Zwillinger's Call of (to?) Cthulu

Also how is Lovecraft's xenophobic casting of of those of not northern European decent in his stories any different than say Hollywood's default racial/ethnic casting of bad guys in movies? It reminds me of a quote from Thank You for Smoking where only Russians, Arabs and villains are allowed to smoke in movies.

The mix has changed a bit over the years. Russian and other former USSR or Iron Curtain countries are now the "new" force behind organized crime. Hispanics are often portrayed as involved with drug cartels in large cities. Asians are making a surge recently just not from the big three, China, Japan, Korea (except North). It's all Malaysia, Thailand and other non-specific southeast Asian countries are also drug gangs or hired muscle. Of course we still have middle-eastern terrorists. I think the only "foreign" culture that doesn't get cast as villains by default in Hollywood are Indians (well maybe in Amazing Spider-Man there's one).

Popular media always cast the minority, those that fall outside the cultural norm at the time, as potentially evil. If you don't understand why someone plays video games, read comic books, SCA, cosplay, anime, are goth or simply have another hobby that none of your friends and family participate in, they are suspect. Look how the media tries the identify the out of the ordinary likes some nutcase has and then blame that for why they're a nutcase. Society likes to cast the "strange and unusual" as threats. Popular media just gives society what they want to hear.

As another semi-on topic thing, the Skulls revamp that's currently on the Beta server has them talking in broken English to represent them as being mostly drawn from the Eastern European community in Paragon City.

Very interesting thread.

Setting aside the racism themes for a moment, I always found something interesting about Lovecraft's horror. It was apparent to me that he considered the concept of great age to hold a quality of horror. It's frequent in his works to directly tie ancientness with negative adjectives, implying that things that are old are intrinsically terrible.

It might be that for truly epic time scales, hundreds of thousands or millions of years, he meant for this to convey a sort of alien horror - gulfs of time so large might imply that anything so old is automatically alien to mankind. However, I'm not sure this is really what he was going for, as he presented it on much smaller time scales as well. For example, I remember him once describing houses so old they had thick layers of shingles on the roofs from generations of re-roofing, and this was written in a way that suggested to me that this great age made this place awful, even though it represented very approachable human time scales.

On the topic of his racism, I always believed he was intensely racist long before I read any analysis of his works. I enjoyed what he wrote, but not all the messages therein.

And I didn't always find scary at all things he seemed to think were the pinnacle of horror, even though I liked how he wrote about them.