O lovecraftiano no cinema: como aniquilação (2018) subverte o horror cósmico de H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract

The objective of this research is analyzing how cosmic horror is taken from literature to visual media, more specifically, how the elements of the genre are represented on film, from a piece of media strongly based on the abstract to another based on the concrete. In order to do that, we’ll use the movie Annihilation (2018) as object of analysis, aiming to observe how lovecraftian horror, as a genre, was adapted. Created and popularized by the author Howard Phillips Lovecraft during the decades of 1920s and 1930s, cosmic horror, a subgenre of horror which has as its main characteristic the combination of horror and weird fiction, has been for a long time considered as “unadaptable” to film both by critics and by the public. Mostly, due to the abstract content on which the stories are based upon, which contrast directly to the film media, as the latter depends directly on the concrete to tell stories. However, since the 1980s, Lovecraft’s work has been constantly adapted to film, in addition to generating several works inspired by the author’s. One of these is Annihilation, a 2018 feature film, adapted from the homonym novel (2014), which possesses strong elements of cosmic horror, with subversions that directly oppose the genre. For this research, we’ll use as reference the works of scholars both from literary narratives as Jonathan Culler (1999), Norman Friedman (2002) and Salvatore D’Onofrio (1995); as well as from film narratives, as François Jost and André Gaudreault (2009), Syd Field (2001) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1983). On the theory of adaptation, authors such as Robert Stam (2008), Linda Hutcheon (2013) will be used; dialoguing with the perspectives of the intertextuality theory, proposed by Julia Kristeva (2005), developed on transtextuality by Gerard Genette (2010) and revised by Tiphaine Samoyault (2008), and afterwards, on the intermediality by Claus Clüver (2006) and Irina Rajewsky (2005). Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) theory on parodies will be used to approach how the film subverts the genre it adapts. Regarding horror on literature, the writings of Lovecraft (2017, 2021) himself and his scholars, such as S. T. Joshi (2014) and Caio Bezarias (2021) will be used, relating them to the theories of Tzvetan Todorov (1973) and David Roas (2014) a on fantastic literature; and Longino’s (1996) and Edmund Burke’s (1993) on the representations of sublime and beautiful. Antonio Candido’s (2009) theories on the character from fiction and Wayne C. Booth’s (1983) and William Riggan’s (1981) regarding unreliable narrators will be utilized to approach literary elements present on Lovecraft’s work, and how they were adapted on Annihilation (2014) and Annihilation (2018).