I saw all the horrors of the universe, and after that, even the spring sky and the summer flowers were poison in my eyes! - "The Call of Cthulhu"
Hi！ Welcome to Game Brain Talk Issue 4.
Today we're going to talk about why some people always think "Cthulhu isn't scary at all."
Friends who know a little about Cthulhu's setting should be able to find that the words "inexplicable" often appear in Cthulhu stories to express the horror of monsters beyond recognition to the point of being indescribable, and the bizarre and bizarre events are incomprehensible.
Yes, this is at the heart of Cthulhu terror – the unknown.
Sadly, this unknown often comes from the tip of the iceberg revealed by the "real world", and the everyday life you live in is nothing but a ridiculously gentle illusion.
It's like the human beings who suddenly awakened from the "matrix" in "The Matrix" and found themselves in the mechanical jungle as a human flesh battery, curled up in the cold nutrient solution for a lifetime and enslaved by machines, and the original normal worldview in their minds was bound to collapse completely.
And the Kristock terror often only gives some individuals the opportunity to glimpse the truth, so that they are separated from the group consensus, this lonely situation of facing the cruel truth alone but can only digest itself is the most terrifying, because it means saying goodbye to the normal social consensus and order completely.
In the world of Cthulhu, human beings are extremely small, and this smallness makes those poor individuals almost powerless to resist in the face of the truth, and only complete despair remains.
As a result, Cthulhu stories often begin with small teams or individuals investigating events, gradually peeking into the terrible truth while moving farther and farther away from the world of common sense, and finally losing their minds in the face of extremely grand and terrifying things alone.
With a basic understanding of Cthulhu-style terror, we can analyze why different people perceive the degree of Cthulhu terror so differently.
The era of creation and cultural differences have created a sense of alienation
The entire Cthulhu story begins with lovecraft's creation in the 1910s, when China was in the midst of the abdication of the Qing Emperor and the difficult transition of the entire society to the Republic of China.
In addition, there are many cultural phenomena unique to the United States in the era of great immigration in the book, so that the characters, scenes, culture, and social customs in the book are not smallly different from the present. If the reader does not know much about these backgrounds, he may have a strong sense of strangeness and will not be able to enter it at all.
Let's look at the original text in "The Call of Cthulhu" to clearly feel the sense of the times.
So as it was approaching evening, the frightened settlers led twenty policemen in two carriages and a car and set off... It was not until finally that the local settlement— a pile of miserably and miserably crowded shacks — finally appeared in sight; ecstatic residents ran out and quickly gathered around the group of police officers carrying shaky lanterns. The faint sound of hand drums was faintly heard very far ahead; but the frightened locals were still unwilling to walk an inch further in the direction of the evil ritual...
The story place is too remote and distant from everyday life
In horror works, it's important to create a sense of fear by breaking down the viewer's inner safe zone. For example, many terrorist incidents like to occur in the bedroom and bathroom. These are more intimate spaces, and once the sense of security in these spaces is broken, it is easy to make people uneasy.
"The Grudge" uses this method very well: many people feel a lot of peace of mind when they wrap the cup tightly when they are afraid, and the ghost in the movie appears directly in the cup really makes many people break the defense.
Many of the places where the Cthulhu story takes place are sparsely populated villages, inaccessible wildernesses and even the polar regions. Considering that many of the locations are still fictional, this makes the story farther away from the audience's real life, making it difficult to invade their inner safe zone.
See no weird, roll into the circle of monsters that don't work
Now the monster movie has been rolled to what extent, I think you must know that you have read countless films.
As long as you want to see monsters, tall, short, white, black, humanoid, spider-shaped, mud-shaped, no eyes, there are too many eyes... All in all everything you need.
Interestingly, many of the monster prototypes in the movie now come from the Cthulhu story, which can be understood as the image in Cthulhu is version 1.0, and what we see now may be the N.0 version that has been iterated for many generations, and countless artists have worked hard to make the monster more terrifying. Looking back at the monsters of the original Cthulhuri, it is naturally not so terrifying.
Of course, the above is still an external cause, and the most fundamental lies in the reader's own imagination. Many times, the Cthulhu story will feel smelly and long to read, but the author is actually providing enough references for imagination.
For those imaginative readers, who are able to imagine very scary images under the hint of words, they will find Cthulhu novels scary. And if the most terrifying image in one's mind is nothing more than spiders, snakes and other real-life creatures, then the Cthulhu story will become boring.
It's like if you put a horror movie on an ant, and even if the film is too scary to do, the ant still can't understand it.
END
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