A Lovecraft Christmas With Help From Mark E Smith

Traditional Christmas carols recast as celebrations of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Sweet huh?

Here are a couple more fine examples (with some Warcraftian assistance in the first one)…

There’s a lot more on the TubesofYou including takes on I saw mommy kissing Yog-Sothoth and Away in a Madhouse. You can waste all of Christmas morning watching this stuff. Believe me.

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is responsible for these wonderfully twisted songs, and they are also the folks who run Cthulhu Lives, a live-action roleplaying game based on Lovecraft’s fiction. Equal-opportunity blasphemists, they also produced a Lovecraftian parody of Fiddler on the Roof.

We’ve posted about HPLHS here before, the trailer for one of their films “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Of course, they have CDs for sale, and if you get really excited you could buy their deluxe gift set featuring a 2-CD, 2-sing-along-book set in a hand-made Solstice Tentacle.

Finally, on a vaguely related seasonal-Lovecraft note, a few years ago the erstwhile BBC site Collective asked Mark E Smith, the singular lead singer of post-punk dada-rockers The Fall, to read a Christmas story. Smith as usual went against expectations and chose The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, which is kinda set at Christmas-time but that’s about it.

Here’s what Smith had to say about his choice of story:

“I’ve been a fan of HP Lovecraft since I was about 17. I chose to read this story because it’s very unusual for him; it’s not like his other tales. They are usually about people who live underground, or threats to humanity – which I like as well – but The Colour Out Of Space is quite futuristic. He wrote it in 1927, which is weird.

Those who, like me, like this sort of thing… will find it the sort of thing they like. Smith’s voices is an acquired taste, and admirers enjoy the flat, garbled trudge of it so much that even a chance to hear him read sports scores.

Folks not yet enamored by Smith may find this: Impenetrable! Frustrating! Vaguely seasonally relevant!! You even get to see him drink a glass of water. You can always read the story yourself online or pull it up and try to follow along with Mark…

mikl-em
Mikl-em

Actor, nerd, poet, producer, writer mikl-em made his name short so you wouldn't have to. In addition to his blog you can find his writing in "Hi Fructose" magazine and witness him almost life-sized in various plays at The Dark Room Theater in SF's Mission district.

He tends to write about theater, humor, San Francisco culture and history, and stuff that's just plain weird. He thanks Scott for sharing the keys to the Laughing Squid virtual HQ and promises to uphold whatever it is that the mirthful cephalopod would prefer to be uplifted.

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