Marie WheelerSo fans of H.P. Lovecraft and the Evil Dead will love my upcoming project: Necronomicon Art Journal.
My intent is to recreate the cover of the Necronomicon as portrayed in the original Evil Dead movie using homemade paper and acrylic paint and then create internal pages to house watercolors of my vision of the Elder Gods, Outer Gods and Great Old Ones.
If you have zero clue what I am on about, take a peek at Wiki’s article on either the Cthulhu Mythos or Cthulhu Mythos Deities or check out an anthology of his short stories; I linked to the dream cycle, but I recommend buying all three as these are the books that fueled my interest in Lovecraft.
I don’t recall when I first heard of Lovecraft as an author, and to be fair, I likely knew of his work through movies and music much earlier and knew of the Necronomicon lore through those venues. It also could have been the movie titled Necronomicon, as I worked in a video store for a few years and do remember seeing it. What I can say definitively is that once I knew of it, I couldn’t get enough. I read all of what I could get and have re-read pieces I like several times. They are a hard first go due to the antiquarian language he uses, which I now believe a purposeful act to fulfill his ego. Words like hoary and eldritch needed to be looked up and I encourage you to have a dictionary or app nearby. He is quite racist as many of his time were; take it for the ignorance that it is and don’t lose the story.
After reading Lovecraft, you will see connections everywhere, especially if you enjoy horror movies, comics and metal. There are a ton of adaptations of Lovecraftian stories in the horror genre, and recently Guillermo Del Toro was looking for funding for an adaptation of ‘At the Mountains of Madness,’ though it failed. The trouble with the adaptations is that they are often loose and the stories are often said to be ‘unfilmable’. I am disappointed that Del Toro was unable to get funding as I think it would have been spectacular.
What is always more interesting to me is the use of pieces of the Lovecraftian universe, such as the Necronomicon in Evil Dead and the fact that Bubba Ho-Tep is strangely close and related to Nyarlathotep, though don’t quote me on that one. Additionally, the Arkham Asylum in the Batman Universe is a direct callback to the fictional town created by Lovecraft and the Arkham Sanatarium in the story ‘The Thing on the Doorstep.’
I have picked up a lot of this through googling different questions and connections, but I also highly recommend the H.P. Podcraft podcast as a companion to the readings. I have listened to them from Episode 1 on as they go in chronological order and you can read the story and then hear the discussion. It’s like a book club without the hassle!
More to come as the project takes shape, I’m off to go make some paper…
