Original article of "Hongli Bookstore". Hongli Bookstore, take you to see interesting books ~
As the year draws to a close, it's time to feel a wave of real fear.
Horror fiction and movie lovers, esports game character lovers can get some pleasant dopamine below ~ (in fact, this is a serious academic introduction to cult literature)
Cute monsters
In addition to the Chinese Nian Beast, the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", and the "Journey to the West" in the original scary monsters, perhaps you have also seen (or heard) western film and television works with glowing sarcomas, tentacle-filled monsters, Japanese front alleys and back alleys of a hundred stories of various female-shaped baby-shaped monsters, South Korea's poignant and beautiful nine-tailed fox ghosts and monsters, these monsters greatly enrich our sensory experience, tempering our guts, kidneys, organ functions. So, although they don't look the same, you might as well call them "cute monsters."
If you, like me, are lucky to have a horror movie complex that you both fear and love, then please laugh at the Spring Festival holiday and the good movies to push the series - "The Conjuring 1~2" (the work of Chinese ghost director Wen Ziren), and the midnight dream back to the trembling series - "Rosemary's Baby" and "Rosemary's Son".
Summoning Spirits 1
Conjuring 2
Because the plot of the "Conjuring" series is too thrilling to be described in words, this article will not be described. The horror level is shoulder to shoulder with the midnight bell and the curse, and there is no desire to take the mobile phone at all, and the !!。
The novel "Rosemary's Baby" tells the story of a young woman "Rosemary" and her husband "Kay" who moved into an apartment that has had many strange events and gave birth to Satan's son after pregnancy. There is not a single bloody description in the whole text, but it can be seen that people have a chill on their backs. The novel was ranked number one on the U.S. horror bestseller list for ten years, and together with The Exorcist and Carrie the Witch, it was called three of the best horror novels in the United States in the 20th century. There are also movies of the same name, but the viewing pleasure is half as much fun as reading.
"Son of Rosemary" began to come out for the sake of readers, and it is the author's sealed work. The plot can be described as a wonderful beginning and end, and the stomach is seriously filled with lackluster plots such as middle-aged and elderly women Mary Sue + son of Satan and his mother emotional entanglement + domineering president (Satan) falling in love with my online novel. Not recommended.
Cult Literature
The above kinds of strange, heterogeneous, strange, sticky, dark, and black blood literary and artistic works are collectively referred to as "cult literature".
Satan is to religious Western civilization, just as cult literature is to the world literary system, although it is a negative figure, it is indispensable. Without Satan, God would cease to exist. Without cult literature, other literature is left alone and boring. Both are mutually reinforcing.
The Cthulhu Mythos is one of the masterpieces of cult literature.
Cthulhu Mythos - The original database of monster movies and game bosses
In the countless works of fictional entertainment based on the theme of the "Cthulhu Mythos", in the infinite shock, confusion, fear, and worship of the great existence that can never be reached, people are constantly sinking and lost, so that they cannot extricate themselves, and are willing to become their loyal believers and followers, worship them, worship them, fanaticism, and constantly sacrifice all their souls and thoughts to it.
The Alien series, the Academy Award for "The Shape of Water", Stephen King's "The Mist", "Shadow House Valdemar", the domestic box office of more than 1 billion movies "Aquaman", as well as the classic games "World of Warcraft" and "Sunken City" all borrow and associate the Cthulhu myth.
It is as if the "Pandora's Box" in the heart has been collectively unsealed, and for those who have come into contact with Cthulhu, even if only to spy on the tip of the iceberg buried in its dark secrets, this "old ruler" who is surrounded by death and putrefaction all the time, contains infinite evil and madness in his body, and holds in his hands the unknown horrors that human thoughts and souls cannot recognize and bear, brings them a forbidden experience like a severe drug addict falling into a psychedelic fantasy.
Cthulhu also embodies a physical concept - that is, the spatial dimension, our existing world is three-dimensional, and Crususus in his cultural works brought a four-dimensional concept (time, space) and The god of Crusu is a four-dimensional creature, not bound by time and space. So in the crususus mythology, the gods can appear at any time and any place at will.
Look at the values of the Cthulhu world system – human beings like to distinguish between good and evil, Christianity divides heaven and hell, Buddhism has Dharma demons, and even Islam has Allah and Unease. But there is no such concept in the Crususus world system, and the evil gods of Cthulhu mythology and the negative characters of traditional stories are not an evil law - they have no sinister intentions, no ulterior motives, no explicit hostility, not even malice - just like when a person inadvertently steps on an ant while walking, will he feel evil? But ants feel evil because you hurt them. These are the values of the Cthulhu world system.
The cultist of cults in Cthulhu mythology – The Book of the Dead
This "Book of the Dead" is the most comprehensive collection of Lovecraft works on the market now, including nearly 80 long, medium and short stories created by Lovecraft in his lifetime, which can be said to define the theme and direction of horror culture in the 20th century, games, movies, music, sculpture, comics, animation, documentaries, visual arts, painting and other fields.
Bibliography of the Book of the Dead
The creator of the Cthulhu myth – Lovecraft
Each people and region has its own unique system of theological ghosts, from the Greek gods of Zeus, the wrath of the Norse gods, the demons and ghosts of East Asia, etc., and Lovecraft single-handedly created a theological system.
Lovecraft, the author of the Cthulhu Mythos, is well qualified to be called the greatest master of dark horror literature in the West in the 19th century, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stock (author of Dracula). Loveclav's works are all short and medium stories, and he is extremely good at using various types of story themes such as history, mystery, archaeology, science fiction, horror, adventure, and curiosity, leading readers to gradually enter the dark mythological world of the ancient great evil gods that he painstakingly created with the help of an ever-changing perspective of time and space.
Lovecraft's creative style was invariably influenced by the family environment: Lovecraft's father went insane at the age of three and died at the age of eight. Since then, the two people who have had the greatest influence on him have been his grandfather and his mother. His maternal grandfather, Whipple van Buren Phillips, often inspired him to read literary classics and tell him his own Gothic horror stories. Her mother, a nervous woman, was admitted to the hospital in 1919 after a long period of hysteria and depression, and died three years later. When Lovecraft was a child, her mother presented an extremely polarized attitude towards him, on the one hand, even if her partner held his hand, she was afraid of her son's wrist dislocation, on the other hand, with hatred for her father, she unjustifiably denigrated Lovecraft, hit his self-confidence, and promoted his extremely negative attitude towards life. After the death of his grandfather, poverty and illness, pain and depression became the norm in his life.
Perhaps, it is these experiences and black personality that make Lovecraft have a different understanding of the universe and fear than ordinary people. On the one hand, his works are all in a gorgeous and varied Gothic style. The description is cumbersome, and the dark words are everywhere in the text: slippery, dirty, dead, festering... On the other hand, it is reflected in the large number of background introductions in his works, with many cultural and aesthetic aspects of the plot weakly related content.
The deepest fear of mankind ?
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear; and the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown." —Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
When you are young, you think you have a comprehensive understanding, a sharp insight, and a value system that you think you are right may gradually collapse with more experience, especially in the year of disaster in 2020, when you sometimes suddenly find that your past self knows nothing about the truth of the world.
When many phenomena that science cannot explain arise, theology seems to become a reasonable explanation. Didn't who (Lao Ai) say that "the end of science is theology" is such a "great rebellion"?
As a weak race in the dark forest of the universe that has never stepped out of the door of the solar system, when we face the unknown powerful dangers from the endless darkness one day, where should we go?
Who knows, after all, we are ordinary human beings who can only live for 100 years in the universe