Many people are fans of Lovecraft, and his work has been discussed extensively on this channel. It would be nearly a crime for a horror channel not to include the legendary father of horror and his masterpieces. We will look at the enormous, terrible Shoggoth in today’s movie, which is one of his most well-known inventions.
Shoggoth is a fictional monster from the Cthulhu Mythos. In his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929–30), H. P. Lovecraft referenced the beings in passing and later illustrated them in detail in his book At the Mountains of Madness (1931). This is Lovecraft’s longest novelette, and it offers the most extensive depiction of his cosmos and pre-human history.
Mountains of Madness was heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Only one full-length novel has been written by Poe. It starts out as a standard high-seas adventure but quickly turns into a strange and epic narrative set in anarchy with enormous albino human-eating penguins.
Shoggoths are the outcome of scientific investigations on an alien race known as The Elder Things, rather than evolution like humans or the deep ones. Employees, soldiers, and slaves of the Elder Things were the subjects of these genetic experiments.
Consider these monstrosities to be massive, intelligent, primitive acid-guzzling mounds; imagine if the primordial soup had sentience and a terrible disposition. The Shoggoths are the main antagonists in the Cthulhu Mythos. They are the most difficult and terrible creature in all of the myths that refuses to take the label of god. In some ways, they are the most Lovecraftian of his creatures. In terms of him, they are undoubtedly one-of-a-kind.
Shoggoth Creature From H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos
To truly understand this creature, we have to take a look at the history of the creation of the being. Aeons ago, according to Lovecraftian history, the Elder Things, a race of otherworldly beings, arrived on Earth. They were the first alien race to colonize the earth, arriving roughly one billion years ago. They were around six feet tall and resembled a large, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages on both ends.
They understood they needed a source of exploitable labor when they realized they needed it. They genetically created the Shoggoths to build cities, tend to crops, and do a variety of other chores for them, using their great scientific knowledge, and their innate shapeshifting skills made them ideal for operating on both land and sea.
The Elder Things’ technology was depicted as incredibly advanced, and At the Mountains of Madness even mentions that they may have had directed-energy weaponry off-handedly. However, they used sophisticated technology sparingly because their natural resilience and mobility rendered many forms of life-support and transportation redundant.
They were scientists who created the heretical Shoggoths to serve as slaves and build gigantic cities all across the world through arcane experiments. The Elder Things were already degenerating as a race by the time humans emerged, and they were losing some talents, such as space travel on their membranous wings.
However, their creation, the Shoggoth lived on. Originally intended to be nothing more than mindless labor directed by hypnotic suggestion, the Shoggoths gradually gained sentience, became dissatisfied with their station in society, and revolted against their masters over millions of years. While the Elder Things and their superior technology rapidly put down the revolt, annihilating the Shoggoths was no longer an option; the Elder Things had come to rely too much on their creatures for their civilization to survive without them.
After a few million years, the Shoggoths revolted once more, but this time they were more organized and caught the Elder Things completely off guard. The Elder Things withdrew to their last and greatest metropolis, buried deep in the Antarctic interior, after failing to block the Shoggoths’ advance with atomic and directed energy weapons.
This city, which was built both on land and underwater, was the site of the last fight against the Shoggoths. After losing control of the city’s landward side, the last Elder Things attempted to flee to the city’s undersea sector, unaware that it was already infested with Shoggoths, and the last of Earth’s Elder Things were annihilated by their former slaves.
From then till now, the number of Shoggoths operating on Earth has steadily decreased to almost nothing, and they can now only be found in the Elder Things’ abandoned metropolis in Antarctica, the deepest oceans, and locked away in the world’s darkest, most unreachable regions.
The Deep Ones, an undersea race, have been known to employ Shoggoths, specifically a breed known as Sea Shoggoths, though it is unknown what the terms of these contracts are or how payment is made. It is said that Mi-go aliens have also experimented with Shoggoths, executing mind-grafts on captive specimens to create a more tranquil and easy-to-control race. Ghols, or ghol-things, are what these Shoggoths are called.
What does Shoggoth look Like?
Shoggoths are shapeshifting, amorphous creatures. A shoggoth looks like a huge amoeba and is a sentient blob of self-shaping gelatinous flesh. In fact, the account given by Lovecraft in his story Mountain of Madness has the most definitive descriptions of shoggoths. They’re described as enormous amoeba-like monsters formed of iridescent black slime with many eyeballs “floating” on the surface, according to Lovecraft.
They are “protoplasmic,” meaning they have no predetermined bodily shape and can create limbs and organs at will. When formed into a sphere, a normal shoggoth is 15 feet wide, though the myth acknowledges the presence of others considerably larger.
Because shoggoths are amorphous, they can take on any shape they need, making them extremely adaptable in aquatic situations. In most Cthulhu Mythos media, shoggoths are depicted as intellectuals to some degree but cope with challenges only by their massive size and might.
As it chases human protagonists in At the Mountains of Madness, the shoggoth simply rolls over and smashes countless enormous penguins in its path. The very existence of shoggoths on Earth terrifies the character Abdul Alhazred. The shoggoths have a striking physical similarity to Ubbo-Sathla, a god-like creature credited with creating life on Earth.
If a shoggoth molded itself into a spherical, it would be around 15 feet in diameter, but there are larger and smaller variants. A shoggoth can shape itself into whatever organs or shapes it requires at the time; yet, in its natural state, it has a seething profusion of eyeballs, mouths, and pseudopodia.
It had the ability to move at amazing speeds when it was discovered at the South Pole. It was like watching a train approach someone who was standing on the train tracks. The shoggoth may murder its opponents by surrounding them and creating enough suction to decapitate them. During their uprising, they deliberately used this tactic to combat the Elder Things.
They apparently have a nasty, overwhelming odour that totally masks the Elder Things’ repulsive odour. The shoggoth’s peculiar characteristic is their repeated cry of “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” This is a sentence they copied from the Elder Things, demonstrating their mindless mimicry.
They are quite horrifying and frankly, disgusting to look at and have been portrayed in a number of different ways including in mutating or weaponized avatars.
Lovecraftian Monsters Shoggoth In Lovecraft Country
In terms of media depiction, the Lovecraftian monsters known as Shoggoths were recently featured in the series premiere of HBO’s Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft Country skillfully juxtaposes H.P. Lovecraft’s imaginary horrors with the brutal reality that many Black Americans currently suffer.
Combining real-life monstrosities, such as racism, with fictitious creatures may have seemed like a leap to some, but the show’s first season debut was a resounding success. Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, and Courtney B. Vance star in Lovecraft Country, which is based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel of the same name.
In the first episode, while on a guided trip and rescue attempt to find Atticus’ father, Montrose, Atticus, Leti, and George end up in a weird region of woods that they mistake for Ardham—a spot that only shows hazily on a map. Atticus, a science fiction novelist who enjoys Lovecraft’s work, describes what shoggoths are to Leti; little do they know, once the sun sets, the same creatures will appear to hunt them. The shoggoths featured in Lovecraft Country are blobby, multiple-eyed creatures with multi-layered rows of razor-sharp fangs, similar to the description in At The Mountains of Madness.
George, a well-read man, compares them to vampires and quotes Dracula by Bram Stoker: “Children of the night, pay attention to them. What kind of music do they make? “. The creatures behave in some ways like vampires; after one of the cops gets bitten, he begins to gruesomely transform into a shoggoth.
This, on the other hand, is more akin to what a werewolf or even a zombie might do in a horror film. The transition is swift and appears to be excruciating. The shoggoths are vulnerable to light, which Atticus and his family take advantage of by using headlights, flashlights, and road flares.
They will be safer as the sun rises for various reasons. They almost died at the hands of a sheriff earlier in the episode when they landed up in a “sundown county,” which was historically regions where Black people were not allowed after dark during the Jim Crow era.
Thus, in this depiction of the infamous shoggoths, they are giant bubble blob guard dogs of the Braithwaite estate with numerous eyes and multi-layered rows of razor-sharp teeth. They rustle through the woods at night, making chattering noises. The Shoggoths are shape-shifters as well, with the ability to stand on their rear legs like humans and even form heads atop their bodies. Shoggoths are blob-like creatures with elongated limbs and a blob body.
They are anatomically swift, muscular, enormous, and powerful. They have a big open jaw with a long tongue and over 4,000 razor-sharp teeth. They have additional jaw parts in their mouths that, when consumed, can liquidize their victims’ skulls. They also have gills on the side of their skulls that allow blood to escape and allow them to breathe underground.
They also have six legs: two forelegs, two back muscular legs with large shovel-like thick claws, similar to rat mole claws, and two less muscular legs on their chest, each with four sharp claws. They have a long sharp needle-like tail on the rear. The tail’s bones are larger at the base and get smaller as you go closer to the tip.
In terms of abilities, the Shoggoth has demonstrated the ability to dig very quickly into the ground with their large shovel-like thick claws to travel underground, especially during daylight hours, and they have also demonstrated the ability to not only run at high speeds but also to jump at various heights, often using tall trees to travel and jumping from one to another to catch their prey.
They do, however, have vulnerabilities in this depiction, and one of them is light, which Atticus, George, and Letitia exploited when purchasing headlights, flashlights, and road flares, all of which helped them survive.
They’ve been adopted in various stories outside of Lovecraft’s work, and they’ve even been loosely interpreted in games like Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, they also make an appearance in the Japanese light novel series My Maid Is a Formless Entity, a shoggoth is a key character. Tooru Araizawa, a high school student, lives alone.
Tooru’s father, an Antarctic paleontologist, sends him a chilled parcel with instructions on how to thaw it out. He places the green rectangular block in the bathtub, fills it halfway with warm water, and walks away for 30 minutes. When he returns, he discovers a female dressed as a maid in the bathtub, who introduces herself as Tekeli.
She reveals herself to be a shoggoth, grateful to Tooru’s 155 million-year-old father and speaking out against the Old Ones who had mistreated her and her people. All that has been translated is the first chapter and a portion of the second. The shoggoth’s single weakness, according to Lovecraft’s mythology, is fire; they are otherwise invulnerable.
Their appearance in Lovecraft Country, however, raised the standard for what’s to come and also how Lovecraftian characters and beings are portrayed in cinema and the big screen.
With that, we come to the end of this video. Which one of H.P. Lovecraft’s horrifying creations do you want us to discuss next? Tell us in the comments below and check out our channel for move Lovecraft-related content!