Cthulhu fhtagn

They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.         Lovecraft, Howard P. "The Call of Cthulhu"

Well, Howard, what are we to make of this? Bad dreams? A harrowing ride on the subway crammed in with the savage hoards? Madness?

This is not someone who is overcome by fear. He would not dwell on such bad dreams if he could not face them. The alien terror that he is, after all, attempting to unleash on us, his readers, is rather a weapon which is his revenge for what has really overcome him, humiliation. Humiliation has been his lot whenever he has ventured outside of the family sanctuary. A sanctuary which has inevitably lost its guardian spirits: first his father, then mother, then grandfather, then aunts. It is incomprehensible to the boy how the Old Ones came to be stripped of their power and it is unknown to him what will summon their return. But it must be so that they will return for otherwise there will be no vindication for him against the inevitably hostile world outside.

Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

And, at last, little Howie Lovecraft will get off.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about this Bad Movie Night. Duty Now for the Future!