Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [31]
O’Bannon discovered Lovecraft at the age of twelve when he read “The Colour Out of Space,” a story about a meteor falling to Earth sparking an ecological disaster. He was hooked immediately by the overheated imagery, the overblownness of it all. No writer he read had ever communicated that feeling of an incomprehensible madness. His favorite tale was “The Outsider.” It gives a first-person account of an unhappy narrator living in a dark, crumbling tower far away from any human contact. How he got there is never explained. Nor is how long he has been there. The story is his escape, climbing to the top of the tower, exiting, and finding a room full of people having a party until they see him, scream, and scatter. Our narrator is the monster. O’Bannon related. He also felt that the world was remote and alien, and usually the conclusion he drew was that he was the strange one. But the mechanics of the tale also made a deep impression. It’s a deeply self-pitying story, one that associates death with “the other.”
In Lovecraft’s stories, humans are powerless and pitiful, bit players in the drama of the universe who “live on placid islands of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity.” In the face of the overwhelming power of the monster, humanity appears helpless. This misanthropy is reflected in mood more than story. The atmosphere itself is as murky and hard to decipher as a foggy sky in Scotland.
Lovecraft does not summon up an image so much as the lack of one: the tower hanging above the “endless forest” into the “unknown sky.” Everything is negative: endless, unseen, incomprehensible, and indistinct. The past is impossible to remember, and the future is a mystery. The portrait in this story is of a mind paralyzed by a world so vast that it’s frightening. He would prefer to stay in his tiny room and rot. This is a work of fantasy, but it felt true to O’Bannon. When you are young and green, what you do not know is terrifying. Most horror fiction relies on sudden surprises, men transforming into monsters, dead bodies rolling out of closets. But Lovecraft’s stories didn’t try to startle so much as to slowly envelop you in a kind of dream. His stories were about awe, not shock.
In his essay on the history of the macabre, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft began with what might be the bedrock idea of the genre for most of the directors who came of age in the sixties and seventies: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft went on to place horror in the context of great literature from Charles Dickens, Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and explained how we remember pain and menace much more vividly than pleasure. O’Bannon and Carpenter each found solace in the seriousness with which this writer took his favorite genre. Most people are stuck in the mundane moment-to-moment dreariness of real life, but Lovecraft preached that only the truly sensitive souls can allow their imaginations to wander to the fantastic—and that this must be rooted in realism. “Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel,” Lovecraft wrote.
The virtue of the unknown, the setting of an indistinct mood, and the necessity of rooting the magical or supernatural in a palpable realism—these were powerful ideas that O’Bannon and Carpenter built