A new in-depth Gamasutra article on Scary Game Findings: A Study Of Horror [Video]Games And Their Players, which delves into exactly what scares Xbox 360 players. Finding out how good PC games look, compared to the Xbox — now that would be pretty scary…

I just can’t see the attraction of multiplayer PC games (and yes, I’ve tried some, from LoTR via Ryzom, to SL), but it’s interesting that Funcom has announced that The Secret World MMO game has sucked in more than half a million registered users. The Secret World is basically Lovecraft meets the Illuminati/Knights Templars in the modern day. And those figures are for a closed beta test, which makes the figures even more impressive. Size isn’t everthing with MMOs though, and as Age of Conan showed. What matters is the quality of the users. Get a half million 13 year-old idiots and the game is ruined. Although the website graphics for Secret World seem to pitch it at the early-teens market, the storyline is from Ragnar Tornquist — creator of the excellent Dreamfall: The Longest Journey — which might give it some adult appeal. The game goes live in April 2012. There’s some nice concept art floating around the web…

A blast from the past: Berni Wrightson’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”, in Eerie magazine from 1975…

So what could be next up in the seemingly-endless line of whimsical Lovecraft / kiddy-culture mash-ups? I’d say it has to be “Jim Henson’s the Muppets do Lovecraft”. To the sewing machines!

More Lovecraft theatre. UCLA Theatre Studies alumni will return to a site near their old campus to perform H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” in a graveyard.

Innsmouth Magazine #8 is now available, with a lovely cover and new Kindle version (USA & UK) and an ePub version on Smashwords.

An interesting-sounding new comic, announced at the NYC ComicCon, called Fatale.

Fatale is Lovecraftian horror noir — or “noirror”. A reporter in 2012 stumbles on a secret that leads him down the darkest path imaginable… to a seductive woman who’s been on the run since 1935, a mobster who may be an immortal demon monster, and the stories of all the doomed men who’ve been caught in their decades-long struggle. Fatale blends noir and horror to tell a riveting epic unlike anything you’ve seen before.

It’s a massive 12-parter that’s set to ship its first issue in January 2012. Which presumably means it’ll inevitably mutate into a chunky graphic novel weighing in at around 280 pages.

The Whisperer in Darkness movie premieres in White River Junction, Vermont at a special flood benefit screening, with a special talk about Lovecraft’s Vermont trip (the flooding there in the 1920s partly inspired the story) and a prop auction. The film’s makers have also donated three miniature sets to the White River Junction museum which is an interesting-sounding…

“eclectic display space for material culture and an experiment in a new taxonomy. Originally thought of as an “alternative” museum, the museum’s present form and activities resemble the 18th and 19th century “cabinet of curiosities” and point to an interest in the historic roots of museums and museology.”