The Thing That Should Not Be: Dean Winchester, Metallica, and H. P. Lovecraft
I have a whole big complex meta I'm writing on class and words and meaning. But that's not a post for midnight before my weekend begins.
No, my post right now is about Dean Winchester.
Dean Winchester doesn't know about H P Lovecraft because he was out having sex with women.
Well, Mr Winchester, I have a question for you. Just what were you listening to when you were having sex with all of those women? I'm going to answer for you: Led Zeppelin and Metallica.
Therefore you have absolutely no reason to not know the entire plot of Lord of the Rings as well as almost all of the Lovecraftian mythos. In fact, you should possibly even associate the One Ring and Lurking Fear with sex with strangers in the back of the Impala.
Given that Dean goes so far as to hum Metallica to cope with debilitating fears, why are we supposed to believe that he doesn't know jack about H P Lovecraft? Are the writers assuming we know nothing about Metallica's work? Does anyone want to shed any light?
Arguably, as a fan of the genre and a hunter, Dean would know more about Lovecraft and his followers than the average member of either group alone. Metal groups have done everything from retelling Lovecraft's greatest hits while screaming and wailing on their guitars to writing odes to Lovecraft's death. And even if Dean thought that was odd and maybe wasn't an expert, he'd at least know who Lovecraft was and what he meant to horror and metal.
(I will note that I am hugely biased because I found Lovecraft's work through Metallica. But if I managed that leap, I'm pretty sure a more hardcore fan than I would at least have a passing knowledge of who the man was.)
For those who aren't Metallica fans, I'm just going to put a couple Metallica songs side by side with lines from Lovecraft. If you know both, you can probably skip this section.
The Thing That Should Not Be (by Metallica)
Messenger of Fear in sight
Dark deception kills the light
Hybrid children watch the sea
Pray for Father, roaming free
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
great Old One
forbidden site
He searches
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell
Crawling Chaos, underground
cult has summoned, twisted sound
Out from ruins once possessed
fallen city, living death
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
timeless sleep
has been upset
He awakens
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell
Not dead which eternal lie
stranger eons Death may die
drain you of your sanity
face The Thing That Should Not Be
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
great Old One
forbidden site
He searches
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell.
Select lines from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (available here) Note: Pieces taken out of the order in which they appear.
“When it come to matin’ with them toad-lookin’ fishes, the Kanakys kind o’ balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts-that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller-them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent."
" I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow moon-saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure-for who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal-so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track-and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.
It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined-nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way-would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw-or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream-flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating-surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal . . . and some were strangely robed . . . and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head. . . ."
No, my post right now is about Dean Winchester.
Dean Winchester doesn't know about H P Lovecraft because he was out having sex with women.
Well, Mr Winchester, I have a question for you. Just what were you listening to when you were having sex with all of those women? I'm going to answer for you: Led Zeppelin and Metallica.
Therefore you have absolutely no reason to not know the entire plot of Lord of the Rings as well as almost all of the Lovecraftian mythos. In fact, you should possibly even associate the One Ring and Lurking Fear with sex with strangers in the back of the Impala.
Given that Dean goes so far as to hum Metallica to cope with debilitating fears, why are we supposed to believe that he doesn't know jack about H P Lovecraft? Are the writers assuming we know nothing about Metallica's work? Does anyone want to shed any light?
Arguably, as a fan of the genre and a hunter, Dean would know more about Lovecraft and his followers than the average member of either group alone. Metal groups have done everything from retelling Lovecraft's greatest hits while screaming and wailing on their guitars to writing odes to Lovecraft's death. And even if Dean thought that was odd and maybe wasn't an expert, he'd at least know who Lovecraft was and what he meant to horror and metal.
(I will note that I am hugely biased because I found Lovecraft's work through Metallica. But if I managed that leap, I'm pretty sure a more hardcore fan than I would at least have a passing knowledge of who the man was.)
For those who aren't Metallica fans, I'm just going to put a couple Metallica songs side by side with lines from Lovecraft. If you know both, you can probably skip this section.
The Thing That Should Not Be (by Metallica)
Messenger of Fear in sight
Dark deception kills the light
Hybrid children watch the sea
Pray for Father, roaming free
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
great Old One
forbidden site
He searches
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell
Crawling Chaos, underground
cult has summoned, twisted sound
Out from ruins once possessed
fallen city, living death
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
timeless sleep
has been upset
He awakens
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell
Not dead which eternal lie
stranger eons Death may die
drain you of your sanity
face The Thing That Should Not Be
fearless Wretch
insanity
He watches
lurking beneath the sea
great Old One
forbidden site
He searches
Hunter of the Shadows is rising
immortal
in madness You dwell.
Select lines from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (available here) Note: Pieces taken out of the order in which they appear.
“When it come to matin’ with them toad-lookin’ fishes, the Kanakys kind o’ balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts-that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller-them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent."
" I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow moon-saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure-for who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal-so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track-and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.
It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined-nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way-would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw-or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream-flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating-surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal . . . and some were strangely robed . . . and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head. . . ."