Post by stephen on Mar 9, 2020 15:06:34 GMT
This film is now on UK release, but I have not seen it yet.
It features in the cover article of the March issue of the UK journal Fortean Times: "The Mythos Meme" written by the film's director Richard Stanley. It's a substantial article with some fine illustrations. 'Meme' is not a term that I have ever used, or that i am particularly fond of; as Stanley informs us it was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976, where atheist Dawkins uses the term 'religious meme'. Wikipedia tells me that:
A meme (/miːm/ MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.
It's an appropriate term for the main thrust of Stanley's presentation: as to how and why Lovecraft's 'Cthulhu Mythos' has become so pervasive and influential in popular culture and entrenched in "the 21st century zeitgeist".
More interesting is the story of Stanley's personal life-long involvement with the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the genesis of his own interpretation of "The Colour Out of Space", which is one of Lovecraft's most powerful tales and more science-fiction than mythos.
There is a character in the film called Ezra, who is based on someone called Uranie, "the grizzled bush shaman who lived off the grid as a hermit in a cottage he had built by hand at the base of the Rennes plateau near my home in the French Pyrenees." Seems that Uranie believed in the Great Old Ones and practiced rituals from "a battered French language edition of yet another hoax Necronomicon", the George Hay/Colin Wilson/Robert Turner recension. He performs a ritual invocation of Yog Sothoth under dramatic conditions, which Stanley regards as an insane spectacle, then interest starts to pick up on his filmscript adaptation...
So there you go. The film seems well worth seeing. Comments anyone?
It features in the cover article of the March issue of the UK journal Fortean Times: "The Mythos Meme" written by the film's director Richard Stanley. It's a substantial article with some fine illustrations. 'Meme' is not a term that I have ever used, or that i am particularly fond of; as Stanley informs us it was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976, where atheist Dawkins uses the term 'religious meme'. Wikipedia tells me that:
A meme (/miːm/ MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.
It's an appropriate term for the main thrust of Stanley's presentation: as to how and why Lovecraft's 'Cthulhu Mythos' has become so pervasive and influential in popular culture and entrenched in "the 21st century zeitgeist".
More interesting is the story of Stanley's personal life-long involvement with the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the genesis of his own interpretation of "The Colour Out of Space", which is one of Lovecraft's most powerful tales and more science-fiction than mythos.
There is a character in the film called Ezra, who is based on someone called Uranie, "the grizzled bush shaman who lived off the grid as a hermit in a cottage he had built by hand at the base of the Rennes plateau near my home in the French Pyrenees." Seems that Uranie believed in the Great Old Ones and practiced rituals from "a battered French language edition of yet another hoax Necronomicon", the George Hay/Colin Wilson/Robert Turner recension. He performs a ritual invocation of Yog Sothoth under dramatic conditions, which Stanley regards as an insane spectacle, then interest starts to pick up on his filmscript adaptation...
So there you go. The film seems well worth seeing. Comments anyone?