Tag: pleasantville

On the Lovecraftian nature of United 93.

There have been sufficient people asking about my observation here that the most successful Lovecraft/Mythos movies made were Alien, Pleasantville, and United 93 – particularly the last one – that I will attempt to explain what I meant there.  Let’s dispose of Alien quickly: malevolent universe, deliberately hostile towards humanity; overwhelming doom – everybody on-board with that one?  We good?  Good. Continue reading On the Lovecraftian nature of United 93.

Movie of the Week: Paranormal Activity.

It’s odd: I like horror movies, but I’m not often scared by them – at least, in the ‘cosmic terror and dread’ sort of way that a good horror novel can scare me*. So I didn’t have the reaction to Paranormal Activity that a lot of people had – but it was excellent, and I enjoyed it immensely, and people who insist on spending obscene amounts of cash for special effects should take a good, hard look at this film.

And so we say farewell to the Cthulhu Mythos epic Pleasantville…

*In fact, the one movie that has ever gotten the most of that kind of Lovecraftian response out of me was United 93, which isn’t even conventionally a horror movie at all.

Pleasantville and the Cthulhu Mythos.

This thought is not mine, but Ken Hite’s. It’s part of his bloody marvelous Tour de Lovecraft, which should be on everybody’s short list of horror-genre analysis books to buy, but the relevant bit is here:

Hence, you can watch Pleasantville as a photographic negative of “The Colour Out of Space.” As the color which nobody in the world has ever seen before spreads, their society is destroyed. We have met the Colour, and it is us.

No, think about it for a second.  Consider Pleasantville as a horror film:

Continue reading Pleasantville and the Cthulhu Mythos.