H.P. Lovecraft was a mess. Let’s just start there. He was a man terrified of basically everything—the sea, cold air, people who didn't look like him, and the sheer, crushing scale of the universe. But out of that frantic, neurotic brain came Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu, a story that didn’t just launch a thousand imitators; it fundamentally broke the way we think about horror. Before this, monsters were usually things you could understand. A vampire wants your blood. A werewolf wants your meat. You can stake one or shoot the other with silver. But Cthulhu? Cthulhu doesn't even know you exist.
That’s the core of cosmic horror.
When "The Call of Cthulhu" first appeared in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, it wasn't an immediate world-shaking hit. It was just another pulp story. Yet, here we are, nearly a hundred years later, and you can’t walk through a gaming shop or scroll through a streaming service without seeing those green tentacles. It’s a bit weird, honestly. We’ve turned a symbol of existential dread and human insignificance into plushies and breakfast cereal mascots.
The Structure of a Nightmare
The story itself is told through a series of documents. It’s "found footage" before cameras were a thing. Francis Wayland Thurston, the narrator, is sorting through the papers of his late grand-uncle, a professor at Brown University. He finds a clay bas-relief of a monster that looks like a mix of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature. It’s gross. It’s wrong. It’s "the call."
Lovecraft wasn’t interested in jump scares. He wanted to build a sense of "cosmic indifferentism."
The plot moves in three distinct acts. First, there’s the horror in clay—a young artist having fever dreams about "dead Cthulhu waiting in R'lyeh." Then, there’s the tale of Inspector Legrasse, who busts a cult in the Louisiana swamps. Finally, we get the actual encounter at sea. The Emma, a schooner, finds an island that shouldn't exist: R'lyeh. The geometry is all wrong. The angles are "acute where they should be obtuse."
If you’ve ever felt a sense of vertigo looking at a vast, empty sky, you’ve felt a tiny fraction of what Lovecraft was aiming for.
Why R'lyeh Matters More Than the Monster
Most people focus on the big guy—the mountain that walks. But the setting of Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu is the real star. R'lyeh is a "nightmare corpse-city." It’s built with non-Euclidean geometry. Now, Lovecraft wasn't a mathematician. He basically used "non-Euclidean" as a fancy way of saying "this place makes my brain hurt."
In the story, one of the sailors is actually swallowed by an angle on a wall. Not a hole. An angle.
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That is terrifying because it suggests that our understanding of physics is just a thin veil. We think we know how the world works, but we're basically ants living on a rug, unaware that someone is about to vacuum it. S.T. Joshi, the preeminent Lovecraft scholar, often points out that Lovecraft’s horror comes from the realization that human laws and human interests have zero validity in the wider universe.
The Cthulhu Mythos is a Shared Hallucination
Lovecraft didn't actually use the term "Cthulhu Mythos." That was August Derleth, his protégé and posthumous publisher. Lovecraft referred to his interconnected stories as "Yog-Sothothery." Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
One of the coolest things about Lovecraft was that he encouraged his friends—writers like Robert E. Howard (who created Conan the Barbarian) and Clark Ashton Smith—to borrow his monsters and books. He wanted a "shared universe" decades before Marvel made it a billion-dollar business. He’d mention the Necronomicon in a story, then Howard would mention it in another. This created a sense of "truth" for the readers. If multiple authors were talking about the same forbidden books, maybe those books actually existed?
It’s meta-fiction at its finest.
- The Necronomicon: Originally called Al Azif, supposedly written by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred.
- The Great Old Ones: Beings like Cthulhu who ruled Earth eons ago and are now sleeping.
- The Outer Gods: Even bigger, scarier things like Azathoth, the "blind idiot god" at the center of the universe.
Misconceptions: Cthulhu Isn't a God (Exactly)
There is a huge misconception that Cthulhu is a god in the traditional sense. He’s not. In the context of Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu, he’s an extraterrestrial being of immense power, but he’s still biological. He’s a "High Priest" for the Great Old Ones.
He’s also not "evil."
Evil requires intent. When you step on an ant while walking to your car, you aren't being evil. You just didn't notice the ant. To Cthulhu, humans are the ants. This is why the cultists in the story are so unsettling. They aren't worshiping him because he’ll be nice to them. They’re worshiping him because they want to be the first ones eaten when he wakes up. It’s a bleak, nihilistic worldview that felt very "at home" in the post-WWI era, where old certainties about progress and civilization had been blown to bits in the trenches.
The Problematic Legacy
You can’t talk about Lovecraft without talking about his racism. It’s baked into the prose. In "The Call of Cthulhu," the cultists are described in derogatory terms, linked to "degenerate" racial groups. It’s ugly. It’s pervasive.
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For a long time, the horror community tried to ignore this or hand-wave it as "a man of his time." But honestly? Even for the 1920s, Lovecraft was considered intense. Modern creators have had to grapple with this. You see it in works like Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff or Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. These authors take the "cosmic horror" elements but flip the perspective, showing that for many people, the real "unspeakable horror" isn't a tentacle monster—it's the person living next door.
Acknowledging the creator's flaws doesn't mean the work loses its power. It just means we read it with our eyes open.
Gaming and the "Sanity" Mechanic
If you know the name Cthulhu today, there’s a good chance it’s because of the tabletop RPG. Published by Chaosium in 1981, Call of Cthulhu changed gaming forever. In Dungeons & Dragons, you get stronger as you go. You get more HP. You get better swords.
In the Cthulhu RPG, you get weaker.
The more you learn about the monsters, the more "Sanity" points you lose. You don't "win" a Lovecraftian story. You survive it. Maybe. Usually, you end up in an asylum or dead by your own hand because the truth is too much to bear. This "Sanity" mechanic has bled into video games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Bloodborne, and Eternal Darkness.
It’s a perfect ludic representation of Lovecraft’s philosophy: knowledge is dangerous.
The Science of the "Uncanny"
Why does a giant squid-man still scare us? It’s the "Uncanny." Lovecraft was great at taking things that are natural—tentacles, slime, huge scales—and putting them where they don't belong.
Psychologically, Cthulhu represents the "Sublime." This is a philosophical concept where something is so big, so beautiful, or so terrifying that it overwhelms the senses. Looking at the Grand Canyon is the Sublime. Looking at a galaxy-sized monster that thinks you’re a snack is also the Sublime.
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Modern Interpretations That Get It Right
If you want to see the DNA of Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu in modern cinema, look at Annihilation (2018). It captures that "shimmer" of something totally alien rewriting our biology. Or The Lighthouse (2019), which captures the isolation and the descent into madness.
Even Ghostbusters is basically a Lovecraft story played for laughs. Think about it: an ancient, interdimensional being (Gozer) is summoned by a cult to a city where the architecture acts as a lightning rod for spiritual energy. That’s pure Lovecraft.
How to Experience Cthulhu Today
If you’re new to this world, don't start with a 500-page biography. Jump into the primary sources.
- Read the original short story: It’s public domain. You can find it for free online. It’s surprisingly short.
- Listen to a dramatic reading: The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society does incredible "Radio Theatre" versions that feel like they’re from the 1930s.
- Play the games: If you’re a "controller" person, play Call of Cthulhu (2018) or The Sinking City. They aren't perfect, but they get the atmosphere right.
- Visit Providence: If you’re ever in Rhode Island, visit Lovecraft’s grave. People leave small stones and octopus figurines there. It’s a pilgrimage site for the weird.
The real "call" of Cthulhu isn't a psychic shout from the bottom of the ocean. It’s the nagging feeling we all get sometimes—that the universe is much bigger, much older, and much stranger than we like to admit. Lovecraft just gave that feeling a face. A very, very ugly face.
To really dig into the influence of cosmic horror, pay attention to the "unexplained" in the media you consume. Notice when a story refuses to give a monster a clear motive. Notice when the "hero" doesn't actually save the day, but merely delays the inevitable. That's where the shadow of Cthulhu lives.
Next time you’re near the ocean at night, look out at the dark water. Think about the miles of crushing pressure and absolute blackness beneath the surface. Then remember the Emma’s crew and the city of R'lyeh. That chill you feel? That’s the legacy of Lovecraft. It’s not about the tentacles. It’s about the silence that follows the realization that we are not the masters of our house.
For those looking to explore further, check out the H.P. Lovecraft Archive for a deep dive into his letters. He wrote nearly 100,000 of them. They offer a raw, unfiltered look at the man behind the myth—the fears, the obsessions, and the strange, lonely life that birthed the modern era of horror. No matter how much we try to "cute-ify" Cthulhu, the original text remains a jagged, uncomfortable piece of literary history that refuses to be ignored.