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No. 78: Why Lovecraft Never Made a Monster Movie

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Why Lovecraft Never Made a Monster Movie

First | Previous | 2009-03-20 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/owls/?comic=78

Strip by: Matt Albrecht

{Cthulhu, who resembles a complex geometrical object with wings and tentacles, terrorises a city}
{Our heroes are running for their lives}
[screams]: Eldritch! Cyclopean! The Horror!
[screams]: Make the Archaic words stop!
[screams]: An indescribable monstrosity!
[screams]: It ignores Euclid's fifth postulate!
[screams]: The angles! The angles! I feel my mind slipping!

The author writes:

H. P. Lovecraft will probably be best remembered for having created the Cthulhu Mythos. Unfortunately, he also chose many descriptive words for his horrors that have since become the target of ridicule. One of my favourites was from The Call of Cthulhu, where he writes, "The Thing which cannot be described," then promptly goes about describing it.

He also used the term "non-Euclidean" to describe the alien architectures from which such creatures live. This has already been the target of many jokes (such as with Lego blocks). Even the Wikipedia article on non-Euclidean geometry makes reference to Lovecraft's use of the phrase.

For the creature itself, I opted to have it take the form of a pseudosphere, which was one of the first surfaces to be used in non-Euclidean geometry.