Enter the Dagon

I come to bury Cthulhu, not to raise him.
We will not be debunking the Cthulhu/Cloverfield connection. There's no connection to debunk. There's no proof it's not Cthulhu, although it's not Cthulhu.

The initial Cthulhu connection came from the now-debunked Ethan Haas angle. There was something to it, loosely - talk of elder things and wars from the stars and such:

...and among them walked the ancients and those whose thoughts were not as to the towers and the marvels, but to the End and the destruction of the Earth and to the fires from which nothing could escape.

It's not out of line to think that sounds like the crawling chaos of Lovecraft's end times, though it's hardly conclusive. In any case, with the Ethan Haas material disavowed, there's very little to call Cthulhu up, other than a sizeable dose of internet wish-fulfillment that seems to have carried over from the initial Cloverfield moments when anything seemed possible.

There is some Lovecraftian content in the Slusho history (our only viable text of potential creature origin). The history tells of:

• -Noriko Yoshida, passing up usual pursuits in favor of unceasing scientific pursuit.


• -Said scientific pursuits, unquenchable, lead to perilous ocean voyage from which there is no return.


• -Descendant takes up scientific pursuit.


• -Scientist contacted in dreams by oceanic creature.


• -Following instruction from nonrational plane, scientist follows new experiment and is transformed into a new being.


• -Scientist begins process of bringing transformation to the world.

So Slusho/Cloverfield is Lovecraftian, but not Lovecraft.

On remake topic, the latest Lovecraft re-do is the upcoming Cthulhu (no release date, but premiered in June at the Seattle Film Festival). Cthulhu , from first-time filmmakers Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell, is a name-changed loose adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (in which Cthulhu does not appear). In this way, it has a connection to Lovecraft maestro Stuart Gordon's 2001 Dagon, also not an adaptation of the story with the same name, but rather another loose telling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

The Cthulhu flick has been gaining a lot of publicity (and may have an easier time finding distribution) as would-be debunkers point out that Cloverfield can't be Cthulhu since there's already a Cthulhu movie coming out. Ownership of Lovecraft's writing is tricky, though, with much of it considered public domain, and the Lovecraft estate (such as it is) generally allowing writers to use it freely.

More Lovecraft news to come...