Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Gustaf Johansen

Entities & creatures

Cthulhu

Cthulhu is the immense, dreaming being at the center of a worldwide cult and the submerged Pacific city R’lyeh. Lovecraft reveals it through art, anthropology, inherited papers and a disastrous sea voyage; later writers and game designers turn that concentrated story into a much larger mythology.

16 min read · 3,180 words

Characters

Francis Wayland Thurston

Francis Wayland Thurston is the Boston narrator who assembles the evidence in The Call of Cthulhu. His investigation begins with the papers of his grand-uncle George Gammell Angell and expands through interviews, travel and Johansen’s maritime manuscript. He does not directly see Cthulhu. His terror comes from recognizing that independent records appear to describe different parts of the same event.

5 min read · 1,035 words

Characters

Gustaf Johansen

Gustaf Johansen is the Norwegian sailor whose manuscript supplies the direct encounter with R’lyeh and Cthulhu in The Call of Cthulhu. As second mate of the Emma and later commander of the captured Alert, he survives the opening of the city’s immense door and escapes by driving the yacht into the pursuing being. His account reaches Thurston only after his death, and it does not contain all the connections that the later investigator makes from it.

5 min read · 876 words

Places

R’lyeh

R’lyeh is the submerged Pacific city associated with Cthulhu and its waiting hosts. The Call of Cthulhu reveals it through dreams, cult testimony and a brief, disastrous landing on an exposed portion of its immense, disorienting architecture.

5 min read · 867 words

Literature

The Call of Cthulhu

A scholar’s inherited papers, a young sculptor’s dreams, a police raid and a sailor’s hidden account converge on a being waiting beneath the Pacific. The Call of Cthulhu turns the act of connecting evidence into the central action of cosmic horror: its narrator discovers that a coherent explanation may be more frightening than an unexplained mystery.

14 min read · 2,771 words

Film & television

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

The Call of Cthulhu is a 2005 American independent adaptation directed by Andrew Leman from Sean Branney’s screenplay. Its 47-minute, black-and-white silent-film form uses the language of early cinema to follow Lovecraft’s geographically dispersed investigation into a submerged city and its surviving cult.

5 min read · 943 words

Themes & context

The Cthulhu cult

The Cthulhu cult is the secret religious tradition investigated through several separate records in The Call of Cthulhu. Its members await the return of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones, preserve images and ritual language, and claim continuity with humanity’s earliest dream-contact with older beings. Most of its doctrine reaches the reader through prisoners’ testimony, especially the account of Castro, while its wider organization remains only partly visible.

7 min read · 1,318 words