The Shadow Over Innsmouth Review

A review of Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth from the Gou Tanabe adaptation.

Transcript

00:00Lovecraft was afraid of many things in his life. He feared the modern world and all of its noise

00:12and demands. He feared germs and the many functions of the human body, and he was also

00:18afraid of fish. People aren't very sure where this fear rose from, but it connects with his

00:25fear of the deep ocean. Plenty of people, including myself, can relate to at least the fear of deep

00:32water. This is probably part of the reason why Lovecraft's mythos is still so impactful.

00:38In December 1931, Lovecraft would write one of his most famous stories, The Shadow over Innsmouth,

00:46and it would combine all of his fears into one story. Innsmouth is a very popular type of setting

00:54in Lovecraft-inspired media. It immediately drives home that feeling of hostility and danger that

01:00many take inspiration to this day. I think an apt comparison would be the village segment in Resident

01:06Evil 4. Usually, in Lovecraft's stories, they focus on a grand journey or a cosmic entity like

01:14in Call of Cthulhu or at the Mountains of Madness. In Innsmouth, the horror feels more personal and

01:22grounded, or at least for the first half. I feel like Lovecraft really hits a stride on this story

01:28because there's a lot more balance between the drama of the story and his lengthy descriptions

01:34of the architecture. He goes into painstaking detail to make sure that Innsmouth feels like a

01:40real place, and props to Tanabe for making probably the best iteration of Innsmouth we'll ever see.

01:46It's appropriately gloomy and dense. It must have been a very hard task for him to translate all of

01:52Lovecraft's terrains into something tangible. Tanabe is also doing his best work here with the most

01:59creepy imagery that he's done out of all the adaptations. One that particularly sticks out is

02:05the foreshadowing of the hotel. You have to love how much that Tanabe respects Lovecraft's writing

02:11while simultaneously adding more to it. I've also failed to mention this in previous adaptations,

02:18but I like how Tanabe's artwork is distinctly more American, for lack of a better term. It

02:25definitely doesn't look anime or stylized to a great deal. But other than that, the art style that

02:33he has chosen here adds a certain sense of realism to the story. Also, like always, his interpretations of

02:41Lovecraft's creatures looks so good. One thing I'm appreciating more about Lovecraft as I read his

02:48stories is the sheer amount of creativity involved. This guy was writing such intense material during

02:56the very early 1900s. His stories often reference other creatures within the mythos as well. I doubt

03:03that this was a very common feature in a person's writing at that time period when he was alive.

03:08I mean, many authors have their own shared universe, but this is way ahead of its time.

03:14There's certainly a lot more action involved in Innsmouth than his other stories as well.

03:19Things get pretty weird quickly at the beginning and just get weirder. I do have to wonder if the

03:25inspiration of this is from his time in Red Hook. For those of you who don't know, Lovecraft lived in

03:32Red Hook for about a year and had a burning hatred of the place due to its modern aspects

03:38and the amount of minorities. It's pretty obvious that the Innsmouth people are stand-ins for people

03:46of color. The story gets a little uncomfortable once you understand what they represent, but everybody

03:54knows that Lovecraft was a racist, of course. In many of his stories, he prominently features

04:00different cultures and ethnicities as threats, like in the ones of Call of Cthulhu, who worships

04:06the deity. It is a bit on the nose in Innsmouth, though, and I won't lie and say it didn't make

04:12me feel uncomfortable. I had no illusions of him being a good person by any means, but it's

04:18certainly here. If you can look past the weird undertones, Innsmouth stands as one of his best

04:24works. The twist at the end was definitely not what I expected, and I highly recommend checking

04:30it out, especially considering the Gotanabe adaptation.