Strange aeons in Dark Rooms: A Mitologia de Lovecraft na Cultura Contemporânea e suas Apropriações Cinematográficas

Abstract

This work seeks to map H. P. Lovecraft 's creations in contemporary culture, giving a bigger emphasis to his cinematographic appropriations. For this, it is necessary a greater understanding of the writer's work and of the philosophical concept of the Cosmic Pessimism that pervades all his stories. In this way, a brief biography and a search to understand some basic elements of his stories is necessary to be able to perceive in a more detailed form his strong presence in several other mediums nowadays. Some essential inspirations for the development of the author's short stories become relevant to this research and thus gain a space for better development, such as Edgar Allan Poe and the film Berkeley Square (1933). Then, we start with an analysis of some remarkable elements of Lovecraftian mythology in our culture in both more academic and more popular spheres. In this way, arriving at cinema, we propose an investigation of Cosmic Pessimism in some films, while mapping various works that have some relation with the universe of the writer. Knowing that he had a strong racist burden on his writing, we sought to problematize this aspect without excusing or redeeming the many problems of his thinking. In a last moment, we propose an articulation of some theoretical proposals with the cosmic and post-human philosophical perspective found in the lovecraftian works. The appropriation of Lovecraft ends up proving not only massive, but revealing curious paradoxes throughout the research