Written by Vinnie C and Mohd Ayan
Edited by Bipasha Bhattacharya and Jairaj Vij
Illustrated by Parina Ramchandani
Few literary genres have left a mark as indelible in the minds of readers as Lovecraftian horror. It was established by H.P. Lovecraft (obviously), using the proliferation of the Cthulhu Mythos and furthered by similar-veined media and spanning the divisions of the screen, paper, paint and galore. This piece intends to dwell into Lovecraft’s brainchild genre and its recreation on screen than the person itself. It’s what he would’ve wanted, we are hoping.
The How, Why, and Where of it
Words, ink on paper, and the indelicate intricacy of it all provides a favourable quality of interpretational freedom to the reader and hence it becomes a tool often adhered to by prolific minds like King, Christie, and Poe across a myriad of genres, all towards the wonderment of the reader through the deviance of their own mind.
The so-esque fervour of an interpretationally fluid literary piece, as demonstrated in the works of Lovecraft, has this cerulean glamour that has enamoured readers for decades now. It is this fluidity of interpretation and individual ideation that grants this genre of Lovecraftian horror the acclaim that it so righteously deserves.
In addition to just that, fear must be a constant in every literary world that H.P. Lovecraft creates in order for cosmic horror or Lovecraftian horror to function. Both the protagonist and the readers suffer fear of the unknowable and the incomprehensible. The insignificance of humans in the context of the immense universe and everything it includes is deeply explored through Lovecraft's stories.
What would drive people insane after encountering Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, or Nyarlathotep was the most mortifyingly intriguing aspect of them, in the fact that it was not just the incomprehensibility of form, occurrence, and meaning within an otherwise definable world, but also the fact that no question presented to audiences is never outright answered, except if it serves the purpose of introducing further questions, blurred lines, and therefore Lovecraftian brownie points into the equation.
The combination of fluidity of interpretation, incomprehensibility, lethal force, and malignant disdain is what distinguishes true Lovecraftian horror. In my perspective, Annihilation gets extremely close to checking all of those boxes satisfactorily.
Annihilation
The book approaches "Annihilation" from a cosmological perspective while rendering some concepts metaphysically illegible. While the movie chooses to address humanity and our intrinsic urge to remould ourselves through self-inflicted harm.
Contextually, "Annihilation" is the same in both the book and the movie, but its particular foci are radically different. While the other is human-centric and deals with the notion of identity, one is about the inexplicable character of the universe and how inconsequential the ego is in light of that.
One aspect of the film that deviates from Lovecraftian horror is the fact that common weaponry might be used to destroy the beasts. They were really just animals with mixed genetics, not some monstrous creatures out of another dimension. Consider the alligator as an example. It is suggested, among other things, that it interbred with a shark. Why couldn't an alligator-shark hybrid be killed by a rifle if an alligator and a shark could? They wouldn't be resistant to weaponry because of that mixture in any way.
The universe's apathy and how pitiful humans are in comparison to it are hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror. For example, Azathoth (the central pantheon in Lovecraft's works) cannot distinguish right from wrong and only dreams, which turns the presentational idea into a disordered actuality. Azathoth is referred to simply as the "blind idiot God."
Conclusively, it must be noted that while Lovecraftian, by its very design, is not a rigid concept but more so overall fluid in its dynamics and the ideas it hints at presenting to audiences, and that interpretational redundancy is something the genre usually departs from, into something more interpretational vibrant and purple, which is unlike other popular genres often seen on pulp or projector.
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