Greetings, investigators! The stars are favorable tonight, and the dark powers we fight against are silent. That means that we have some time to talk, and we’d like to go deeper into the Hospital, one of the levels currently available in Lovecraft’s Untold Stories, to explain where its inspiration came from.
Hospitals are a common place in horror stories – we relate them with sickness, pain, and death, and that scares everyone for obvious reasons. But the Hospital in Lovecraft’s Untold Stories is not a random, run-of-the-mill scary location. It’s directly inspired by a Lovecraft short story, one with its own place in the history of the genre: Herbert West—Reanimator, serialized first in an amateur magazine and published some time later in the pulp classic magazine Weird Tales.
Although this story was not exactly one of Lovecraft’s favorites, it holds some significance for his later works. For a start, it’s the first mention of Miskatonic University, a fictional place located in Arkham (in turn, a fictional town in Massachussetts). Miskatonic is famous for holding a genuine copy of the Necronomicon; under its surface of a serious, Harvard-like teaching institution, its faculty has an ongoing interest for the occult. Almost 20 characters out of its Faculty appear in different Lovecraft stories playing different roles. They usually try to explain first, and fight later, the appearances of creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos and all the phenomena related to them.
Herber West—Reanimator is also one of the first depiction of zombies as reanimated corpses with mindless, violent, and cannibalistic impulses. Inspired by (and up to some point, mocking) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Herbert West is a scientist who turns to grave-robber to get corpses for his experiments in reanimating dead bodies using a mysterious serum created by him. This story is more a pulp fiction than Lovecraft’s cosmic horror: mad scientists, brain-eating monsters, gruesome murders, and sinister locations.
The Hospital in the game is a direct reference to Herbert West—Reanimator that we have mixed with other creatures of the Mythos, creating our own Untold Story.
The Hospital is not the only location directly inspired in Lovecraft’s stories that you will find in Lovecraft’s Untold Stories. Stay tuned, because next week we’ll introduce you to another one: the infamous Innsmouth, found in stories such as The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Until then, we hope you have good luck in your struggle against the Mythos, investigators – you’re going to need it for sure…
See you next week!
The devs