Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture

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This article provides a list of media featuring H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture. For works that are stylistically influenced by Lovecraft, see Lovecraftian horror.

Contents

[edit] Literature

  • The webcomic Sinfest has featured Cthulu on May 29, 2008 when Slick is on a conducted tour of Hell in a train that says Infernal Studios Tour. Slick is sure that "... its fake"
  • The webcomic "Penny Arcade" has featured Cthulu on two occasions, once with him working on a crossword puzzle on a park bence ("what's a ten-letter word for 'a black goat with a thousand young'?"), and the other time with him devouring the Earth on Christmas Eve in Tycho and Gabe's book, "The Last Christmas."
  • The parody book, "Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse", features a character called Tuna Lovecraft, a parody of Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter books. Her familiar is mentioned as being Cthulhu. However, Tuna says that "he's just a friend of (her) dad's."
  • The User Friendly web comic includes Cthulhu, sometimes as an employee of a parody of a Canadian ISP. In the comic, he is referred to as a 'Squid God'. Hastur also appears, given physical form as a blob of pure blackness, when the nastiness of Usenet is extracted and used to flavour coffee.
  • The SubGenius mythos overlap heavily into the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • Jon Stewart's America: The Book mentions at the beginning that saying the title "Time Warner Company" backwards would summon the Dark Lord Cthulhu
  • Minions of Cthulhu attempt to bring the Great Old One back in modern day Glasgow in The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet (2005) by British author William Meikle ([2]).
  • Resume With Monsters, by William Browning Spencer is a satirical novel where a temp worker gets a job at a company whose upper management interacts with Lovecraft's Elder Gods.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff novel, Night of the Living Re-Run, features Clark Ashton Smith' Mythos-tome The Book of Eibon.
  • The works of Thomas Ligotti often intersect with the Mythos, whether obliquely or subtly.
  • The webcomic Irregular Webcomic has Cthulhu as a character, until he was wrestled to death by Steve.
  • The Bugtown comics of Matt Howarth have Cthulhu as a keyboard player of the popular interdimensional bar band The Bulldaggers.
  • In the 10th issue of Jinxremoving, a comiczine by Arpad Crisis, Arpad gets the flu and is conscripted into battle by a talking ghost booger that tells him he must fight the most horrible thing imaginable, a frat-boy Cthulhu named "Frat-Sothoth." Arpad chickens out and runs away.
  • The popular webcomic and manga series Megatokyo briefly features a book called the Necrowombicon, an obvious parody of the Necronomicon.
  • The comic book Little Gloomy features a character named Carl Cthulu.
  • Lego's Bionicle franchise features a Lovecraftian being known as Tren Krom, a tentacled monstrosity capable of driving even Makuta into madness. Story writer Greg Farshtey confirmed this as a reference to the Cthulhu Mythos on Bionicle fan site BZPower.

[edit] Television

  • Justice League: In the two- part episode called "The Terror Beyond", inserted the concept of the Great Old Ones into the Justice League series. In the episode the JLA must join forces with mystical Doctor Fate and villain Solomon Grundy to defeat the leader of the Great Old Ones, an extra-dimensional being named Ichthultu (a variant of Cthulhu, which Dwayne McDuffie mistakenly thought couldn't be used for copyright reasons), which once posed as a god on Hawkgirl's home planet.
  • The Real Ghostbusters: The episode The Collect Call of Cathulhu revolves around a cult attempting to revive Cthulhu. The episode made repeated references to various aspects of the Mythos, including Lovecraft himself, and the Derleth name, as well as the Necronomicon, which returned in the episode Russian About. The episode stated that Lovecraft and the others based their mythos around their own "research" on the real Necronomicon. It also features a fictional story by Lovecraft, "The Horror from the Depths."
  • Rough Magik (2000), influenced by "Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow out of Time", features the government secretly battling the Sleeping God.
  • The Babylon 5 television movie, Thirdspace, is based upon the Cthulhu Mythos, although the Old Ones are not actually referred to by name in the movie.[1]
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy: The episode "Prank Call of Cthulhu" features a phone of Cthulhu which Grim says is the most dangerous phone in the universe, and which Billy hopes to use to avoid being identified by caller ID. Cthulhu then enlists Billy and Irwin into a prank calling business, turning the people of Endsville into squid-like horrors. In the episode, Cthulhu appears more anthropomorphic than usual, with scrawny legs and purple skin.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "The Darkness Within" features a Cthulhu like monster.
  • The animated series Freakazoid featured a spoof of Cthulhu known as Vorn the Unspeakable.
  • Dragomon, while named after the Mythos god Dagon, physically resembles Cthulhu. As well, he is imprisoned deep beneath the digital sea, much as Cthulhu is imprisoned in R'lyeh.
  • An episode of Pani Poni Dash had several references to Cthulhu.
  • The Simpsons episode "Brawl in the Family", from the 13th season includes a scene at the Republican Party headquarters in which Bob Dole reads from the Necronomicon.
  • In an episode of the Whitest Kids U' Know sketch comedy series, kids accidentally kill their brother with a nail gun and use the Necronomicon to bring him back to life by shouting the word 'jumanji'.
  • In the episode "Gee Whiz" of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, there is a scene when Frylock is going to introduce Meatwad to the Bible, but accidentally pulls out the Necronomicon.
  • In the original Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name" the Enterprise is commandeered by life forms from the Andromeda galaxy. During a mind-meld with one of them, Mr. Spock discovers that despite their human appearance, the Kelvins are actually "immense beings, with hundreds of tentacles".
  • In the popular BBC Television series Doctor Who, a race called the Ood resemble the Cthulhu.

[edit] Film

  • Cast a Deadly Spell is set in a fictional world where magic is common and a private investigator named Harry Philip Lovecraft is hired to find a stolen book called the Necronomicon.
  • In The Evil Dead , and its sequels Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, the Necronomicon is described as a text from ancient Sumeria, "bound in human flesh and inked in blood", that can resurrect demons and turn humans into monsters. Writer/director Sam Raimi was apparently unaware of the book's previous existence in the works of Lovecraft at the time of the first film, but was made aware in time for the sequels.[2] This Necronomicon however, seems unrelated to Lovecraft's mythos, instead focusing on the "Simon" Necronomicon's Sumerian basis.
  • The Necronomicon that appeared in the Evil Dead series also appeared very briefly in Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday and Pumpkinhead.
  • In the Mouth of Madness is a movie inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • The Gates of Hell AKA City of the Living Dead is an 1980 Italian film set in Lovecraft's fictional town of Dunwich, but otherwise does not resemble any of HPL's work.
  • The Beyond AKA Seven Doors of Death is a 1981 movie featuring The Book of Eibon, a piece of the Mythos invented by Clark Ashton Smith.
  • Alone in the Dark, 2005 movie adaptation of the video game (see below).
  • Dagon A Spanish film, which tells tale of Dagon.
  • One of the lead characters in the German horror comedy "Night of the Living Dorks" has a book entitled "Necronomicon," which she claims is the only edition. Passages from this book, along with "the ashes of an undead" turn the other lead characters into zombies early in the film.
  • In Mortuary, by Tobe Hooper, the text That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange æons even death may die citation is found on a witch tomb (also the town in the film is called Arkham).
  • Andrew Migliore and John Strysik's Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft and Charles P. Mitchell's The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography both discuss films containing Lovecraftian elements.
  • The character of "Davy Jones" in the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest film series bears a resemblance to the commonly accepted appearance of Cthulhu.
  • In the months preceding the film Cloverfield, many thought that the monster was Cthulhu himself. Some believe the monster to be a Cthulhi, even after seeing the film, however this is most likely not the case.

Many other films have used Lovecraft's inventions, often greatly modified from his original versions; see Lovecraft's IMDB entry for a complete list of films crediting him.

[edit] Music

  • The Black Dahlia Murder released a track on their 2003 album Unhallowed entitled "Thy Horror Cosmic," which features lyrics clearly descriptive of the rise of Cthulhu as told by his worshipers.
  • The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets is heavily inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos, with songs such as "Cthulhu Dreams", "Yog-Sothoth" and "Six-Gun Gorgon Dynamo". Their latest album "The Shadow out of Tim" is a musical adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time".
  • The doom metal band Brown Jenkins writes songs that are almost completely inspired by Lovecraft, and has an EP, "Call Down The Star Cult", which is based on Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu".
  • Drakkar, a heavy metal band, recorded "The Walls Of Olathoë", about the city mentioned in Lovecraft's story "Polaris", for their 1998 album Quest For Glory.
  • Explicitly Lovecraftian (H. P. Lovecraft is, in fact, listed as a member), Pittsburgh-based band Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos has released two EPs of music inspired by Caitlin R. Kiernan's Mythos-inspired novels Threshold and The Dry Salvages, and are preparing to re-release their first album, Iä! (originally on Optikon Rekords). Many of their individual tracks are "soundtrack" pieces to various stories by H. P. Lovecraft.
  • The genitals of Oderus Urungus, the lead singer of Gwar, are called the Cuttlefish of Cthulhu [4].
  • The band Rudimentary peni, a deathrock/punk band, has an album Cacophony which is heavily influenced by H.P Lovecraft and his stories.
  • The indie rock band The Awful Lot song "Riot in the Miskatonic Morgue" incorporates several elements of the mythos.[6]
  • The doom metal band Electric Wizard references Lovecraft's writings in several songs, most notably "Weird Tales" and "Dunwich".
  • The psychedelic folk band "HP Lovecraft" from the 1960's wrote many songs with Cthulhoid lyrics.
  • The Fields of the Nephilim songs "The Watchman" and "Last Exit for The Lost" contain the lyric "Kthulhu Calls".
  • The artist Redrum features a song called "Cthulhu" in the album "Dear Satan"
  • The English psychedelic/blues band Uriel recorded a song called "Azathoth" under the band name Arzachel.
  • The gothic, neo-classical duo of Nox Arcana have made a record called Necronomicon which is written entirely about the Cthulhu Mythos
  • The gothic country duo The Nightshade Family features Lovecraft-inspired cover art on their album Helping Hands.
  • The Norwegian black metal band 1349 reference Cthulhu, as well as other elements from the Mythos, in the song "From The Deeps".

[edit] Games

  • The Chaos Gods from Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 resemble the Great Old Ones in the fact that they are extradimensional beings who are worshipped and can influence the physical world. The Old Ones in warhammer also share some traits with the Old Ones of Lovecraftian mythos - they came from the stars and created sentient life on the planet. Similarly, their nemeses the C'tan also are extremely Lovecraftian (the Void Dragon being described in several places as dead but dreaming, imprisoned on Mars).
  • The Elder God in the Legacy of Kain video game series is said to have been inspired by Cthulhu.
  • Arkham Horror is a well-received board game from Fantasy Flight that focuses exclusively on the Mythos as "Investigators" attempt to prevent the rising of a Great Old One by sealing gates to other worlds.
  • Serious Sam: The Second Encounter mentions that the last enemy boss was killed by a ritual involving "twenty thousand pounds of ectoplasm, the Necronomicon, and a mis-pronounced Latin proverb."
  • The Murlocs of the Warcraft universe are almost identical to the Deep Ones of Lovecraft's stories. They are one of the primary adversaries encountered in the on-line role-playing game World of Warcraft, and recent updates on the game's website suggest that the Lovecraftian connections will be further explored, with the Murlocs worship of ancient aquatic "gods" being a primary feature. One particular quest involves slaying a murloc-worshipped being by the name of Dagun, the whole questline being strongly Lovecraftian.[3][4] There are also characters in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne that resemble the star-spawn of Cthulhu named "Faceless ones".[5] Their boss, a "Forgotten one" resembles a monstrosity with multiple tentacles,[6] probably making reference of Cthonians. A boss in the game World of Warcraft named "C'Thun" also resembles a Cthonian.[7][8]
  • The popular tabletop card game Munchkin has released many themed revisions of it's card set; one (Munchkin Cthulhu) is nearly entirely Cthulhu- and Lovecraftian- ("HP Munchcraft") themed.
  • The Necronomicon is mentioned in the video game Max Payne. Max states that a copy of the book is laid out on a table in Jack Lupino's nightclub Ragna Rock.[9] In the following level, Max reads Lupino's obsessed call towards numerous dark deities of various sources, including Cthulhu
  • Cthulhu and the mythos was featured in a chapter of the early printings of the AD&D 1st Edition supplement Deities and Demigods before a copyright dispute led to later printings omitting the material.
  • The monster Malachi in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is based Cthulhu. Also, there is a monster called Cthulhu, although it looks more similar to a demon. The names of these two creatures have been switched due to license issues or translation error from their Japanese counterparts.
  • In Cave Story Cthulhu is a mysterious figure dressed in green that gives the main character advise. He does not resemble Cthulhu.
  • The 2006 Frogwares Ascaron PC game The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, features an investigation into a number of disappearances believed to be the work of a Cthulhu Cult.
  • The MMORPG Runescape has a summoning monster named Karamthulhu overlord that is supposed to represent Cthulhu in a fishbowl. It also has a character called Ezekial Lovecraft who claims his father is Howard in reference to H.P. Lovecraft. [7]It also features aquatic monsters called Dagannoths, which live beneath a lighthouse.
  • The game Quake, released in 1996 by id software is set more or less in an adaptation of Lovecraft's universe. The later episodes are inspired by several dark fantasy influences, notably that of H. P. Lovecraft; most notably, the end game boss is named Shub-Niggurath (one of Lovecraft's mythical "Ancient Ones") and the end boss of the first episode is named Chthon, although there is little resemblance between the game's portrayal and the original literary description. Some levels have Lovecraftian names such as the "Vaunts of Zin" or the "Ebon fortress".
  • The dark god Tharizdun and its cult of Doomdreamers from the D&D 3.0 adventure Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil bear a striking resemblance to an Old Ones and its followers. Madness and insanity figure heavily into the cult and its attacks.
  • Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 contains a villainous, sentient, and near-invincible starship called Sovereign which resembles Cthulu's squid-like appearance. Both Sovereign and Cthulu are feared as near-omnipotent beings and have cult followings. In Mass Effect, a race of sentient machines known as the geth worship Sovereign's race, the Reapers, and Cthulu has his own cult following in Lovecraft's works.
  • In the MMORPG Tibia[[8]], The Quara Constrictor and the Quara Constrictor Scout look just like Lovecraft's description of Cthulhu. "A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body...". Also the Quara Boss is named Thul. The name clearly comes from removing the first and last letters from Cthulhu. There is also an NPC, The vampire Vladruc in Venore, when asked about undead, uses a well known phrase from the fictional book, Necronomicon , which is mentioned in many novels: It is not dead, which can eternal lie, and in strange aeons, even death may die.[10]
  • The Lords of Cthul from Monsterpocalypse are obviously based on the Cthulu Mythos, as interdimensional monsters from a realm of darkness. Their appearance is also Cthulu inspired, with green skin and mouths full of tentacles.

[edit] Notes

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  1. ^ JMSNews: The J. Michael Straczynski Message Archive. Retrieved on 2007-07-11.
  2. ^ Bill Warren, The Evil Dead Companion, pg. 36. First edition, 2000. ISBN 0-312-27501-3.
  3. ^ Bel'dugur's Note, cites the Murloc worshiping Dagun (the Ravenous)
  4. ^ Dagun the Ravenous, with a picture.
  5. ^ Faceless Ones information, with a picture.
  6. ^ Forgotten One's information, with a screenshot.
  7. ^ C'Thun - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
  8. ^ A picture of C'Thun
  9. ^ Max Payne's game script at IGN.
  10. ^ http://tibia.wikia.com/wiki/Allusions
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