Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 5: Lovecraftian

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

A dark, ominous sense of dread. An ancient book with bizarre drawings and script. What’s this passage behind the walls? A staircase that travels down deep into the bowels of the earth. Something alien lurks in the darkness. Ancient and evil. A descent into madness.

Lovecraftian refers to a genre of fiction credited to H.P. Lovecraft during the 1920s and 30s. Rather than focusing of gore and shock, Lovecraftian horror focuses on a world-view called ‘cosmicism’ in which everyday life is believed to be just a veneer over a meaningless and alien reality that if fully revealed would drive a person insane.

H.P. Lovecraft

Some of the most common tropes of Lovecraftian horror are:

Great Old Ones - The beings first appeared in Lovecraft’s novella ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1931) but were already hinted at in the early short story ‘Dagon.’

Cthulhu - Cthulhu is in many ways a personification of the extreme nihilist vision of cosmicism. Cthulhu was first introduced in his short story The Call of Cthulhu published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. In the story he described it as ‘A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus- like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.’

Cthulhu

Necronomicon - A fictional grimoire capable of awakening Cthulhu and bringing the apocalypse. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft’s 1924 short story ‘The Hound’, written in 1922. Though its purported author, the ‘Mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft’s ‘The Nameless City’.

I highly recommend HP Lovecraft: The Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness by Charlotte Montague.

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 4: Retrofuturism

The term 'retrofuturism' was coined by T.R. Hinchcliffe for his book Retro-Futurism, published in 1967  by Penguin Press. In 1983, avant-garde artist Lloyd John Dunn resurrected the term and published a magazine by the same name dedicated to Xerox Art that ran from 1987 to 1993.

Elizabeth Guffey and Kate C. Lemay in their article "Retrofuturism and Steampunk" published in the Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, provides a good definition of retrofututism. They wrote, "Retrofuturism can be defined as an ambivalent fascination for a future that never came to pass. But, by engaging the popular strain of Futurism that thrived from the later nineteenth century through the 1970s, the term usually applied to an array of pop-culture ephemera from the early to mid-twentieth century, from robot toys to shark finned hovercrafts, pulp magazine covers to architectural utopias."

Pawel Frelik wrote in his essay "The Future of the Past: Science Fiction, Retro, and Retrofuturism", published in the Parabolas of Science Fiction, "The prefix "retro" may be used very liberally nowadays, but for the purpose of discussion I understand retrofuturism, or science fictional retroism, as a practice that specifically exploits the tensions between ideas about the future from our historical past - either actual predictions or fictions in time - and notions of futurity expressed in contemporary narratives." He goes on to write, "Retrofuturism, I suggest, refers to the text's vision of the future, which comes across as anachronistic in relation to contemporary ways of imagining it."

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as well as Blade Runner, both mentioned by Frelik in his essay, are certainly examples of Dieselpunk Retrofuturism. However, neither Pan's Labyrinth nor Raiders of the Lost Ark, both Dieselpunk movies, are retrofuturist for they both lack a "vision of the future".

Dieselpunk Movie "Blade Runner": Retrofuturism

Dieselpunk Movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow": Retrofuturism

A good rule of thumb is that all diesel-era style or themed retrofuturism is Dieselpunk but not all Dieselpunk is diesel-era style or themed retrofuturism.

Dieselpunk Movie "Pan's Labyrinth": Not Retrofuturism

Dieselpunk Movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark": Not Retrofututism

I highly recommend Pawel Frekik's essay "The Future of the Past: Science Fiction, Retro, and Retrofuturism" published in the Parabolas of Science Fiction.

Click here to hear a spirited discussion about Dieselpunk and retrofuturism.