Love Me Some Lovecraft: The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Sorry for the lack of a "stuff I did this week" post last week but I honestly didn't do anything. At least, nothing on the internet. But now I'm back for another one of these. Fish people and bizarre race metaphors abound in this week's HP Lovecraft short story review type thing.

Like a lot of mostly cool people living in the past, HP Lovecraft had a lot of not cool qualities. Take for example this week's short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." On the surface you have this typical Lovecraftian story about a dude who discovers this town full of weird hicks who are slowly morphing into fish people because of some bizarre cross-mating agreement the town had with "The Deep Ones" many years ago. There are your usual vague allusions to Cthulhu and his kind, a kind of depressing twist ending and once again the idea of horror literally lurking beneath the waves.

However, when one looks past all of the funny names and monsters details, what we have here is HP Lovecraft basically saying how gross and wrong he thinks biracial people are. That kind of blood purity thought is not surprising given the era but it kind of casts a shadow over "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" ironically enough.

Anyone looking to see this story as a movie but way worse and with way more Spanish people should check out Dagon on instant streaming. The dude wears a Miskatonic University, Lovecraft's reoccurring fake college, shirt the whole time. Almost makes up for how bad the movie is.



Next week, dogs beat demons in "The Dunwich Horror."