Episodes 77 - 83 ~ At the Mountains of Madness

[dadavoodoo]

Here Is a little something about the art....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
All most ever time H.P.L talks about art he hast to bring up Clark Ashton Smith.

[semiosteve]

http://en.wahooart.com/A55A04/W.nsf/Opra/BRUE-6WHLL6

http://www.selfmadehero.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/roerich.jpeg

I guess this is what HPL is referring to for the Roerich artwork

semiosteve

[fubarinpittsburgh]

You guys apologized about how slowly you are going through the story.

Take as much time as you need! Pure gold guys! I cant get enough of you guys talking about this one!

And Chad, the dog knows what you did.

[Genus Unknown]

Totally. If you were creeping your way through, say, "The Electric Executioner," that would be one thing, and well-nigh unforgivable. But come on, this is (along with "Call of Cthulhu") the classic of classics. Hell, give it another pass when you're done just for shits and giggles.

[dadavoodoo]

By over describing "The Elder Things" They become even more strange. Also when H.P.L describes a "Life From" it is nothing like anything you have seen. In a lot of Si fi one find the aline to be not all that unlike us. 

[old book]

The radio updates: The slightly stilted tone of these (dropping short words, etc) makes me think these are sent in Morse code. Is that confirmed or refuted in the story anywhere?

Well, if you poke around the internet, there is an audio file by admiral Byrd from the Antarctic, broadcast to the people in radioland. It's called Mail Call. It looks like there was a whole series of them, but as far as I know only one has come down to posterity.

Byrd in Alone also mentions he was supposed to make a broadcast from his remote post or the main post in Little America that was to be relayed to radioland by an East Coast station back in the US, but the weather conditions or something didn't permit it, so this might have been a regular thing. Elsewhere in the same book he struggles with Morse, I don't remember all the details. Howard Lovecraft might have heard one of these broadcasts at some point.

[Eibon]

Interesting that no-one's mentioned the origins of the story, beyond it being inspired by Pym.

H. Warner Munn, in the introduction to King of the Wold's Edge (Ace Books, c.1960s) says: "...we visted back and forth between my home in Athol, Mass., and his in Providence, R. I. quite a bit. His novel At The Mountains of Madness was suggested by a story I wrote as a continuation of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and which I later destroyed because his story shaped up so wmuch better than mine."

Of course, by the time the story reached print it was what someone in Crypt of Cthulhu magazine once referred to as a "thematic sequel", with little more than the giant albino penguins and the shoggoth calls remaining from Poe.

As for John W. Campbell, and The Thing. The point I made several years ago about this one was that Campbell and the hard Sci-Fi people hated Lovecraft for is aparent vagueness (Arthur C. Clarke would write a parody called "At The Mountains of Murkiness", which pretty much sums it up for them). So Campbell wasn't writing as an adoring acolyt, he was writing the  finding aliens in the ice story "as it should have been written". He makes a great job of it, and it had some great paranoid ideas that fit with Lovecraft, but Campbell was no fan. The emphasis on the alienness of the creature is very good, and anyone who can make a bucket of milk scarey is not bad (you have to read the story to get that reference).

Curiously the first movie makes things more Lovecraftian in one respect. Unable to do the shape-shifting on the budget, the Hawkes produced film makes the monster a vegitable lifeform, like the elder things! A "comsic carrot" as one character says. A band of scientists who are more interested in the unique oportunities an intellegent plant lifeform presents are added to provide the tension.

As an aside, this film then influences the TV series Doctor Who in two stories: The Ice Warriors (1967), in which frozen Martians are thawed out; and The Seeds of Doom (1976) where palezoic alien seed pods are found at the antarctic and when they burst open they infest human hosts transforming them into mostrous plants. A mad millionaire plant collector has one pod shipped back to Britain with desasterious results. For a TV programme the body horror of the transformations is quite good. The seed pods opening can't help but bring to mind the pods from Riddley Scott's Alien (1979).

As for the Carpenter remake. Generally it's a good film, but it let me down in two ways. The intelectual element of the original is slightly lost among some fairly unsimpathetic characters. The other was that at the time of production he spoke about making a horror film, normally so reliant of darkness, in a whiteout enviroment being an interesting challenge. Well, obviously it was too much of a challenge, because the actual film, even the scenes outside, mostly happen in darkness and shadow. I would have liked to see him use the environment more.

Oh, also as an aside, the second Doctor Who monster was called a "Kyrnoid". Lovecraft refers to the elder things as crinoid. Check out the wikipaedia entry for "crinoid', particularly the pictures. You might find some interesting connections. Also, someone in a Crypt of Cthulhu article suggested that the sea cucumber was an inspiration for the barrel-shapped elder things.

[MediaGhost]

That's a lot to chew on, Eibon!  I'd have loved to to have read Munn's original work.  Too bad he got all emo and destroyed it.

One tiny quibble, though.  As far as Howard Hawk's The Thing From Another World, it was budgeted at over $1,000,000 and had a 51 day shooting schedule.  For the 1950s that puts it solidly in 'A' movie territory, especially for RKO! 

It wasn't that he didn't have the money to do a decent transformation scene.  Rather, Hawks was a notorious cheapskate (he made TFAW largely with unknown actors to save money) and didn't want to fork over the dough for the f/x.  Instead, he went with a largely humanoid "rubber suit" monster and wound up with something that, well, just didn't film very well - which is why we only glimpse it a couple of times in the film. 

Other than that, you're absolutely correct.  The whole "plant lifeform" thing was a story device used to create tension between the egghead scientist group and the bonehead military group.

[adamgurri]

Wow, thanks for the info Eibon!

Genus: I was afraid to admit that this story didn't grip me, too. It started out so good and exciting. And from a fan point of view, I want to absorb the whole mythos explanation he lays out, but I really had difficulty taking it in the way it was presented.

[Eric Lofgren]

Ep. 3 was great. It was a rare treat to have an artist on as a guest. And I'm happy he'll be back for more. From what I've seen of his work, I like it a lot.

[Genus Unknown]

Great episode, although I'm sorry to say that between the phone distortion and the accent, I couldn't understand a word Mr. Culbard said. 

[Mike J.]

Regarding the salt and the ... meat: I don't think it makes a lot of sense for the Elder Things to have tried to preserve the meat they butchered - I don't think they had a lot of time to do so (two days? - not enough time to dry big hunks of meat out, I don't think), probably didn't have the (large?) amount of salt it would have required, nor would an intelligent creature have bothered to try to preserve any food in below-freezing temperature: It simply wouldn't be necessary. Just my own suppositions, though. I think an impromptu meal is most likely.


-Mike J.

[Sunjammer]

This was the first HPL story I read, and while I think it's a great gateway drug it's gone from being my first love to one of my least favorite stories of his.. I think my biggest problem with it isn't the meandering structure or the sort of ridiculous elder things, but it's the way he almost completely ignores or bungles the audio. Tekeli-li? Seriously? It's such a specific onomatopoeia it's almost impossible to wringe it into any sort of form that causes the slightest inkling of unease. Beyond this, we're left with generic windy antarctic and, er, squawking penguins. OH GOD NO NOT THE PENGUINS.

There are certainly great standout bits, but for anyone who has spent any time at all in any sort of arctic landscape, the soundscape is *incredibly* dense for such a wasteland. And haunting. I realize this is probably mostly just a personal hangup, but he executes sound so well in some of his other stories (the final bits of Dexter Ward are standout moments, as are his minute detailing of The Haunter of the Dark). His Antarctic simply isn't a place he manages to make me inhabit. There is barely a mention of the temperatures, which you'd think a horror writer would milk for every penny's worth of discomfort.

Overall a lovely and intriguing bit of science fiction fantasy, but I've stopped recommending it to people who aren't already head over heels in love with his work.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Regarding the salt and the ... meat: I don't think it makes a lot of sense for the Elder Things to have tried to preserve the meat they butchered - I don't think they had a lot of time to do so (two days? - not enough time to dry big hunks of meat out, I don't think), probably didn't have the (large?) amount of salt it would have required, nor would an intelligent creature have bothered to try to preserve any food in below-freezing temperature: It simply wouldn't be necessary. Just my own suppositions, though. I think an impromptu meal is most likely.


-Mike J.

You know, I always thought of the salt as being a preservative, too, but you bring up a good point about both the temperature and the lack of time. I could see it as being used as a preservative, but more out of a force of habit than a practical solution to the problem, after all, the Elder Things had no idea what to expect of the larger world or their ancient city, so they may have been taking precautions against their specimens rotting along the way of a long journey. Also, I could see them using the salt as a preservative, only in a way that we might not understand, possibly a chemical technique that we don't really understand.

Either way, I think it was meant to indicate the storage of large quantities of meat in the story, but more as a creepy bit of foreshadowing than an actual well-thought out plan of preservation on the part of the Elder Things.

Bob

[TheSnark]

(Genus Unknown - You really couldn't understand what Culbard was saying?
That's a really mild accent)