A dark, twisted version of [[{{Arcadia}} rural New England]] as used as a setting for horror stories. Named for the author [[HPLovecraft H.P. Lovecraft]]--a native of Rhode Island--who wrote a number of tales set in a New England milieu, usually small isolated towns, that are dark and foreboding, populated by hostile and [[CorruptHick corrupt (in several ways) hicks]] that often are not quite human, twisted by the influence of ancient horrors and extradimensional deities (and [[KissingCousins generations of inbreeding]]). Milder versions of this can be found in other types of horror. If you don't want as many New England Accents, Upstate New York will do, although it probably won't be quite as Eldritch.

This setting has certain common points with the DeepSouth, in that the depiction could be construed as condescending and offensive to those who live in such environs, but there are two important differences: In Lovecraft country, evil and corruption is mostly supernatural in origin, and the setting is solely used for horror stories. American TV can depict a rural New England that is not Lovecraft Country, but the rural South is almost always the DeepSouth, unless the author is southern himself.

For analogous settings outside of New England, see CampbellCountry.

Most examples are [[{{Literature}} literary]], as successful adaptations to other media are seldom seen.
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!!Examples

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[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* Forget the current WordOfGod that it's in New Jersey, or the usual assumption that it's "New York at night": [[{{Batman}} Gotham City]] is clearly smack in the middle of LovecraftCountry.
** In fact, Arkham Asylum, the CardboardPrison all of Batman's villains end up in, is named after one of Lovecraft's towns.
* Much of the X-Men craziness takes place in upstate New York. Including the ancient evil of the N'Gari. One of their entrance points into our realm happened to be on Xavier's property. Oops.

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[[folder: Film ]]

* Although not strictly Lovecraftian, the film ''SleepyHollow'', being a loose adaptation of an 1819 horror story by Washington Irving, features a milieu that has much in common with LovecraftCountry. The film includes supernatural horrors, witchcraft and the [[strike:cheap trick]] cinematographic technique of using a blue camera filter to make everything seem bleaker in an isolated small town in early 19th century New York.
* The horror film ''TheBlairWitchProject'' is set in the woods of Maryland--a bit south for LovecraftCountry, but it worked.
** The hills of northwestern Maryland/southwestern Pennsylvania look an awful lot like New England. ThisTroper has spent a lot of his life in both areas.
* ''TheAmityvilleHorror'' is an allegedly true story about a haunted house in New York.
* ''In The Mouth Of Madness'', an [[HPLovecraft H.P. Lovecraft]]/{{Stephen King}} homage, is set primarily in New Hampshire or on the road to that state.

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[[folder: Literature ]]

* The stories of [[HPLovecraft H.P. Lovecraft]] more or less created this setting, including the fictitious Massachusetts towns of Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth. {{Lovecraft}}'s stories, together with writings by other authors set in the same universe, are collectively known as the ''CthulhuMythos'', after one of the [[EldritchAbomination nightmarish deities]] that occur in the setting. Most of the locations mentioned above are in fact based on real-life places:
** Arkham is Salem, albeit a bit further west.
** Innsmouth is Newburyport.
** Kingsport is Marblehead.
** Dunwich may be Athol, Wilbraham, the lost town of Greenwich, or any number of other towns in the Pioneer Valley.
*** "The Colour Out of Space" was inspired by the flooding of Greenwich for the Quabbin Reservoir.
** The Miskatonic is the Merrimack river.
** Several colleges and universities claim to have inspired Miskatonic University, but the two leading candidates are the University of Lowell (inland, but located on the Miskatonic/Merrimac river) and the University of New Hampshire (which is closest to the seacoast).
* The overwhelming majority of {{Stephen King}}'s stories are set in LovecraftCountry, though mostly in Maine, whereas Lovecraft set most of his stories in nearby Massachusetts.
** That's called "[[WriteWhatYouKnow writing what you know]]". King is a Maine native.
** Not only is Maine Lovecraft Country according to {{Stephen King}}, he [[WordOfGod specifically pinpoints]] the source of all related supernatural weirdness in places such as the fictional town of Derry, Maine and--er--[[TheDarkTower himself]].
* Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," a short story set in the woods outside [[TheColonialPeriod colonial]] Plymouth and involving [[DealWithTheDevil deals with the Devil himself]], making this OlderThanRadio.
* "Rip Van Winkle" and other Washington Irving stories, if you push the definition to include upstate New York. "The Devil and Tom Walker" would be a good example as well, as like "Young Goodman Brown" it has a theme of Puritans seeking out {{Satan}} en masse.
** Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster", which uses yet another variation on this theme, takes place in New Hampshire.

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[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* ''KingdomHospital,'' the U.S. remake of Lars Von Trier's excellent darkly humourous ghost story ''{{Riget}}'' (known as ''The Kingdom'' to Anglos) is set in a New England hospital, possibly because the legacy of LovecraftCountry in fiction assured that it would be perceived as the most suitable locale, but also because the adapted screenplay was written by StephenKing.

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[[folder: Tabletop RPG ]]

* The ''WorldOfDarkness'' sourcebook ''Rage Across Appalachia'', a crossover between ''WerewolfTheApocalypse'' and ''ChangelingTheDreaming'', covers the area exactly how one would expect from the World of Darkness. IE, it's a playground for Black Spiral Dancers, unseelie fae, and wouldn't you like to know what else.
** The ''MageTheAwakening'' {{Sourcebook}} "Boston Unveiled" portrays rural Massachusetts as filled to the brim with insane mages, mutant cannibals, twisted spirit exiles living in the ghosts of frontier houses and [[EldritchAbomination horrors from an alternate history so abhorrant that it was aborted into an anti-reality]] (which many of the cannibals happen to worship).
*** "Boston Unveiled" has the reputation among Boston gamers as being one of the most chronically incorrect sourcebooks in the game series. Half the information on real places and people is incorrect, the other half is out of date.
* And, well, ''CallOfCthulhu''.

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[[folder: Video Game ]]

* ''SilentHill'' is apparently supposed to be located in New England, although one of the locales, Toluca Lake, is apparently a real place in California.
** WordOfGod says that they're not the same place, though this hasn't stopped people from speculating. (This troper included.)
*** Speaking as a previous resident of Toluca Lake - which is a residential area in Los Angeles, near North Hollywood - this troper is disinclined to see any visual connection. The nearby San Bernardino Mountains, however, are not dissimilar in appearance to Silent Hill, and even feature a town called TwinPeaks.
** Even stranger, the movie adaption takes place in West Virginia. This troper, who lives nearby, doesn't think it's a stretch to think of the place as the Lovecraft Country of the south.
*** The screenplay adaptation was inspired in part by the real life ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Once a coal mining town, it was abandoned when an underground coal vein caught on fire and could not be put out, resulting in amongst other things a constant haze of smoke that ''did'' put out a Silent Hill vibe.
* ''CityOfHeroes'' has Croatoa, a suburb of the titular Rhode Island metropolis which is slowly being pulled into the spirit world.
* Raccoon City of the ''ResidentEvil'' series claims to be in the midwest but has geography and architecture which strongly resemble New England.
* The ''Call of Cthulhu'' PC adventure game ''Shadow of the Comet'' is set in [[strike:Innsmouth]] Illsmouth, a small New England town with a [[CosmicHorror big problem]].
* In ShadowHearts: From the New World the gang takes a trip to Boston's Arkham University for information on the enemy they are fighting. Naturally, some of the staff there are summoning up {{Cosmic Horror}}s for you to do battle with.
* The Roivas Mansion in EternalDarkness is in Rhode Island.

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[[folder: Web Comics ]]

* Although ''TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob's'' [[NothingExcitingEverHappensHere Generictown]] is a little too innocent to qualify as Lovecraft Country itself, one of its neighboring towns is Innsmouth, where the police keep getting crank calls about "fish people."

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[[folder: Web Original ]]

* The WhateleyUniverse: [[SuperheroSchool Whateley Academy]] is an easy walk from Dunwich (although the authors set it in New Hampshire) and a nice drive from Arkham. Even closer are a variety of Class X sites so Lovecraftian and dangerous that even superpowered mutants can't deal with what's there. There's even a truly horrific site in the campus sewer system.

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[[folder: Western Animation ]]

*''Scooby Doo'' seems to be set a lot in Lovecraft Country.
**Therefore proving that if Lovecraft protagonists weren't so worried about the unknowable elder lore, Cthulhu would turn out to just be a guy in a mask.
*** And he would have gotten away with it when the stars were right, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids and their dog!
**** Don't worry. With strange eons even LongRunners may die.
**** Some of us wished that just once, the Great Monstrous Thing had turned out to be completely real, and just as completely unconcerned about the triflish mortal "kids" and their attempts to...do what, exactly? ...LovecraftCountry without being actual Lovecraft Sites.
* TheSecretSaturdays love these places.
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