Final Essay - At The Mountains Of Madness

Fear Is The Mind Killer – It Is The Little Death

At The Mountains Of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft

I contend that H.P. Lovecraft used the psychology of fear of the unknown on the mind, to make his short stories and books into popular fiction. Lovecraft used the strange attraction of fear and drew the average person to his works. I will illustrate the method of the creation of fear is as important as the psychology of the fear in how it affects our brain. It was H.P. Lovecraft himself who said; “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (Lovecraft 1) Lovecraft may not have completely understood the psychological forces as we understand it today, but with mental illnesses throughout his family, he understood the power of fear, and how it affected the human mind on the surface. Lovecraft created the themes that are used constantly in modern Horror Fiction through subtle use of language, and the creation of an entire mythos using a combination of mythologies. The wonder and unknown of the ancient civilizations and myths are used as a force or a universe that is vast, making the reader feel small in a large unknown and unfamiliar place.

Fear and memory have a special relationship. Lovecraft keys on this relationship in his text by examining things on the scientific expedition through a historical perspective and suggesting that we are actually delving into the memory of the earth itself. G. Stanley Hall talks about fear of this kind in “A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear” when referring to the memory y of a child. Being thrown into the air as an infant is not unlike a teenager on a rollercoaster, the fear is exciting and fun, and it stays in our memory as such. It can set up a desire for more of the same, but in some cases, given the right circumstance, this excitement becomes real fear, and has the opposite effect. Hall says; “It is always exciting and nearly all children love it up to a point (varying greatly with the extent of movement, who is responsible for it, a trusted friend or stranger, and especially with the diathesis of the child), beyond which it becomes a fear or perhaps a terror, causing shrieks and even convulsions, making the child forever after hate or fly and hide from those who toss it.” (Hall 322). In this one example we can see both the thrill of something fearful, and how it can easily turn to dread. Placed in our memories in this way, Lovecraft seeks to extract that same emotion from his readers by evoking the immensity of the unknown, and make the reader feel as though they are falling into a place where there is no familiarity. Lovecraft eases the reader into the unknown almost without them knowing by using a 2nd person perspective; “He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world’s rim. Atwood’s theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet.” Lovecraft goes on to describe a 700 mile long glacial void. These numbers were beyond imagining for most during the time period in which it was written. Pleasure becomes terror as the reader, who was previously wrapped in the comfort of scientific explanation and the known world is thrust into a new world where science and logic give way to true horrors both ancient and unfamiliar in landscapes vast and uncharitable, and ancient beyond comprehension. Part of the way H.P. Lovecraft does this is to mention previous explorers who had previously explored Antarctica.

It is entirely possible that Lovecraft use G. Stanley Hall’s aforementioned work to great effect in his own writings. Having been published in 1914 it would have been a book readily available in the large library Lovecraft had access to growing up. This representation of the psychology of fear is not dissimilar. Hall compared our experience before birth in the uterus to our development as a species from other forms of life through evolution saying; “Our ancestors floated and swam long before they had limbs, and they breathed by gill slits, which the foetus reproduces long before the development of lungs,” he then goes on to imply some are actually born with these vestiges as abnormalities, and says; “Although we cannot demonstrate rudimentary organs, we may not in fact have before us here some of the very oldest elements of our psychic life, reminiscent echoes of the primeval sea, on the other hand, and vestiges of dendritic life on the other, a pristine outcrop of the factor of the space sense itself.” (Hall 325) This explanation and description is not at all dissimilar to the language used by Lovecraft to explain the unknown “old ones” and creatures in his stories. Furthermore we can look at the way in which Hall describes the movement of an infant; “it creeps in many ways, forward, backward, sideways, also hitches, rolls and crawled, and even after it has just learned to walk may, if in a hurry, revert to creeping, or if in a great hurry, to the still more primitive and still faster method of rolling.” In this we can see more similarities in the way Lovecraft describes the movements of these ancient creatures who once ruled over the Earth in “At The Mountains Of Madness”. This grotesque description of growth, movement, and later, the psychological effects, could have had a great influence on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and helped him create fear on a base level that he hoped would strike a chord in our ancestral memory in some sort of psychic fashion as described in the work of Hall. Considering how his work was received since shortly after his death, the analysis holds true for many fans of Lovecraft, and the fear he created through these perceived processes grew into an entire Historical Society celebrating his works, and embracing the ideal.

As a father figure to modern Science Fiction and Horror, we can see Lovecraft begin with a premise of known facts and quantifiable data in order to create a viable reality in which to set a story of things unbelievable. Andrew Leman, in his work “In The Time Of H.P. Lovecraft” that Lovecraft spent time in the; “British Museum, diligently combing through science journals, magazines, and newspapers going back as far as 1779, collecting stories of strange occurrences for which there was no satisfactory scientific explanation, making cryptic notes to himself on thousands of small slips of paper.” (Leman 1) This was a genesis of the unexplained for Lovecraft. It was the establishment of the unexplained in the midst of what was plainly normal that allowed for great contrast. The Royal Society authors tell us; “The neuropsychological findings often show differentially severe impairment of fear recognition after amygdala damage, but it is seldom only fear that is affected.” (The Royal Society 1) The authors go on to imply that indeed the amygdala is part of the brain that responds to fear, and also allows coping with trauma. A good example is in the television show “Firefly”. Viewers see the character River Tam who has had her amygdala stripped as an experiment, this fact was first revealed in the episode Ariel. Her inability to cope is apparent, and her fear reactions are unstable at best because she was altered to the point where she was able to feel everything all at once including an empathic sense to those around her. She was built as a weapon because she had no fear once her coping mechanism was resolved later in the feature film “Serenity”.

It is further knowledge from other psychological research throughout history that explains the activation of fear of the unknown that causes human fight or flight in a crisis. The sheer scale used in Lovecraft’s work is part of what made mankind feel like a very tiny piece of a vast unlimited universe filled with mystery and the unknown. There was a sudden realization that even the alien Old Ones in Lovecraft’s work, who by their own right are most unnatural in appearance and composition, had a fear of an even more terrifying assortment of creatures that were even more frightening. This gives “At The Mountains Of Madness” many layers of the fear of the unknown. The fear of the unknown is still the same today as it was at the time At The Mountains Of Madness was released. Otto Brandt tells us of the unreasonable fears humans have over research, the location of biology labs, and even the tilt of the earth’s axis. It is just as much a fear of what may happen based on experience, as it is fear of true unknown things that compels mankind to both pursue the unknown, and run from it. Even with the advent of scientific discovery, there is always a theorist who imagines how the new discovery could destroy mankind. Even technology that has not been invented yet, such as nanotechnology were the center of discussion on a possible apocalyptic scenario involving out of control procreation of nanites resulting in the Grey Ooze Theory. (Phoenix, Drexler Briefing). It’s no surprise that Lovecraft is able to go the opposite direction and use things from prehistoric time and bring them into his literature as the unknown in the present. The sheer scale used in Lovecraft’s work is part of what made mankind feel like a very tiny piece of a vast unlimited universe filled with mystery and the unknown.

To see how the fear Lovecraft creates in At The Mountains Of Madness is attractive to a broad audience, we need look no further than the ongoing sales of both this book, and his related works. There is also the matter of the film attempts at the story that are the same or similar. Currently James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro are working on the film for a 2013 release that is sure to rake in over 100 Million dollars. Just about every film involving ancient astronauts owes their inception to At The Mountains Of Madness. Films, horror and sci-fi alike, owe a great deal to Lovecraft as they reap the unknown in their exploration of the unknown in Antarctica. Films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and the 2011 sequel rely heavily on At The Mountains Of Madness. Ridley Scott, Neill Gaiman, and countless other film makers and writers have used the same type of fear to attract millions of audience members and hundreds of millions of dollars.

There remains a good question based on all of the attraction in literature, film and other media. The love and attraction of fear and horror can be explained by the same fight or flight part of the brain, the amygdala. Leslie Fink of Live Science talks about this very attraction and also quotes New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux; “So far, though, the amygdala has the upper hand in the fear response. "This may explain why, once an emotion is aroused, it is so hard for us to turn it off," he says. If we like that sort of thing, it may account for why we’re so eager to turn it back on again.” In the Fink article, LeDoux also says; “If you have a good imagination, you can connect to your hardwired fears simply by thinking about a scary situation.” It seems that memory allows humans to replay scary situations, or scenes in their heads to get the same emotional response. It is also easy to see that the attraction to get the same emotional stimulus is what drives people to read, or re-read the same types of material, or use other media for the same response.

The final thing that ties Lovecraft’s creation of fear together in his novel is word choice and descriptive terminology for all senses and emotions. For example Lovecraft writes; “I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond.” (Lovecraft 245) All of these very descriptive emotions simultaneously by two characters illustrate how Lovecraft pulls out all the stops in an attempt to create a heightened sense of things. In the same paragraph; “…as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickets and in places obviously thinner.” The sheer amount of descriptors per page is a lot to take in as a reader, and while many readers are engrossed in the story and absorb them properly, the ability to take these in as they were intended wanes over time as the reader is overloaded with adjectives. That being said, it is interesting how Lovecraft’s choice of words give real scope and meaning to the objects, places, or emotions involved in any given part of the story. It is a tactic used by so many authors who came after him, but so few authors before him. This color of literature has a genesis, and that beginning in the genres of Horror and Science Fiction lies primarily with Lovecraft. His idol and inspiration, Edgar Allan Poe was a schoolmaster in the creation of mood. Lovecraft stood on his shoulders and generated an extraordinary display of language arts, imagination, and brilliant story-telling that resulted in a master of Horror. Lovecraft’s legacy will live on for centuries as his stories are expanded on, retold, role-played, revered, worshipped, and parodied. A brilliant success that he never lived to see, the billions of dollars generated by his genius is a good testament to those of us who have the pleasure to delve into the world of H.P. Lovecraft. The addictive fear of an unimaginable universe is ours to share, and it is easy to see why that fear is made so potent through the pen of the original Master of Horror.











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