[Pride 2020] Lovecraft, Horror And Questioning Sexuality

The oldest human emotion is fear, and the oldest fear is fear of the unknown. However, the first unknown is that eternal question: who am I? When Lovecraft came up with his philosophies of cosmic horror, he had many external fears. He feared human society, advancing beyond his scope of understanding. He feared the expanse of space and the unknown implications of science. He feared the life in the sea, which washed ashore bewildering creatures the likes of which he had never seen before.

However, Howard Phillips Lovecraft never had any questions about his own identity. In fact, his identity was one of the few foundations upon which he stood – to the detriment of everyone around him. Lovecraft was notoriously bigoted, having expressed many racist beliefs in his various letters and stories. Queer identity isn’t something Lovecraft mentions really ever, because it’s highly possible Lovecraft doesn’t have any understanding of it – despite the fact Lovecraft might’ve been asexual and thus part of that LGBTQA community.

However, this essay isn’t going to try to argue that Lovecraft is a secret gay ally. He’s not. He’s not an ally of any minority group. However, both the works of Lovecraft and those inspired by him have expressed queer narratives. Many horror stories feature queer narratives, but the idea of cosmic horror – that great big unknown that forces you to question your role in the universe – overlaps extremely well with the common LGBTQA pastime of questioning your sexuality and gender identity.

Arguably the most overt example of a Lovecraft story overlapping as a questioning narrative is that of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a novella written by Lovecraft in the last few years of his career. This story has been reinterpreted multiple times, most notably in Stewart Gordon’s Dagon. The story features its narrator traveling to the New England town if Innsmouth, where years prior the heads of the town arranged a contract with fish people who worship the Deep Ones Dagon and Mother Hydra. The contract allows for those on the surface to gain riches beyond belief, with the caveat that they will breed children with the Deep Ones, creating a hybrid race of immortal fish people.

Our narrator is at first horrified by these alien creatures and tries to run away. Ultimately, his actions motivate the government to launch nukes into the underwater cities of the Deep Ones, but as time passes, the narrator realizes that he shares a common ancestor with the people of Innsmouth, and realizes, as fish people features manifest on his body, that the sea is calling him.

Already, you can see the queer metaphor. We see a person fighting against who he is, denying himself, actively fighting to destroy a paradise for people like him, only to end up realizing he was what he was fighting this whole time. While this is not a universal narrative for queer folks, it is one that a lot of people who are raised in relatively abusive or conservative households might experience.

The queer allegory, however, was tweaked somewhat in Dan Gildark’s 2007 adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Cthulhu. While the movie takes the name of a very different Lovecraftian horror, that being the high priest Cthulhu who rests in the sunken city of R’lyeh, the story is unlike Lovecraft’s classic short story “The Call of Cthluhu” in every sense.

The often unseen film Cthulhu focuses on a history professor named Russ who returns to his hometown to his mother’s funeral. His father is the center of a New Aged cult. Every interaction with the people of his hometown is profoundly uncomfortable, as Russ, since leaving, has come out of the closet as a gay man, which his more conservative mates and family deride him for. The discomfort throughout the film is ramped up as it turns out there’s also something really strange going on with the cult, but even before that the sheer social isolation felt by Russ is the core tension offered by the film.

One thing noticeably absent in Cthulhu, aside from Cthulhu, are the fish people. The threat of fish people remain, yes, but unlike the short story where we learn our protagonist is one of the fish people, there’s a distinct disconnect from the fish people, the cult, and Russ. This is because the great fear – the great unknown that inspires terror – isn’t the fear of being a member of a subaquatic race but rather the fear of the majority, the fear of the establishment turning against you.

In short, Cthulhu inverts the typical concepts of Lovecraftian fiction. In most Lovecraft stories, the monster is the great unknown, with mainstream society struggling to comprehend what will happen. However, here, the other, the queer character is the protagonist, and it’s the mainstream society that’s breaking our protagonist.

Screenwriter Grant Cogswell claimed that the framework of The Shadow Over Innsmouth resonated with him as a queer narrative. More specifically, the idea of returning to your home and finding yourself in an uncomfortable, even hostile, environment. "I knew folks who grew up in these backwoods places and then in their 30s, one of their parents died or had a stroke, and they had to go back and face their past."

Cthulhu is not loyal to the original Lovecraftian text. It’s clear that, while Gildark and Cogswell don’t respect the monsters, they respect the fear Lovecraft inspired in his text. They are but a group of horror creatives who are taking the framework of Lovecraft and applying their own perspectives onto it. Lovecraft is undeniably a bigot, but the fears he portrayed are universal and diverse.

Writer N.K. Jemisin has won the Hugo-Award three years in a row thanks to her incredibly diverse writing. She wrote a Lovecraft-inspired novel, The City We Became, as a critique of Lovecraft’s overt racist rhetoric. However, her explanation as to why this novel was so important to her can apply to many queer audiences as well. To quote Jemisin, "I was choosing to engage with Lovecraft’s fear of the city - his sense that these diverse people brought a bad energy to it. My take was: of course they bring an energy to the city, all people do. He perceived it as evil, but really it’s just life."

Much like Cogswell and Gildark, Jemisin frames bigots as the greater evil in her novel, with the tentacle Cthulhu-esque creatures working through the collective aggression of alt-right trolls – people who very often will attack diverse folks coming to genre fiction.

However, it’s undeniable that Lovecraft is growing queerer as new voices come to the genre. While few are as overtly queer as Cthulhu, the recent Underwater did feature out-queer actress Kristen Stewart. Undeniably, Stewart brings an inherent queerness to the story as a viewpoint character, even if her character’s sexuality is never confirmed either way. Underwater, unlike Cthulhu, actually features Cthulhu, emphasizing the inherent horror of the sea and the almost careless way it can destroy a person. However, here, the sea doesn’t really care what sexuality or gender identity you conform to. It’s gonna kill you either way.

Contrasting to her, her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson, fascinatingly enough, recently starred in The Lighthouse, a film that possesses a great deal of Lovecraftian elements to it, with the great sea and storm acting as part of a greater unknown that isolates the two human characters, played by Pattinson and Willem Defoe. This film takes a far more human-centric perspective on its conflict, featuring the stripping away of restraints and facades. It’s arguable that both characters are either gay or bisexual, seeing as how, after a few drinks, the two are close to kissing one another before trading blows. They come close to drunkenly allowing their inner desires to come out, only to realize and fight against it hard.

In his manner, modern Lovecraft-inspired horror like The Lighthouse shows the same horror that The Shadow Over Innsmouth featured: that the thing you’re fighting might very well be a reflection of what you are on the inside.

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