These are the instructions my professor posted.
Dr. Quack has become fascinated by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and after having read his entire corpus of stories and work, the good doctor wants to see how the work of other writers and short film creators might match up to Lovecraft’s work. After doing some research about what Lovecraft believed were essential to creating a terrifying horror story, Dr. Quack boiled it down to what he saw as three essential elements, which are:
To quote the great H.P. Lovecraft himself, he stated “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Dr. Quack found the other two elements as being that the human characters must be utterly believable and be seen as realistic and the outside creatures or alien threats must be completely non-human and totally different from humanity, thus embodying the fear of the unknown and being totally alien.
The lecture notes on the stories explain how these elements worked in Lovecraft’s stories. But what about those who want to capture those elements that Lovecraft used so well during his literary career that ended with his death in 1937 but lives on in those who were inspired by the type of stories he created, which has become known as Cosmic Horror.
Dr. Quack has selected two “creepypastas”, which are essentially online videos that present a short story to listeners and viewers along with two short films that model themselves after the atmosphere created by Lovecraft.
So what you are being asked to do by Dr. Quack is to look at all four of these works, and using the standards set forth by Lovecraft as constituting the foundations of Cosmic Horror or Lovecraftian Fiction, tell Dr. Quack whether you believe these two creepypastas and the two short films live up to that standard. Are they good material? Do they tap into that “fear of the unknown”? And should Dr. Quack recommend that Dr. Oakes use them in future classes?
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|