Lovecraft project wins Amazon Studios attention

Online retailer Amazon recently decided to start Amazon Studios, hoping to snag original scripts and pitches, and turn them into movies.

Fear.net has a new interview with screenwriter Alex Greenfield

“His biggest success so far has been The Temple, a Lovecraftian tale about evil in the Afghani desert. With The Temple, Alex won Amazon’s July 2011 overall Best Script Award — then Amazon gave him a bunch of money to create a “test movie.” Alex took us through the process of working with Amazon Studios, and tells us about his upcoming genre projects.”

Rather than the underwater setting of the Lovecraft story, in Greenfield’s version the temple is found by U.S. Special Forces in the lawless mountain region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Namecraft of Lord Dunsany

It’s behind a paywall, but this new academic article might interest…

Robinson, Christopher L. (2012)   “The Stuff of Which Names are Made: A Look at the Colorful and Eclectic Namecraft of Lord Dunsany”.   Names: A Journal of Onomastics.  Volume 60, Number 1, March 2012, pages 26-35.

“Lord Dunsany’s prolific namecraft provides a rich field for study, but poses difficulties for traditional approaches to names in literature, which typically seek out the hidden meanings or symbolisms of isolated names. An alternative approach is to look for trends in the forms and substances of the author’s inventions as a whole. To this end, Emile Souriau’s threefold typology of neologisms proves useful. In the first category, Dunsany camouflages pre-existing vocables of diverse origins. In the second, he employs anglicized versions of forms identified with foreign languages and nomenclatures, though he does not introduce actual foreign sounds. In the third, he constructs names from morphological building blocks. Whether English or foreign, Dunsany divests his source materials of their original referents, yet retains traces of their idiomatic provenance. Colorful and eclectic, his inventions resonate within a mythopoetic encyclopedia of diverse literary, historical, and cultural traditions.”

Lovecraft to Borges: cities in deserts

A seemingly new (Nov 2011) short scholarly paper, in French. Reflets de villes dans le désert : de Lovecraft a Borges (“Reflections of cities in the desert: Lovecraft to Borges”)…

“There is a traditional conception of the fantastic city. It rises in the Gothic novel, and has been perpetuated in the modern horror, imposing an urban topography across two or three levels — articulated as a social reality, a visceral fear, and as a symbolic expression.”