Your channel is fabulous and is great for beginners and experts in the lovecraftian alike. Also, you helped me begin my obsession with lovecraftian things. Good luck onwards.
ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oFgWy2ifX5s.html This video about Japanese hermits shows that Lovecraft was an early sufferer of this condition. Modern people are just catching up to his view point that conforming is bad for the soul(for lack of a better term)
Hi all. I'm back in Zurich with my equipment, books and high speed internet. The videos promised for January will be on time. Next upload will be: "What Makes Something Lovecraftian" (about 80% finished). Until then I'm trying a more relaxed style of vlogging that someone requested. It isn't fancy and isn't my usual style but... let's see how people like it. I hope everyone is well and I look forward to a great 2019!
@Brent Hui Hi Brent. Good observation. She really did a number on his confidence. I think this is why he often looks awkward in his posed photos. Regarding his letters... there are collected works published by the likes of Arkham House and Hippocampus Press. They are overpriced though. I didn't buy them. I instead spent a lot of time on google tracking snippets down.
@Brent Hui Those anthologies exist. But I'm not paying such an inflated price. If I bought them all (remember, Lovecraft wrote a TON of letters) I will not have money for my rum and my books and that's a deal-breaker.
I’m inclined to think that this story is about the being coming into a new realm through a ritual being carried out. Thinking of how Cthulhu and the ancient ones who are “not dead, but dreaming,” it seems the narrator is stuck in some sort of purgatory, unable to escape until the ritual is initiated, then breaks through the barrier-terrifying the humans who carried it out, and catching his own reflection at the end. Anyone else think this?
Hmmm but the castle has a forest in which the protagonist walks in sometimes. So it's like an underground forest? It's a trippy story to say the least.
This is one of my favourite Lovecraft stories. There's plenty of stories about vampires and zombies etc but Ghouls not so much. I love the word Ghoul. I like the line Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind. Great video Damien.
Cheers Paul. Yes, ghouls are hardly seen. Lovecraft's lines at the end of the Outsider are so quotable. "I know now that light is not for me, save for the moon over the rock tombs of Neb"... "I know always that I am an outsider, a stranger in this century and among those who are still men."
It's amazing to me, how few people who have read this amazing work by HP, cannot seem to grasp the idea that the main character is not climbing a castle tower. He is scaling up the inner walls of his very own family crypt or mausoleum.
I enjoyed this deep dive. The Outsider is great short story, and it helped me want to read more Lovecraft when I first went through it. I've read it a few times, and it's available in audio version all over the RU-vid. I like your take on how it can be viewed as an internal reflection from Lovecraft. I typically see it as an undead/zombie reanimating (for some unknown reason) in an ancient and very deep crypt. The "trees" blocking the outside world are roots, the "high tower" is the crumbled remnants of the crypt entrance, etc. It is pretty heavy handed, and you can see the end coming from about the middle of the tale. And yet, it's creepy to consider that this undead ghoul is sentient, yet doesn't understand it's own circumstances. At least not until the very end. And what happens to this sentient, well-read, undead monster after this tale? Are there others like it, shambling back to Not Life? How does such a thing happen? Why did it happen? Agreed on, 5 Elder Stars out of 5! Heh!
You ARE a real youtuber. I used to make videos when I was a kid, then I started going through various channels and got bored. But I keep comming back to yours, I keep listening to this format as it's the most basic but the most tolerable of them all. Whenever I see these highly edited animated hi-budget videos about Lovecraft, they're always containing lots of social justice bullshit. Keep up the good work!
Thanks bro, that's good to hear. I am glad people are liking this very simple format. Thankfully they are easy to make barring the time it takes to read/make notes. You know, as you said, many videos are highly polished, etc. but if I dare be so arrogant, the youtubers are typically not Lovecraft fans. Their channels are usually focused on more mainstream stuff and their info comes from 10 minutes on his Wiki page and of course the leftist Google New search results. I don't upload so often but I guarantee there is no sign of stopping and there is a plethora of video ideas. Have a great day!
Your interpretation reminds me of a couple of Harley Quinn quotes - " Normal's a setting on the dryer, people like us, we don't get normal", and I guess this story was Lovecraft's attempt to "Own that shit". Thanks for enabling automatic English captions by the way, it really helps people like me; Hard-of-Hearing guy.
Great, insightful, earnest review. I find nice parallels to "The dream quest of unknown Kadath": the interesting ghoul-character (who used to be human and still retained some of his human traits), as well as the perilous "climbing out of the Underworld" sequence. As you mentioned, the story does have a dream-cycle vibe to it, and it seems to enrich its atmosphere further. Cheers.
This one really got me... Especially when he talks of now I ride the night wind with the mocking friendly ghouls and play by day in the tombs of nephren ka... The light is not for me... Made me upset lol... But at least he belonged somewhere I guess... It made me feel. Sad for the beast... Brilliantly written!
Thank you. It is philosophic story and the philosophy is very simple - before going to meet others look at yourself, how do you look. Regretfully, that outsider had no notion of a mirror. His creators, jailers, custodians or others left him fantastically ignorant. Poor soul. Quite probably Lovecraft consciously or subconsciously had himself in mind?
This is one of my favorites. I had a conversation about The Outsider with other Lovecraft fan and told him how I as an autistic relate with the character and the emotions he's going through. When I jokingly said how Disney should make a movie of it, he told it reminded him of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Do you wanna know something funny? When I read the story for the first time, I thought the character is a woman because in Finnish, there's only one pronouns (hän) meaning both "he" and "she", and character's sex wasn't that clear.
Hey man, Happy New year! Well, I think you should take your time and post a video wherever are available. You are doing a great work spreading the Lovecraft, shit! I might say it your channel is the best Channel about Lovecraft and Cthulhu Mythos. Just Focus on Quality not Quantity.
Hi Bruno. Thanks for your comment. Obviously I will not desire any undermining the quality of videos. But doing something quick as well like this will add more variety I feel. Something positive. As the channel gets bigger, more requests arrive for different things. I like the challenge too.
Great video to launch 2019. Learning how Lovecraft's writings gets into other people's heads is the best way to see what was going on in his.// Also, there's a movie called 'The Endless' you may want to check out. I haven't seen any modern films able to grasp the Lovecraftian atmosphere as well. I found it on Netflix.
HPL is either understood and relatable, or a complete foreign weirdo. I don't think readers can fall into any other category (considering my observations). An acquired taste.
Just a thought for channel expansion: there are lots of painters out there whose themes overlap with Lovecraft's. You've made some videos on music, and paintings and art are another way to expand the channel for sure. Beksinski, Bocklin, Fuseli, etc.
Very interesting thought. I was in Prado Museum in Madrid and saw some very morbid paintings by Francisco Goya. I do know that Lovecraft occasionally name-dropped painters in his stories. Thanks for the suggestion, I have put it in my notepad.
@@ArkhamReporter Thats a very good point, Goyas etchings Los Caprices and his Cabinet Paintings and Black Paintings are perhaps more superstitious than cosmic, but terror abounds. I wonder what HP's favourite art period was..
@@MrRemorseless The black paintings were awesome. I especially recall the one of Saturn eating his sons. It was very morbid and the brush strokes were very emotional and imprecise. Very nice. I recall HPL mentioning Dore a few times in his stories. I assume that was Gustav Dore. If you want nightmare fuel check out the Polish painter Zdzislaw Beksinski.
I think the solud ground thing was a show of Non Euclidean Geometry. Basucally Space warps and acts very strange. Its a staple in his Cosmic Horror cos of how Mathematically and Logically so weird it is and how it makes no sense it makes people go insane. Which helps with the horror
I love this one it's one of my favorite HP Lovecraft stories (probably in the top 10 for me, possibly even in the top 5?). Funny you posted this today; I was watching some of your older videos last night and almost made a comment about 'The Outsider' on the one you were ranting about people that try to force SJW agenda into their Lovecraftian inspired fiction. This is the one example I can think of off the top of my head of a story written by HP that does touch on the 'the monster really isn't the villain" theme that you were talking about in that other video. In a sense you could say HP was ahead of his time by putting this theme in one of his stories even though it wasn't his typical subject matter...not to mention it's much better done here than any of the modern SJW nonsense. Maybe one could argue that those modern themes could be loosely inspired from this story? I'm not against the 'monster isn't really the bad guy" theme, when it's done right it can be an fascinating subject, but I do agree that trying to force this theme into pre-existing HP mythos is just a slap in the face of the source material. If people really need to put that theme in their work take this story as an example and do it tastefully without butchering the HP Lovecraft mythos and source material. Sorry if this was a bit of an off topic rant, thought it was worth mentioning though.
Thanks for watching my older videos. I sometimes feel new subscribers are missing the stuff when I only had like 10 people following. "The monster isn't the villain". I think that in The Outsider he still saw the monster as the villain. He saw an ideal society he wanted to be apart of (the protagonist climbing through the window to join the party) but could not join it. He was a freak. In the modern "mythos" stories the monsters are made sympathetic for political reasons. I truly believe that. The SJW doesn't like that Lovecraft held opinions incompatible with their ideology and therefore they try to subvert the source material and make it palatable to their audience. They WANT to butcher Lovecraft because they hate him. They feel happy about doing it. I don't do a lot of politically focused Lovecraft videos on my channel but believe me I read a lot of what leftists think and feel about him. I read their reviews of him, their articles. They truly get pleasure from butchering his stories, like they achieved some victory over a disgusting straight white conservative male.
@@ArkhamReporter Thanks for the response and making the vids. I was thinking about this more during the week, and what's interesting about most of HP's monsters to me is that they aren't necessarily 'evil,' they are just entities surviving their own realities and humanity is so insignificant to them that we are really just like an anthill on the side of the road you step on. This makes turning the monsters into 'sympathetic' characters just funny to me, and whoever is writing that really is missing the point of Lovecraft imo, but I do kinda see the line of thought where his monsters don't have to be 'evil,' per say, just entities doing their own thing. To me that makes them far scarier than Dracula or Freddy Kruger or any of the more typical horror monsters. Yeah I think most of the modern nonsense is all political. If you live in the US, you have this nonsense stuffed and crammed into every crevice of every thing you can think of, including literature. It's probably not much better in most other places. None of the claims against Lovecraft hold any water. The word 'negro' wasn't racist when HP was alive, or for a long time after; it meant the same thing as 'a black dude' in the context he is using it. Deep ones and his other monsters are based off of religions, myths, folklore, the Christian devil, etc., yet people can somehow still twist that into SJW nonsense. I can only think of two reasons why people would outcry Lovecraft as racist: either they haven't read any HP Lovecraft for themselves, and are only quoting what they heard in from other SJW's, or they simply don't have the reading ability to handle HP Lovecraft, but know how to skim through pages and spot 'choice words' they can use to fuel their own stupidity. They can't write as good as Lovecraft, maybe they can't even read good enough to understand Lovecraft, so they bash it instead, and now you have a literary genius that happened to be married to a Jewish lady being labeled an anti-semetic racist, and the masses are dumb enough to believe it. And I'm glad this channel doesn't get too political, but I think it's very important to bring in the modern leftist propaganda against him so it can be corrected. There are plenty of people out there that haven't read him yet, and if the only info being passed around about him is the SJW lies, all is deter people from reading great literature.
@@Dogmeat229 His entities are definitely apathetic to us. We are inconsequential to them. It is quite dehumanizing and shocking to us. I will be addressing this concept briefly in my upcoming video (it is taking longer than I thought to get done). This American political issue. It is an infected society. Honestly I truly believe you guys are in the middle of a civil war. Not with guns but with ideas. A culture war. Every week there is some new battle ground. This time it's the Catholic kids in MAGA hats and that Indian guy with his drum. It's all sore tiring and frankly it makes me want to not see your country. I know that clearly, obviously the majority of Americans I would get along with. That nation birthed HPL after all : ) But it is really tiring. I'm sadly quite addicted to monitoring what is happening over there politically and socially. The news, various youtube commentators. But it literally feels depressing to see it daily. These modern writers have an agenda to push. They use HPL's creations to do it because firstly they hate him and secondly they feel smug about using his works for their nauseating rhetoric. I avoid talking of politics here mostly because I think that many people are tired of it. As you said, it is every where. Some people are Lovecraft fans and to see the Mythos tarnished (as so much pop culture, literature and film is tarnished now politically) is just depressing. Thanks for your comment, I enjoyed reading it.
@@ArkhamReporter Sounds like a good topic for a video, I'll keep an eye out for it. I think you summed up the US political issue very well. The media seems to be what's really pushing things in this direction. They like to find every example of outrage they can, even if it isn't true, and push it nonstop for the 'trend of the week' for all the teenagers/teenage-minded people to go after. Fear-mongering sells, and the news corporations use this to their advantage. This isn't a new thing here, and it isn't only used by leftists- check out the "satanic panic" in the US during the 90's if you want to see the other side of US politics when they take over the media...there was even the famous case here of the "West Memphis Three" where three teenagers that liked metal and had long hair were wrongly sentenced for the murders of three children after the rightwing media was pushing nonstop Abrahamic/Jesus hype against pagans and metalheads...they did over 18 years in prison before being proven innocent and released...the real murderer(s) never got caught. Some things never change. Most parts of the US don't seem to be as bad as the media makes them out to be, unless it's before a major vote, but it probably depends on where you are. I can't blame you if you wouldn't want to visit here now, but most people and places aren't quite as politically fueled as the media likes to make them seem, although that may depend on where you are. But things are more tense in the last couple of years, again, I blame the media for this. Most people here just go about there lives, have their own political opinions, and just don't talk about them as much unless they know the people they are talking to aren't babies. Thinking about the attacks against HP stories again, maybe the best way to combat that is by having actual discussions about what those stories are really about? I re-reread The Dreams in the Witch House again recently after reading some SJW nonsense bashing it....like I said in another comment I suspect they either haven't read the story, or couldn't follow it. Maybe videos like this about Witch House, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and other stories that are commonly misinterpreted by SJWs would be a good idea? This way people that haven't/can't/don't want to read HP Lovecraft can still get an accurate understanding of the plot without the fake SJW nonsense tainting it.
I love this story, to me atleast its perfect and is what it is, a story about the other whether your a weird goblin looking thing or just the new guy in a new town.
I don't think he's actually a Lovecraftian ghoul, but rather some sort of sapient undead revenant. My opinion stems from his self-description when he sees himself in the mirror (which looks as if he's rotting rather than canine in cast) and his mention of "the friendly ghouls" as another sort of creatures at the end. He may have been created by some process akin to that at which the ancient Egyptians were aiming, because of the reference to Egypt at the end (and remember "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs." Anyway, this is one of my favorite Lovecraft tales.
It is an allegory of all lonely, not handsome/pretty persons unaware of the ways of the world yet attracted to its "beauty". A very sad story. Reminds me "The Beauty and the Beast", but the Beauty was good enough to see the Beast's soul behind ugliness.
One of my favorites. I might have to do a song or album based off this one, but dreams in the witch house is first before I do that one. Damien check your email from awhile back re: Psyclopean . I sent you a bunch of download codes for you and your subs
I honestly laughed at this comment. How on earth did you conclude my name would be George or Duke? Good names to be sure but really? Something in my voice is George-like?. My name is spelled with an "e" though. Damien.
Hey, not really relating to the content of the video, but have you read Daniel Clore's "Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon "? www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/about-hp-lovecraft/weird-words-lovecraftian-lexicon The description of it is intriguing, however, the price is equally daunting. If you have it, please let me know if it's worth buying - I'm a sucker for altiloquent and poetic English and this seems to combine Lovecraft and his trademark eloquence 'twixt a pair of delightful covers.
Man, it's kind of sad that poor Howard viewed himself so poorly. I'll agree, he had some interesting facial features, but that was just cause it was offset by such a stern demeanor. By no means was he not a handsome dude, though I totally get having moments where you feel you just don't fit in anywhere.
@@richardinwood272 from the text: "There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky". Further in the text the word castle is used. And the protagonist also mentions going outside, he knows its not all underground. You are wrong. Admit it and move on.
@@ArkhamReporter haha. Then why was he so horrified when he had scaled the tower and found himself at ground level? I came to your video to enjoy some clarity, yet I see you're such a big Lovecraftian that you empathise so much with the character that you fail to escape the 4th, nay, the 3rd wall even and place yourself in the position of reader. Yield, for it is you who are filled with wrongitude, sunny Jim.
@@richardinwood272 That's a lot of words but none help save you from your embarrassing attempt to belittle my knowledge of the Mythos. It's a castle, you said its not. Lovecraft (and I) say it is. Now go away, little puta.
@@ArkhamReporter Here are some ideas: Add words on your video (like a title or key points), try summarizing and using words to get to the point, speak better (improve speaking speed and tone). An ideal video about this topic should not be more than 6 minutes.
@@beatsbyturbo6233 You're utterly insane sir. Look at the ratio of likes to dislikes (only one dislike, probably you), look at the overwhelmingly positive feedback. People asked me to slow down when I talk (not everyone is fluent in English) and finally this is unscripted unlike every single other video I make. I think I know what I'm doing.
@@ArkhamReporter Man, I was just giving you advice, if you don't want it leave it, but you don't have to start swearing and giving me long paragraphs to read.
