorical devices and hackneyed word and rhythm patterns it comes across a long way from the stark objective simplicity which is my goal i shall never be very merry or very sad for i am more prone to analyze than to feel what merriment i have is always derived from the satirical principle and what sadness i have is not so much personal as a vast and terrible melancholy at the pain and futility of all existence how can any woman love a face like mine nobody among my progenitors was as rotten looking as i am i am a sort of parody or caricature facially of my mother and maternal uncle my daily life is a sort of contemptuous lethargy devoid alike of virtue and vices i am not of the world but an amused and sometimes disgusted spectator of it i detest the human race and its pretenses and swineishness it is damned odd that i nearly six foot chalk-white nordic type of the master conqueror and man of action should be as much of a brooding analyst and dabbler and impressions as any oxide sawed-off mediterranean brunette i am sure i would rather be a general than a poet safe preference since i shall never be either futility and ineffectiveness are my keynote i shall never amount to anything because i don't care enough about life and the world to try within my nature there seemed to be no faculty of rational self-guidance boy and man i blundered into every ditch and bog which lay within sight of my way unpractical i was called by those who spoke mildly idiot i am sure by many a ruder tongue and idiot i see myself whenever i glance back over the long devious road something obviously i lacked from the beginning some balancing principle granted to most men in one or another degree i had brains but they were no help to me in the common circumstances of life in all practical matters i am idle and inept the more active life to one of my temperament demands many things which i could dispense with when drifting sleepily and inertly along shunning a world which exhausted and disgusted me and having no goal but a vial of cyanide when my money should give out how easy it would be to wait out among the rushes and lie face down in the warm water till oblivion came there would be a certain gurgling or choking unpleasantness at first but it would soon be over then the long peaceful night of non-existence which i had enjoyed from the mythical start of eternity till the 20th of august 1890. it is telling i think of the mental state that he was usually in then one of the only instances where he is actually saying something that was in his opinion positive about himself was probably put down in a moment of depression-related mania and reads as incredibly unhinged and also like many things he said very racist i am naturally a nordic a chalk-white bulk teutonic killer of the scandinavian or north german forests a viking a berserk killer a predatory rover of the blood of hingust and harsa a conqueror of celts and mongrels and founder of empires a son of the thunders and the arctic winds and brother to the frosts and the auroras a drinker of foeman's blood from new picked skulls i'd like to point out that he wrote this while living in providence rhode island and having never fought in war as he was declared to be medically unfit to join the army in world war 1. he also as a young man was obsessed with hunting and on his first outing he shot a squirrel and was so upset by what he had done that he vomited and never went hunting again also several years after writing this he would discover to his horror that he had a significant amount of welsh blood in him on his father's side which might have in part inspired him to write the shadow over insmith which is about a man being driven insane by learning that he has partial fish ancestry lovecraft was a walking combination of contradictions the saddest of which to me is that for as much as he hated people and hated to be around people and to be seen by people by all accounts he was an incredibly kind human in one-on-one interactions one critic said of meeting him i had never been ambitious to meet lovecraft i had an impression that he was heavy and ponderous he is apparently all those things i detest yet from the minute i met him i liked howard p lovecraft immensely his kindness and personal interactions is something that you can find testament to over and over again and i think personally that is one of the saddest parts about this is that he obviously wanted to like people and to be liked by people but lacked that ability within himself to do that lovecraft often invited others to take walks with him late at night to discuss ideas and one such friend cm eddie jr described an evening where lovecraft came to his home to read out loud to him the outsider the day that he finished writing it the pair then walked to see the old home of edgar allan poe and eddie said of that day it was as rewarding as any walk with lovecraft and that he found many of the buildings fascinating and conveyed that fascination with me and this was in essence the reward of a walk with lovecraft this and the warmth of his personality which once having shared one never forgot it is well known that he died considering himself a failure when he wasn't included in the list of writers and prominent people from providence and the rhode island travel guide he took it as a major blow but despite that and the things that he said and did time after time you can find instances of him going above and beyond to help people out both with his time and what little money he had that he loved being around people but knew how he came across i mean when he died all of his friends and acquaintances put together a collection of essays about what he meant to them on a personal level and how he had touched their lives that just isn't a thing that happens when people die even famous people and in his time he was correct in his estimation that he wasn't really famous obviously there was something there that was genuinely kind and loving underneath it all something that wanted to reach out and be touched and seen and loved and interact with other people he was a walking contradiction a dichotomy of what he wanted to be and how he wanted to treat people and how he wanted to be seen and be seen meeting how he actually was and how he actually behaved and thought and i think that is tremendously sad also as a quick side note in relation to shadow over endsmith i think there isn't a great place to slide this in but i just wanted to say here that considering the context of his work and the sheer amount of aquatic monsters in there his diet was very funny to me elsprog de camp says in his biography lovecraft had a genuine horror of seafood any attempt to make him eat it he said would cause instant vomiting i also think that it is very funny that he was a massive fan of ice cream and that in the later part of his life he developed a habit of eating it almost every day you can find many instances of people writing about how they were going on a walk with him to talk about something only for him to purposefully manipulate the route that they took so that they would wind up at the ice cream shop one written account says each of the three ordered a double portion in a different flavor and traded parts of his serving with the others so that each got three flavors with each serving one dry dropped out soon but morton and lovecraft continued triumphantly through the whole 28 flavors consuming more than two quarts of ice cream a piece at one setting and i think this is interesting though because while intelligent beyond most people who have ever lived i think this example is emblematic of a repeated type of behavior on lovecraft's part that demonstrates that he had the social skills of a child in a lot of ways he liked childish things and refused more or less to conform to acting like an adult in all ways except for outward appearance and that isn't intended to be a criticism in any way people should be able to like and behave how they want to as long as they're not hurting others i'm just stating a fact here he put so much sugar in his coffee that the bottom of his mug after he drank it would be a thick black sugary muck this was just his nature which in a way was deeply helpful in fostering the creativity that he showed off in all of his work but came with some other issues that affected his personal life he was volatile and would often respond to things that he perceived as problems and intensely emotional outbursts oftentimes acting in socially off-putting ways that signaled a deeper untreated mental issue that he carried with him his entire life they both harmed his personal relationships and made it difficult to keep a steady job he was an objectively really weird guy and very socially awkward in all instances of life and in relation to that quote a moment ago he was weirdly personally obsessed with militarism even though it never really crept into his stories when visiting the memorial to fallen colonial soldiers in the revolutionary war in lexington massachusetts he reportedly threw up both hands in the air and screamed so perish all enemies and traitors to his lawful majesty king george iii he later clarified his stance on this by saying all my deep emotional loyalties are with the race and the empire rather than the american branch at public events where the national anthem was sung he would loudly sing god save the king over the crowd and this is just one part of one facet of his extremely socially inept personality and while i don't want to linger on this too long essentially what i'm trying to get at here is that both by nature and by nurture lovecraft was a physically and mentally unwell man for all of his short adult life before his death at the age of 46. reading his personal writings gives the tone of the sheer force of pure unfiltered clinical depression that he suffered at all moments of the day and has honestly been difficult to sit with for weeks on end while i work on this video and as a result of that depression he spent the greater part of his existence sitting alone in his home and while he did like to travel and keep correspondences throughout the country by early adulthood he had developed a strong fear and dislike of the outside world and anything that did not fit into his narrow definition of decent in my mind i see this video as a somewhat sequel or clarification or epilogue if you will on the lovecraft segment in my anatomy of a franchise on reanimator that i made last year one of my personal rules that i keep for myself here on this channel is to only ever cover something once to never leave anything on the table to be talked about another day i've always thought it was obvious if someone was trying to hold back so they could double dip and make something else about it later and my goal is to never really do that i want each of my videos to stand exactly for how i feel in entirety about a subject but in this instance i felt it was appropriate to come back to this as most of that video was just about reanimator i didn't talk much about lovecraft as a person very much at all actually and as you can see there was definitely room for that to be expanded upon one thing that frustrates me as a creator is that often people equate me criticizing something about a work or an author or a filmmaker with me not liking that work or that person last time i feel a lot of people misunderstood the point i was attempting to make when talking about richard blackburn being the person who made lamora i love lamora and i think richard blackburn made an excellent film i was only suggesting that women should be able to make more movies about women or more movies about anything that they want they should just be able to have more art funded and released than they currently and historically have been able to i was only making a point about representation not blackburn himself as a director or as a person or the work as a whole i certainly wasn't saying that men were not physically capable of empathy or writing women characters that's absurd but a lot of people took my words to mean that and that's okay i'm a firm believer in the public domain and i also feel that once you create something and put it out into the world what other people take and do with that thing or how they interpret it is ultimately beyond your control you have full power over what you make and say but the impression on it once it's out there in the court of public opinion is what it is as lovecraft himself puts it the tragedy of the artist is that he cannot keep his own work an author can through the printing press but an artist either has his work or someone else has it and i know that's not exactly what he was talking about but the basic idea is that once you make something and release it you no longer have it it's no longer really yours it's in everyone else's hands by that point which is why the response to things that i make never really fully bothers me because i understand that it's not a real part of the creative process for myself only a part of the future creative process to possibly consider i've read almost everything that lovecraft ever wrote and could be considered to be a collector of lovecraft books and related items i even have one of the only 3500 first edition hardcovers of the dark brotherhood that were ever printed in really good condition i wouldn't be here wasting my time making a video over the course of two months that is this long about someone that i hated or didn't find interesting i love his stories and his mind and i always have i think that he was a creative genius who completely fascinates me but he was also a terrible person i just needed to clarify that because i'm not just some guy who read one or two of his stories and then went to rant online about him i very much understand his body of work and am always wanting to understand him more as a person the hard cover of his completed works has set on my nightstand for years now every time when i'm cleaning that i put it away it quickly finds itself back there so i've just decided to leave it sitting there for when it's needed i literally fall asleep next hp lovecraft every night of my life at least once every few days here over a year since making that video i get a long comment talking about how i was too hard on lovecraft in that video and how he wasn't actually that bad and how he turned his views around by the end of his life and how he married a jewish woman and how he never actually caused anyone any real harm i want to be absolutely clear that he was a monster and an incredibly destructive and legitimately evil person probably much more so than most people realize everyone knows that he was a racist but rarely do you see people talking about what he actually said and did aside from the same things that get brought up over and over again like a meme such as the name of his cat it wasn't just a few racially based comments and stories and it wasn't just a poem that he wrote once like his views are typically painted as but instead was a reoccurring pattern of repeated behavior that he expressed many times in writing throughout his life until his death trauma can manifest in many different ways for people but it was a deliberate decision on his part to fall into racial extremism with his hatred i've been criticized by some in the past for editorializing too much in my videos and adding my own opinions into situations rather than just presenting things as they are and so for those individuals out there who say that about my work and said i was doing that last time when talking about lovecraft what follows here for the next few moments are just the facts no opinions for me not from his stories but things he actually did and said to and about real people in his lifetime when i say i like hitler i do not imply that he is personally winning or temporarily rational but simply that he is an honest ignorant man fighting bravely and blindly against the disintegrative forces which more educated and sophisticated people accept without adequate evidence as inevitable of course it is quite possible that he may do more harm than good but the preservation of germany as a coherent cultural and political fabric is of infinitely greater importance than the comfort of those who have been encommoded by nazism and of course the number of sufferers is negligible as compared to that of bolshevism's victims i regard the celts as an inferior race but little better than mexicans and but little more capable of self-government they could never maintain an orderly existence save under the domination of some branch of the teutonic master race if they could leave england they would have to take germany as a master in fact i am not sure but that they need a few prussian methods to curb their ebullient and seditious emotions it should be noted here in relation to his views on people of celtic background is that before he even found out that he himself was welsh one of his closest lifelong friends roberty howard was irish in the present age of limitation of growth among the literate and cultivated and concomitant unlimited multiplication of the inferior ignorant and unfit is certainly something about which we may be alarmed it is rapidly producing a race of lower and lower level not really extinguishing civilization but retarding it and injuring it seriously the cause of course is dominantly economic if it requires more money than any high-grade man is likely to possess to rear five or ten children in a manner suitable to a high-grade man's children who can expect him to have that many can anyone be expected to rear a brood of children which he cannot educate to his own level on the other hand the inferior have no level to maintain they spawn like rabbits and have no motive to not do so the triumph of nature over northern ignorance the northern bigot with false zeal inflamed the virtue of the africa race proclaimed declared the blacks his brothers and his peers and at their slavery shed fraternal tears distorted for his cause the holy word and deemed himself commanded by the lord to draw his sword whatever the cost may be and set the sons of ethiopia free it is ever the part of the exemplary citizen to sustain with equanimity his share in the production of the coming generation a responsibility so shirked by some that the foreigners are likely to engulf us in but a few years unless checked by legislation and the ku klux klan of course they can't let inwards use the beach at a southern resort can you imagine sensitive persons bathing next to a pack of greasy chimpanzees the only thing that makes life endurable where blacks abound is the jim crow principle and i wish they'd apply it in new york both to inwards and to the more asiatic types of puffy rat-faced jew either stone out of sight or kill him off anything so that a white man may walk the streets without shuddering and nausea one night lovecraft was dining at lillian clark's house whose maid delilah was black and after clark complimented delilah in front of him lovecraft joked to clark at her expense saying that she certainly is a valuable n-word and ought to bring a good 900 or 1000 in any fair market north of savannah i wish i could present you with the deed of sale to such a prime piece of property for christmas but these pesky abolitionists have wrought havoc with the trade upon learning that his friend james morton had recently slept with a black woman lovecraft stood up and yelled at him any white man who would do such a thing ought to have the n-word branded on his forehead i hardly wonder that my racial ideas seem bigoted to one born and reared in the vicinity of cosmopolitan new york but you may better understand my repulsion to the jew when i tell you that until i was 14 years old i do not believe i ever spoke to one or saw one knowingly what i was really laughing at was not boaz himself whom i freely gave a place among the first-rate anthropologists but the naive way in which all n-word lovers turn to him first of all when trying to scrape up a background of scientific support he is the only first-rate anthropologist to overlook the obvious primitiveness of the n-word and the australoid hence the equalitarian utopians have to play him up for all he's worth and forget the great bulk of outstanding european opinion orientals must be kept in their native east till the fall of the white race sooner or later the great japanese war will take place during which i think the virtual destruction of japan will have to be effaced in the interest of european safety the more numerous chinese are a menace of the still more distant future they will probably be the exterminators of caucasian civilization for their numbers are amazing but that is all too far ahead for consideration today and of course the new york [ __ ] problem is beyond calm mention the city is befouled and accursed i came away with it with a sense of having been tainted by contact and longed for some solvent of oblivion to wash it out how in heaven's name sensitive and self-respecting white men can continue to live in this stew of asiatic filth which the region has become with marks and reminders of the locust plague on every hand is absolutely beyond me there is here a grave and mighty problem beside which the n-word problem is a jest for in this case we have to not deal with child-like half-gorillas but with yellow soulless enemies whose repulsive carcasses house dangerous mental machines warped culturelessly in the single direction of material gain at any cost rat-faced beady-eyed oriental mongrels twisted rat like vermin from the ghetto the aryans in india were too late in establishing their color-based caste system so that today the culture of the hindu is probably the most thoroughly repulsive on our planet the more one learns about india the more one wants to vomit aside from a few profound minds the indian people represent such an abyss of degeneracy that extirpation and fumigation would seem to be about the only way to make hindu stand fit for decent people to inhabit there is no more sense in trying to prove an n word a white man's equal than to try and prove a neanderthal man's corresponding equality the only reason that sentimental fanatics have not tried to pull over the latter piece of folly is that all the neanderthals are extinct my god what a filthy dump i thought providence had slums and antique bostonium as well but damn me if i ever saw anything like the sprawling sty atmosphere of new york's lower east side we walked at my suggestion in the middle of the street for contact with the heterogeneous sidewalk denizens spilled out of their bulging brick kennels as if by a spawning beyond the capacity of the places was not by any means to be sought at times though we struck particularly deserted areas these swine have instinctive swarming movements no doubt which no ordinary biologist can fathom god knows what they were jew italian separate or mixed with possible residual irish and exotic hints of the far east a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect repellent to eye nose and imagination would the heaven a kindly gust of cyanaging coils affixiate the whole gigantic abortion in the misery and clean out the place i'd like to see hitler wipe greater new york clean with poison gas giving masks to the few remaining people of aryan culture even if of semitic ancestry the place needs a good fumigation and a fresh start if harlem didn't get any masks i'd shed no tears and the same goes for the [ __ ] slums the facts are plain i'm no bigot [Music] that's certainly not everything far from it but i'll stop there one last thing i'd like to address though a common fact that people jumped at to defend him was that his wife sonya green was jewish which must prove that his views turned around or that he wasn't actually racist or that he wasn't that bad but they were married on march the 3rd of 1924 and as you can tell most of the instances listed here come around or after that period of his life yes there are statements made shortly before his death regretting the extent of the vitriol of his youth but his views did not change just his attitudes about how he presented them softened with time there was never a point in his life where lovecraft was not a hateful creature and he recognized this within himself when married and living in new york together his wife at one point pushed against his views and years later had this to say on him although he once said he loved new york and that henceforth it would be his adopted state i soon learned that he hated it and all its alien hordes when i protested that i too was one of them he'd tell me i no longer belong to these mongrels you are now mrs h.p lovecraft of 598 angle street providence rhode island in his mind his attachment to her lifted her above what he perceived as her inferior genetics and in a very abusive fashion he tried to force her to abandon her previous friends and family in life to become more like him she said at one point that soon after we were married he told me that whenever we have company he would appreciate it if there were aryans in the majority she also at one other point reflected on the way that he viewed her and her family by saying he admired hitler and read mineconf as soon as it was released and translated into english i believe he was very much influenced by that book it may have had much to do in influencing further his hate not only for jews but for all minorities which he made little effort to conceal to be a member of a pure-blooded race he insisted ought to be the greatest achievement in life yet the greatest anthropologists have assured us that there is no such race in existence to my ears a great deal of people who are arguing in defense of lovecraft are using an updated form of the exact same dated and biased argument that august derleth used 60 years ago when he said it so happened that many of the antiquarian haunts in providence and the vicinity were despoiled by foreigners who moved into the old houses these foreigners were of various nationalities and races and lovecraft disliked them all impartially his dislike however did not represent racial prejudice but was rather a symptom of that fear of and dislike for change which represents to all of us the passing of the familiar and is in fact symptomatic more deeply of a basic insecurity which is associated with the passing of familiar aspects of life which have come to signify security for those of us who are prone to such reactions it is only natural in the face of the facts about his sheltered early life that lovecraft's sense of security would be bound up with all aspects of that life with old things houses people books past time just as it was one reason that we know so much about how lovecraft felt on issues and why this video is even able to exist is because of the sheer amount of resources written by him that survives today which isn't the case with a lot of famous individuals he would frequently get into arguments with friends who would press him on his beliefs and they would hold debates over long periods of time in the form of letters many of which are still around today quickly becoming collector's items after his passing for his few fans that would carry on his legacy it is believed that he wrote over 100 000 letters in his lifetime and while a large amount of them are no longer with us a great deal of them are and because of these arguments that he held in them we see him reinforcing the same beliefs over and over again and know exactly how he felt on a lot of issues which is really beneficial when trying to understand him as a person he never really wrote a full-on autobiography but this is practically the next best thing some would argue that it's even better because in these letters he's not really speaking to an audience he's not really trying to make himself look better these are pure unfiltered lovecraft we also have a lot of historical articles that survive today from people who knew lovecraft and spoke of him and their relationship with him and while he was not actually famous in his time because of this and how many people wrote about him his life is pretty much mapped out very clearly for historians with this you can even piece together the feeling of his last few days before his passing and i think they are fascinating there exists a series of western union telegrams from one of lovecraft's ants addressed to robert barlow letter on the way telling of howard in hospital that letter in question i believe reads dear bobby i have intended to write a gay little letter long since but now i am writing a sad little letter telling you that howard is pitifully ill and weak i think you can imagine how frantic i am but i try to keep a good cheer in his presence wednesday march 10th the doctor said it would be better he'd go to the hospital and me meet and with my inborn optimism i was looking for miracles but they have not come and the deer fellow grows weaker and weaker nothing can be retained in his stomach all the pain and trouble seems to come from intestinal and stomach distress needless to say he has been pathetically patient and philosophical through it all howard gave me your letters to answer days ago but i simply couldn't write you are a dear good friend and i love and appreciate you because you love and appreciate my beloved nephew i'm going to spend this afternoon at the hospital as i have each day howard is at the same hospital he courageously took me to just a year ago he was a bork of strength to me and i hope i can do as much for him hastily but most sincerely your friend annie gamwell the next telegram reads howard died this morning nothing to do thanks and at last one final letter follows from her it's hard for me to think these days but i found your address and meant to tell you the sad news that my beloved nephew howard p lovecraft died yesterday he has suffered very much the past month and on april 10th the doctors decided that the hospital was the best place but it seems nothing could save the deer precious howard needless to say i am brokenhearted about it he was my entire family and such an available and wise companion i remember you have been a most kind friend of howard our little service is at noon thursday at the underkeeper's chapel 187 beaufort street and the funeral at swan point cemetery in our family lot hoping all is well with you and your household sincerely any ep gamwell out of all letters associated with lovecraft this one is probably the most important and he isn't even the writer of it subjected to all friends of the late howard phillips lovecraft it is an announcement that came two years after his death telling that his collected fiction works will be published for the first time in one single volume titled the outsider and others copies of this book go for thousands of dollars today and if this had never been published we would not be here at this moment talking about him and it isn't just because this work went on to be the initial spark behind public interest in lovecraft but also this book is largely regarded as the reason that h.p lovecraft's body of work is considered to be part of the public domain you see lovecraft's will named robert barlow as his literary executor which is a position that handles an author's estate but in this time really had no actual legal standing lovecraft also before his death while he was in poor health gave several stories to august derlith to be published should anything happen to him on top of that his aunt annie gamwell believed that she as his closest living relative owned the rights to his work after his passing and since they had never been officially divorced the question was there if sonja green possibly owned his stories as his wife which was even more confusing for her because she thought they had been divorced for years but lovecraft lied to her and never actually filed the paperwork meaning that her third marriage that she was currently in was not legally valid then when gamwell died soon after she left the rights to lovecraft's body of work that might not have even been hers to her friend edna lewis and lovecraft's second cousin ethel phillips morish not only this but lovecraft also encouraged others to write stories set within his fictional universe meaning that many of his tales were connected to other works by many different authors some of which knew him personally and some who didn't and this resulted in a legal dispute of lovecraft's own making involving so many parties of questionable claim to lovecraft stories that it resulted in his work eventually just belonging to all of us which i think would probably have made him happy and is arguably one of the reasons he has stayed around this long and remained culturally relevant as people continue to put their own spin on his ideas over a hundred years later after some of them were put to paper because they're legally free to do so his fiction is not only uniquely original but also extremely easy to get a hold of and read because anyone can print it i've said this before but in my mind lovecraft's body of work and the countless pieces of art that have sprung from inspiration of his is one of the best arguments for the public domain's existence the world would be a better and more creative place if everything entered the public domain after a five or so year period of being created or maybe even as soon as it was created i don't know copyright is a dumb and harmful thing that we've put up with for too long and has resulted in the superhero disney hellscape that we have found ourselves trapped in but that's another tangent for another day and as far as all this goes with everything that we've said so far i stand in a weird place of confliction when it comes to lovecraft he has been an important influence on my life for years now and like many i have always seen myself in both aspects of him and his work as of this month i have now been doing this for three years and this weird project that has taken me a lot further than i thought it ever would has become a strange part of my existence this pandemic has been the worst year of my life but has also weirdly held some personally very high moments for me it's been a mixture of moments that i'll remember for the rest of my life as well as some of the worst days that i've ever had i've just had stretches of days this year that have consisted of a sense of pure unadulterated dread that has made it impossible to function for weeks and sometimes months at a time in this period my work has not been as prolific as it once was the space in between my videos has only grown with time which is something that immensely frustrates me and is something that i'm always trying to get better at which somehow makes it even longer for videos to come out it's just that since the channel took off i've been hit with this feeling of a compulsion to make things as good as i can and a responsibility to not disappoint anyone i want to deliver something of quality and while that's a good thing over time it has also made me very tired in general this past year i've been a little upset and agitated a lot of the time i feel myself getting more and more worn down the longer i work on things and i've been in this constant state of weird burnout since late 2019 i can't find a way out of it i don't enjoy things like i once did and i find it difficult to focus on things and this isn't unusual for me i've always been the type of person to dive into a project to an unhealthy degree before this i did that with comics and with writing which is funny enough what led me to do in youtube this isn't something that i ever thought i would be doing as a job i never imagined myself in this position and it's been a little bit strange to be adjusted to it you see i went to school for mass communications because i wanted to make movies but that was before i learned that making movies was less like making movies and more like moving heavy stuff around in the sun all day which nobody wants to do so i became a video editor but i quickly learned more often than not that being a video editor is less like a creative position and more like a position where you sit next to someone who is in a creative job telling you what to do because they don't know how to run the software and i found that to be miserable but through all of this i realized i didn't want to make movies and i didn't want to edit television shows what i really wanted to do was hidden in that in that i really wanted to tell stories and i can't really tell you why but comics seemed like the logical thing to do there so that's what i pursued but i didn't know how to draw and i certainly didn't have the money to pay someone to draw for me so i had to teach myself cut to a couple of years later and i have several pitches put together and i'm desperately trying to get anyone who is anyone to look at my comics i once drove over five hours for just a few minutes of time with robert kirkman the creator of the walking dead to get him to look at some of my work at an event that he was hosting i was desperate and so around this time i'm at this comic convention and i see sitting over in the corner legendary batman artist neil adams he's just sitting at his table and there's nobody there so i go up and talk to him and you've got to keep in mind that this is somebody that i've looked up to for a very long time and so i walk up to him and he looks up at me and he says hi and i said hey and then i just sort of stand there awkwardly for a few seconds while he looks at me and i eventually just say how are you doing and he gets this look on his face and he looks at me and he's like is that the best question you've got for me and in that moment i panic i've looked up to neil adams for years i've loved his art and i've wanted to draw like he could and now he's wanting a better question for me that i just don't have and my mind goes blank and i can't think and the first thing that pops in my head is well what do you think of this and i reach for my phone in my pocket and he goes oh my god i will pay you 100 in cash to keep that thing in your pocket and i'm kind of taken aback and that makes me a little mad and i said well at this point i'd rather just show you and he goes fine so he tells me to take a seat beside him and so i do and he's looking at this page of a comic pitch that i've put together and he sits there for 45 minutes and talks about how bad at art i am and he completely destroys me he doesn't hold back at all i won't go into any details about it but at one point he points to one of the panels and says see this one could have been 300 better if you just tried and that experience was so bad that it made me never want to make comics again i got home from that trip and i packed up my pens and i stopped making art for a while i just got up every morning and went to my job every day i just continued to exist and in that time i got really depressed i'm happiest when i'm making things and even though i worked at a semi-creative job i felt kind of empty and in that time i started watching a lot of youtube and i found a lot of creators that i enjoyed and i thought that might be a fun way to express myself that might be something that i could do once or twice and see how i like it and i just kept going so here we are today before i move on though i want to say that i hold no hard feelings against neil adams for what he did or what he said to me or how he behaved in fact i'm thankful because he was right because for all the joy that it brought me trying to pursue a career in comics would have been really tough and i doubt i would have actually ever gotten to the point where i was financially stable or successful in that regard and i didn't recognize it at the time and i didn't see it this way but years later i think he was kind of trying to save me from that because comics are hard they eat people alive i did a whole two-part series on that last year and to be honest i'm really thankful for what he did if anything that encounter got me creatively to where i am today and showed me where my priorities should be and the things that i make because like i said i wanted to tell stories i didn't want to draw but it's cool that i'm able to do that now and so with my own work with that kind of hyper focus that i was talking about that leads me to burnout is kind of how my mind operates when i'm working when i'm in that flow state is when my best material gets made but i also recognize that it's not good for me it is something that i'm always trying to get better at but i say all of this to get to the point that i always reach this state of not being able to work as well as i could have had i pace myself more and in this past year when i got to those places i found myself watching castle freak a lot of the time as well as reading lovecraft's work it became kind of a comfort for me in february of 2020 i had roughly two and a half thousand subscribers and by the end of april i had over a hundred thousand and in that period there came a lot of serious life adjustments for me both because of the channel and because of outside circumstances happening in the world it felt like everything was crashing and burning around me while simultaneously parts of my life were becoming pretty good both the external struggles with the pandemic and the internal anxiety that i experienced with the channel growing both brought their own problems they each had their own unique forms of stress and dealing with them kinda gave me whiplash i'm really lucky that the videos took off when they did because before this i was a substitute teacher and i wouldn't have been able to continue doing that because soon after the school's closed it would have been a really bad situation for me economically and to me it's a little bit eerie how things worked out there are parts of this job that i know i'm not traditionally the best at i've always been an intensely private person and i've never been very good at being social in person let alone online i've always struggled making friends and keeping those connections has always been very difficult for me as well and i really hate social media every time i tweet i'm filled with this overwhelming anxiety to where it makes me hate opening the app i like to take my time with projects to where they feel emotionally right for me in person i am very introverted and social situations have always exhausted me which i get the feeling is not the most amazing combo for this line of work part of me never expected this to go beyond a couple hundred regular viewers when i started this and with that in mind it is difficult to describe the particular kind of nausea when something that you made in just a couple of days that you thought would flop and that maybe one or two hundred people in total would ever watch goes on to get over 5 million views possibly even 6 million soon and not only that but then thousands of that 5 million then go on to watch everything that you've ever made before that things that you made when you thought you had a sense of anonymity i still say what i want to about people or art or world events i feel like that's an appeal of my videos but there's definitely a way to do that without ruining someone's day if they heard you say those things i still say what i want to but my tone is definitely different now and i take extra care in the words that i use back then i had the freedom of knowing that whatever i said would be between me and a few other hundred people that it would be our little secret and that no one who was the subject of a video would ever know that they were featured in that video that they would never know what i said about them which certainly isn't the case anymore there are several videos that i want to make and eventually will make that the people who are the subject of those videos will know that that video exists and will know what i said about them if they watch it or if someone tells them about it and that's a really odd feeling as a creator to sit with i won't say any names but i know for a fact that there are a few people who have been featured on the channel who have seen the video about them that i made or at least know that it exists most of which were from this time period from before the channel took off when i only had a few hundred subscribers where i felt like i could be free to say whatever i wanted however i wanted and while most people have been pretty chill i know of one person who was really not happy with the video existing and another group of people who own a certain dead creator's rights sent me some pretty angry emails that eventually didn't go anywhere it's a funny thing what you'll say when you think you have a sense of anonymity and how harsh your words can be when you think you can get away with it what i experienced there in some small way is probably a little similar to how lovecraft would feel if he knew that his private letters were being read over the internet a hundred years later to a whole bunch of strangers not that my videos were ever private but when you have such a small audience you consider less how harsh you are with your words and how they might impact somebody because in your mind not that many people will ever see this certainly not the person that you're talking about it's just something that you don't really consider and in very insular groups like the one that lovecraft found himself to be a member of venting about cathartic ideas can quickly turn into hateful ones what starts off as a joke or opinion about a person's work or a person or group of people can quickly transform into a common belief about them in reading his letters some of his correspondences are not all that different from echo chambers on the internet today with a sense of invisibleness you feel as if you can be free to say anything that you want in any tone that you feel at least in my case that's how it was when i first started this i thought so little of this project's potential to reach people that i didn't even bother to come up with a name for it after a few days of not being able to think of anything i just took one from a book it reminds me of a time i was in college i was in this fiction writing class and i submitted a story that i was really proud of and a few days go by and i get this email from my professor that i expect to be my grade and when i open it it's an audio file and the subject says listen to this so i click on it and the voice of my professor comes out of my computer and says zayn there's just so many problems with this story that it would save us both time if i just said them out loud instead of writing them all down that email destroyed me i didn't leave the house for four days i missed almost an entire week of class because something that i made and that i cared about had been annihilated to that degree in a critique and that was just between me and one other person and at the time admittedly i was much more sensitive than i am now to that kind of thing but even so i couldn't imagine what that same instance must feel like between two complete strangers in a public forum like youtube where anyone and everyone can watch and respond to and if there's anyone whose work has been featured on the channel and was made to feel that way because of something that i said i would be really regretful of that i've always been the type of person to try very hard at my work to try and make the best possible thing that i could that being said like lovecraft and like every other creative person on the face of the planet dead or alive at the heart of that there's a bit of an insecurity a feeling that what i make is not very good this feeling of insecurity even ties into the performance of videos today because when one of them doesn't do that well i have an overwhelming sense of relief that essentially equates to thank god not that many people found out i was an idiot today and all of this is not to say that i'm not happy with how things turned out i very much am and i'm extremely thankful that i'm able to do this every day of my life making videos is the first thing that i've ever had that felt really right for me it's the first place that i felt like i belonged it's the first time that i felt creatively fulfilled i'm extremely fortunate in the situation that i'm in and i don't want to sound like i'm complaining or that i'm even upset at all because all in all i'm having a good time here i'm really just trying to convey my own mental state and how that has evolved over the past year or so because my feelings on life have been a series of contradictions and emotionally i've kind of been all over the place but it's something that i'm always trying to work on i don't want you to worry about me because i really am fine and i'm going to be fine my biggest fear here is coming across as the mortifying ordeal of being known meme it's just that when suddenly everything you say publicly at least in this format is almost guaranteed to be seen by 100 000 people it changes your perspective a bit on how you should phrase things and conduct yourself when talking about things that are important to other people the channel becoming popular while everyone was stuck in doors has had some weird effects on my personal life as well a lot of people that i know in the real world don't even know that i do this because i've had the benefit of not having to go to social events where i would run into them and talk about what i do a few weeks after the channel gained popularity an acquaintance of mine actually sent me a link to the nightmare artist and i've since had several encounters with strangers who have seen that particular video i didn't tell many people that i made videos before the pandemic because i liked it being my thing that i worked in my free time for myself i did it for me and i liked that people didn't know about it there are a few people who i see on a fairly regular basis who think i work for a pottery company and my own grandmother doesn't even know that i do this or will even know that she's mentioned here unless one of you tells her it's been yet another adjustment that i've had to make within my life this summer as things began to open up more and i suddenly found myself having to figure out ways to talk about what i do i've had the benefit this whole time of not having to do that my internet self and my real world self are finally having to meet and in that regard i thought it was a good time for you to meet more of me as well and with that in mind if you've ever had any questions for me i'd like you to write them under the pinned comment below and i'll answer some of them next time i was always a shy kid at recess i would walk laps by myself or sit to the side and read i would be generally aggravated or annoyed if someone bothered me while i was doing this and i guess to a degree i've never changed most people thought i was pretty odd for the first 20 or so years of my life and i imagine a great deal still do when i would go to amusement parks as a kid i would just sit on rides completely stone-faced expressionless no emotion and people would think i was having a bad time but i really wasn't and i guess in that regard i've always been kind of difficult to read emotionally and i really see a lot of myself in that young lovecraft out in that field gazing at the stars i wasn't in a field and i wasn't gazing at the stars but that kid was me i was weird i was different i owned a yu-gi-oh duel disc i had interests that in that time would label me as an outsider and as i grew up that changed in me into resentment and bitterness and for a time it made me mean it's really hard for me to say this but for a few years in middle school and early high school i was definitely a bully i was like that until people started getting taller than me and i learned a few things about life and how to treat people and in those few years i took that out on people i didn't like myself i didn't like the way that i behaved i didn't like the things that i thought were interesting because other people laughed at me for them i was hurt and i needed a way to vent that i was an angry little kid and i didn't treat my friends right i didn't treat my brother right and in reflection i have a lot of embarrassment and shame over that period of my life and like it's middle school i get it people are weird in that time and kids in general are pretty mean but it does really upset me that there are probably some people who look back on that period of their life and see me as the antagonist of their story or at least an antagonist it's something that i'm extremely sorry for and ashamed at the way that i behaved and informs every single day how i interact with people and i don't think that any of lovecraft's views were good obviously but because of my own experiences i feel a great sadness when i think of him and i feel empathy because i can see that angry child in him and in my own way i know how he got there how under the right circumstances anyone could get there if the right influences existed within their life it's kind of what i meant when i said that studying and understanding lovecraft ultimately compels you to reflect on your own past and how you've treated others it makes you think about how you've lived your life and consider the decisions that you've made and maybe that's one of the secrets to his longevity as a creator because in discussing his work we all ultimately end up talking about ourselves and how his art relates to us and how we relate to each other about how his art and who he was relates to who we are as people and maybe that's the secret to all good art and stories is that in talking about it we ultimately end up talking about what it means to be human it reminds us of who we are and demands us that we do better one of my main philosophies in video making is to try and never waste anyone's time i understand that i make very long videos but i try to make them as dense as they can be even though my videos are long i like to give people a good time in as short a time as possible but once a year i like to make a video kind of like this that's a little bit looser in style that i consider kind of a hangout video and i know this will probably end up being the longest video i've made on the channel so far but this time getting across my ideas on what i want to say has been a little bit difficult which is unusual for me words are usually my thing but i'm struck with this idea that there are so many things that one could say about hp lovecraft that i don't know what i want to say on him and the longer that i sit here with him the more complicated my feelings are about him and it becomes harder to express what i want to say the isolation i felt in the past year has been at times too much to handle there were some days where i felt that my mind had been permanently altered by the intensity of it all and i've only recently started to feel like my old self again things like connecting with new friends on discord has really helped me with that because there was a lot of time in the past year where i just didn't feel like me i didn't feel good and that's starting to change for a while basic tasks became very difficult for me to do i only recently finished reading a novel for the first time since all of this began and i used to read all of the time i still read of course but it was almost exclusively short stories and comics novels became very very difficult for me to keep my mind on in this time i even started working on a video about isolation as a theme in horror movies but this eventually fell apart in that time it helped me though it helped me to see people who were going through a similar thing that i was going through to see people who were feeling what i was feeling and in this i think it is both intrinsically connected while totally irrelevant to why i revisited castle freak so many times in the past year and also why lovecraft was on my mind so often through all of this in each of his stories i see someone trying to fight the loneliness that he thought was his life trying to express himself trying to be understood by another person which is what we all ultimately want we all want to be understood we want to be seen we want to connect with others we want to feel important in other people's lives and in his stories i see this and see him trying to reconcile this feeling of being different from other people and not fitting in and not being understood and feeling alone i see someone who is inherently sad and i feel empathy for them and a connection to them another person who i felt was going through a similar thing that i was i hate to admit this but ever since i read his private letters to friends when i was in college i've thought that i've had a lot in common at least on an emotional level with lovecraft one that endeared me to him early on more than i already had been by reading his work and attached me to him more than i normally would be with an author one 1934 letter reads in those middle years the poor devil was such a nervous wreck that he hated to speak to any human being or even to see or be seen by one and every trip to town was an ordeal in those days i could hardly bear to see or speak to anyone and liked to shut out the world by pulling down the dark shades and using artificial light anyone who knows me knows that i will shut down and do this all the time oftentimes disappearing for weeks without a word working on projects by myself in my home not speaking to or seeing anyone for days at a time and while i don't hate people at all or hate to see people or to be seen by people it is often a tiring experience it's something i honestly kind of hate about myself but is the reality of the situation of who i am and how i'm emotionally built and how i prefer to work it's just difficult for me to get out and to see people and be around people most of the time being social has always been an emotionally taxing event and i'm unfortunately famous for texting right before something i had agreed to go to when i was in a better mood saying that i'm not feeling great or that something came up i think part of understanding lovecraft comes with an inevitable confrontation about aspects that you dislike or outright hate within yourself that you recognize within him in trying to understand lovecraft you two are forced to gaze into the mirror and reflect on your own beliefs and how you fit within the world around you it's a hard thing to admit when you're wrong hard to self-reflect and say that we've caused harm in our past and even harder to determine to try and make a difference and try to do better in our future to try and right the wrongs that we have done or if that can't be done at least do no more harm than what's already been done it's hard to contribute it can be difficult to be a positive force and not fall into a wellspring of negativity it is easier to rebuke the world double down on our insecurities and direct them at others to make scapegoats out of marginalized people who are only trying to live with the same decency dignity and freedom of unbridled life that is the goal of any person it is easier to say that we are monsters because of the way that the world has treated us rather than try to be better the very essence of lovecraft and his work and creation is formed out of hatred manifested from fear but hatred nonetheless oftentimes externalized based on internalized feelings or unfounded preconceptions even the very basis of his universe is founded in the fear of minorities taking over society as he often described the cthulhu mythos origins as follows all my stories unconnected as they may be are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who in practicing black magic lost their foothold and were expelled yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again and lovecraft knew this about himself this was clear to him it was not something he was oblivious to that is evident in the way that he talked about himself and his beliefs and how he felt when people looked at him he felt as if time had passed him by that he was not of this world any longer that his beliefs would be more accepted maybe in another time and place in history a time that to him acted more rationally but from his perspective in the culture of the time that he was born into he was looked upon as if he were a freak and in that i think it is no coincidence that the outsider was written during the time period when he was first being exposed to new york first having to confront people that he felt were not like him and through that i feel an incredible sadness when i read this line from the outsider when the creature views itself in the mirror and for a moment fully takes in what others see when they look at him i beheld in full frightful vividness the inconceivable indescribable and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives god knows it is not of this world or no longer of this world in a way we are still viewing him like this exactly 100 years after he put these words to paper in the spring of 1921. he was keenly aware that that was how others saw him in the corresponding scene in castle freak he doesn't just touch the mirror in horror he doesn't stand there in a sudden state of extreme despair at realizing what he is in relation to the world around him he destroys it takes his chains and smashes it to pieces in anguish rather than bare look at who he is for a moment longer the very act of self-reflection is in this moment too much to handle and does not change who he is he would rather destroy the mirror and stew in his darkness than embrace change accept what had happened to him and try to move past it and live and love with others in the light lovecraft despised the world around him because it was a world that he was forced to live within that he viewed as a place that did not welcome him or his extremist views or concerns but it only didn't welcome him because of his own doing because of the way that he behaved and conducted himself it's just like when his neighbor who knew him as a child said that despite feeling hideous he looked more or less normal the only reason he believed himself to be an outsider is based on his own actions beliefs insecurities and preconceptions he felt as if he were from a different time early on in his life and from there believed that he continued to watch as the world marched past him leaving him and his ideologies behind and he took those feelings and he turned them into monsters they were so powerful they could eat the world in a moment if they so chose to do so monsters so great that humanity in comparison was inconsequential monsters that dwarfed everything else and had legions devoted to them the very act of creating cthulhu was one of internalized self-reflection and hatred realizing who he was and how he wanted to feel compared to the world around him how he wanted people to feel because of the way they had treated him he wanted others to feel as inconsequential as he did as useless and as broken i'm not the first nor will i be the last to talk about the contradiction of liking lovecraft's fiction while also trying to understand how that could have come from someone who thought the way that he did beyond doubt there is something that draws people who feel as if they've never fit in to his work a great deal of which lovecraft himself would have no doubt hated in his day there are things that he said in his stories that have resonated deep within me much more so than almost anything i've ever come across before and a part of me even hates myself for that i hate that one of my literary idols was a pro-eugenics genocidal fascist who often cheered on the deaths of millions of people i mean what do you do with that it's just something rotten that sits inside of me and i don't know how to handle it it has sat inside me for a long time and has only intensified within the past several weeks the longer i've had to exist constantly in the same space as his ideas day after day something i think a lot about is that i wish he had lived to see the end of world war ii i wonder if seeing how that played out in reality would have changed his mind much by the last two years of his life before his passing in 1937 he was horrified by the events that were happening on the global stage and did denounce his previous ties to hitler and the nazi movement and in that time you see a major shift in his political views as well as he became much more of a socialist and i often wonder what an h.p lovecraft in the 40s 50s 60s and maybe even the 70s would have looked like had he lived i think him dying when he did was tragic because he had so much more to give in his work he only got better with time and seeing that character progression in him as he tried to possibly move past his old self could have been amazing to be honest with you after all this time i don't really know how i feel on hp lovecraft in the time since i started this video i have felt both awe and total revulsion of things that i have learned or read i have felt great emotions while working on this and even though it's been two months now of me thinking of him constantly while i'm awake and often while i'm asleep formulating my final thoughts on him here when it's all come to an end is still difficult for me to do part of me thinks he's too complicated of a subject to come to a conclusion on too complicated to encapsulate in a single project i mean in all this time i've hardly mentioned any of his actual stories i get the feeling that he is just something that exists that you experience and that the more you learn the harder it is to justify your feelings about him and his work but that in that process you learn more about yourself and how you view and interact with art trying to come to terms that something so incredibly hateful could have at the same time possessed such a beautiful mind but maybe that is why his work lives on in the minds and dreams of those today why he continues to fascinate people and inspire great works of art long after he has left us a man who is a series of interconnected contradictions who understood that within himself and tried to reconcile it through his art that he most accurately summed up for both himself and for us when he spoke through the lips of the monstrous narrating ghoul i know the light is not for me save that of the moon over the rock tombs nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts yet in my new wildness and freedom i almost welcome the bitterness of alienage i know always that i am an outsider a stranger in this century and among those who are still men [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music]

Channel: In Praise of Shadows

Views: 208,542

Keywords:

Id: FUFnNx0fSm0

Length: 108min 1sec (6481 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LemonDemon7]

One of the best horror channels on youtube, I missed this one

[u/[deleted]]

That first quote from the "just fact" sections sounds disturbingly familiar.