Skip to main content

Hear H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories Read by Roddy McDowall

"Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable," goes a typical line in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. "Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied." As a writer of what he called "weird fiction," Lovecraft specialized in the narrator plunged into a loss for words by the sheer incomprehensibility of that which he sees before him. But in the case of this particular sentence, the narrator sees not an ancient monster awakened from its millennia of slumber but "nothing less than the solid ground" — or as the reader put it, nothing more than the solid ground. But then, most of us haven't lived our entire lives locked up high in a castle.

The story is "The Outsider," something of an outlier in the Lovecraft canon due to its outsized popularity as well as its Gothic tinge. By the author's own admission, it owes a debt to his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed represents Lovecraft's "literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height."

In 1926 or today, one could do much worse for a model than Poe, and critics have also detected in "The Outsider" the possible influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. Anyone daring to read the story aloud must thus strike a balance between several different competing tones, and few could hope to outdo Roddy McDowall's performance on the 1966 record above. But as Dangerous Minds' Paul Gallagher notes, that actor, "child star of Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka," is "hardly a name one would associate with the master of the unnameable."

Though McDowall would later "star in some jolly decent horror movies like The Legend of Hell House and Fright Night, he was in 1966 best known for the likes of "That Darn Cat! or Lord Love a Duck or the stage musical Camelot." In the event, McDowell proved "almost a perfect choice to give life to Lovecraft’s words," delivering a "light boyish charm" combined with an intonation that "causes a growing disquiet and a dreadful sense of unease," altogether suitable for the work of "the weird and reclusive Lovecraft." He also brings to the role the kind of faint, unexpectedly refined menace that would make him famous as Cornelius and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films. After "The Outsider" McDowall reads Lovecaft's earlier story "The Hound," and surely his voice is just the one in which Lovecraft fans would want to hear spoken, for the very first time in Lovecraft's oeuvre, the name of the Necronomicon.

via Dangerous Minds

Related Content:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories Free Online: Download Audio Books, eBooks & More

23 Hours of H.P. Lovecraft Stories: Hear Readings & Dramatizations of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” & Other Weird Tales

An Animated Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft and How He Invented a New Gothic Horror

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of “Weird Fiction”

Making The Planet of the Apes: Roddy McDowall’s Home Movies and a 1966 Makeup Test

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Hear H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories Read by Roddy McDowall is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2IqOr1m
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more