Tag Archives: Lovecraft

RIP Stuart Gordon (1947 – 2020)

Incredibly Strange Film Show on Stuart Gordon (part one)

Stuart Gordon is a film director is best-known for his Re-Animator (1985), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922).

Incredibly Strange Film Show on Stuart Gordon (part two)

The story starts with these lines ominous lines, in keeping with Lovecraft’s sinister oeuvre:

“Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”

H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922)

The television documentary series Incredibly Strange Film Show did a special on Gordon in 1989 where they interviewed him in the La Brea Tar Pits

What’s in words: Lovecraft’s vocabulary

Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1915 [image source]

In 2011, blogger Cthulhu Chick [1] counted American author H. P. Lovecraft‘s favorite words:

One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as “indescribable” or called “unnamable” or “antiquarian” or “cyclopean.” And sometimes we wonder how many times he actually used the words.

This is the list:

Abnormal – 94, Accursed – 76, Amorphous – 19, Antediluvian – 10, Antiqu (e/arian) – 128, Blasphem (y/ous) – 92, Cat – 46, Charnel – 20,Comprehension – 9, Cyclopean – 47, Dank – 19, Decadent – 32, Daemoniac – 55, Effulgence – 4, Eldritch – 23, Faint (ed/ing) – 189, Foetid – 22,Fungus/Fungoid/Fungous – 54, Furtive – 60, Gambrel – 21, Gibbous – 9, Gibber (ed/ing) – 10, Hideous – 260, Immemorial – 25, Indescribable – 25, Iridescence – 2,Loath (ing/some) – 71, Lurk – 15, Madness – 115, Manuscript – 35, Mortal – 27, Nameless – 157, Noisome – 33, Non-Euclidean – 2, Proportion/Disproportionate – 53,Shunned – 54, Singular (ly) – 115, Spectral – 60, Squamous – 1, Stench – 59, Stygian – 6, Swarthy – 14, Tenebrous – 9, Tentacle(s) – 28, Ululat (e/ing) – 4,Unmentionable – 16, Unnamable – 22, Unutterable – 13

See also: frequency list