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A dark, twisted version of rural New England as used as a setting for horror stories. Named for the author 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 corrupt (in several ways) hicks that often are not quite human, twisted by the influence of ancient horrors and extradimensional deities (and 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 Deep South, 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 Deep South, unless the author is southern himself.
For analogous settings outside of New England, see Campbell Country.
Most examples are literary, as successful adaptations to other media are seldom seen.
Examples
Comic Books
- Forget the current Word Of God that it's in New Jersey, or the usual assumption that it's "New York at night": Gotham City is clearly smack in the middle of Lovecraft Country.
- In fact, Arkham Asylum, the Cardboard Prison 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.
Film
- Although not strictly Lovecraftian, the film Sleepy Hollow, being a loose adaptation of an 1819 horror story by Washington Irving, features a milieu that has much in common with Lovecraft Country. The film includes supernatural horrors, witchcraft and the
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 The Blair Witch Project is set in the woods of Maryland—a bit south for Lovecraft Country, but it worked.
- The hills of northwestern Maryland/southwestern Pennsylvania look an awful lot like New England. This Troper has spent a lot of his life in both areas.
- The Amityville Horror is an allegedly true story about a haunted house in New York.
- In The Mouth Of Madness, an H.P. Lovecraft/Stephen King homage, is set primarily in New Hampshire or on the road to that state.
Literature
- The stories of 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 Cthulhu Mythos, after one of the 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 Lovecraft Country, though mostly in Maine, whereas Lovecraft set most of his stories in nearby Massachusetts.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," a short story set in the woods outside colonial Plymouth and involving deals with the Devil himself, making this Older Than Radio.
- "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.
Live Action TV
- Kingdom Hospital, 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 Lovecraft Country in fiction assured that it would be perceived as the most suitable locale, but also because the adapted screenplay was written by Stephen King.
Tabletop RPG
VideoGame
- Silent Hill is apparently supposed to be located in New England, although one of the locales, Toluca Lake, is apparently a real place in California.
- Word Of God 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 Twin Peaks.
- 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.
- City Of Heroes has Croatoa, a suburb of the titular Rhode Island metropolis which is slowly being pulled into the spirit world.
- Raccoon City of the Resident Evil 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
Innsmouth Illsmouth, a small New England town with a big problem.
- In Shadow Hearts: 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 Horrors for you to do battle with.
Web Comics
- Although The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob's 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."
Web Original
- The Whateley Universe: 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.
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 Long Runners 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? ...Lovecraft Country without being actual Lovecraft Sites.
- The Secret Saturdays love these places.
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