The original story began from the tale of two fishermen—Edward W. And Francis Klarrman—heading across the bay one day in 1943, looking to haul in their daily catch. The two men caught sight of a 12-foot-long serpentine creature, not too far from their vessel. They saw this creature turn to look at them several times. It turned its horselike head almost completely around, before disappearing under the waves.
The entire experience was astonishing and the Chesapeake Bay Monster has become a unique fixture of local history. Their description of Chessie was rivaled only by the more widely-known Loch Ness Monster. Plenty of witnesses have described Chessie as long, black, and snakelike, but the reports have varied drastically. Whether Chessie is 12-foot serpent, or a 30-foot serpent this cryptid has been reported as far back as 1846. Captain Lawson originally reported this strange creature when he saw it at the tip of the bay. It isn’t difficult to imagine that it is still considered a tall tale even to the present.
The Legend of Chessie
While it’s true that the legend hasn’t been substantiated with scientific fact, those who claim to have seen her range from retired CIA officers, fishermen, soldiers, and regular civilians. Those who argue her existence point out that the plausibility of her existence is much larger than her cousin across the pond—the Loch Ness Monster. This is due to the fact that the Chesapeake Bay has much more direct access to the open ocean than Loch Ness; as one of Britain’s largest and deepest freshwater lakes, it is connected to the sea, but there are nearly 7.5 miles of the River Ness between the lake and the oceanfront.
Scientific advancements have given us the capability to explore the ocean floor, but that hasn’t revealed every secret. Chessie has somehow kept its legend alive through its cunning, elusive, shy, and daring spirit. The existence of Chessie remains plausible, despite evading any type of classification.
People are most likely to catch a sighting of the Chesapeake Bay Monster between May and September. This is likely due to the warmer weather which causes people to flock to the beach. Do the larger crowds draw the curious creature closer to shore? Or are the increased number of watchful eyes the cause of the nearly 30 reports per year?
Sightings of the Family-Friendly Fiend
In 1982 a guest of Robert and Karen Frew captured the first known footage of the sea monster. The Frews were having a cookout at their seaside home on Love Point, when they noticed something strange. The guest noticed this creature undulating through the water near the shore. When they couldn’t identify what they were seeing they grabbed their camera.
Unfortunately, video evidence from 1982 was sub-par and with the camera zoomed all the way in all that was captured was a blurry dark gray mass snaking through the water. After being sent to the Smithsonian for verification, the professionals analyzed it, but all they could say with certainty was that the dark blurry mass was, in fact, a living creature. While they couldn’t confirm that it was Chessie, it fueled the fire of a legend that had previously been a laughable local tale. This of course brought on a lot of skeptics and caused the Frews to be the target of criticism and controversy—with many accusing them of participating in a hoax for clout. Thankfully for the legend of Chessie, the candid nature of the Frews report brought out witnesses who had remained silent due to their unwillingness to become social pariahs.
A more in-depth description of Chessie came from an encounter in 1985 when a recreational fisherman and his friend hooked a fish out on the bay. When this fisherman turned to see what he had caught he was met with a shockingly huge serpentine creature as it erupted from the water, a snapped fishing line hanging from its mouth. It rose approximately twelve feet out of the water, exposing its diamond-shaped flippers and ellipsoid body before submerging into the depths of the bay. This pair of fishermen described this creature as having green-yellow reptilian skin, with barnacles covering its back. Are we to believe that previous accounts only ever witnessed the creature’s long neck and not the entire body?
A 2014 sighting of Chessie described it as a long, black, serpent winding through the water of Magothy River. These witness accounts are conflicting, but it’s unclear whether or not these reports are of different creatures. This particular witness was parked aside the Magothy River at high tide, around 1:40 AM when he saw Chessie. The witness didn’t specify the lighting situation surrounding the sighting. Initially, he believed that what he saw was two creatures traveling together. A lack of photo evidence caused his sighting to remain unverified.
Sea Serpents like Chessie
Reports of sea serpents like Chessie (or even Nessie for that matter) aren’t uncommon—after all, our planet is 71% water and less than 10% of that has been thoroughly mapped out and explored. The existence of these kinds of creatures cannot be completely ruled out, which is how these kinds of legends still have so much steam after one hundred fifty years.
The spirit of Chessie maintains its playful innocence, instead of a malicious nightmare fuel cryptid. In the years since the first reported sighting Chessie has become a mascot for the people in the Bay. As a result, its likeness has been turned into plushies, stickers, and apparel to promote tourism.
Georgia-based author and artist, Mary has been a horror aficionado since the mid-2000s. Originally a hobby artist and writer, she found her niche in the horror industry in late 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. Mary’s evolution into a horror expert allowed her to express herself truly for the first time in her life. Now, she prides herself on indulging in the stuff of nightmares.
Mary also moonlights as a content creator across multiple social media platforms—breaking down horror tropes on YouTube, as well as playing horror games and broadcasting live digital art sessions on Twitch.
Why on earth would a delicate woman of your stature write about such awful, disturbing, and blasphemous things?
As the daughter of the brilliant feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin as the reformist writer and philosopher William Godwin, Shelley is famously noted for her 1831 introduction to a reprint of Frankenstein. Her explanation that, “it is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing…” shows exactly how significant they were to her self-image.
The Liberating Feminine Voice of Horror
It is genuinely not surprising that the daughter of the renowned mother of the modern feminist movement was a feminist herself. Mary Shelley’s life reflected by the inspiration she took from her mother’s radically forward-thinking when it came to equality on the basis of sex. Her mother’s best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, lived on through Shelley’s own lifestyle and unstoppable life-force, but how did that translate into her own voice as an author? There is a lot of dialog between scholars as far as interpretations of her motivations behind the wonderfully disturbing work she created in her lifetime. Some suggest that Frankenstein is a horror story of maternity as much as it is about the perils of intellectual hubris.
From the time that Mary ran away with Percy Shelley all through the time she spent writing Frankenstein, Mary was going through maternal horror of her own—she was ceaselessly pregnant, confined, nursing, and then watching her first three children die at young ages. It doesn’t help matters that Shelley’s life was haunted by the fact that her mother died only ten days after Mary was born. Truth be told though, it was unsanitary practices by the attending physician, Dr. Poignand, and not through any fault of Shelley’s. It was Puerperal Fever, caused by doctors moving directly from autopsies to births without any means of sanitation, that took Shelley’s mother from her.
The tragedy of her mother’s death so early on in her life influenced Shelley greatly and losing three of her own children just compounded upon her morbidity. She used this mindset to her advantage though and translated her message of what it felt like to be born without a right to history—for, “what is woman but man without a history…” as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar stated in The Madwoman in the Attic. We can see Mary Shelley in Frankenstein’s monster, as a creature born without a history, or at least without an unalterable or supported history. Both Shelley and Frankenstein’s creation shared the feeling of being born without a soul, “as a thing, an other, a creature of the second sex,”—for being a woman in the time that Mary Shelley lived was to be a second-class human being.
A Symbol for Early Equality
Shelley can be considered a symbol for both feminism and equality of sexual orientation; a less discussed topic than anything else of her life, there is evidence that shows that Mary sought the company of women after her husband’s death. This is an important topic to mention, as it is signifies the very secretive intimate history of homosexuality and how big of a part it actually played during the Romantic era.
Life From the Bed of a Grave
Writer Sandra Gilbert insists, that Mary Shelley’s, “only real mother was a tombstone,” but she didn’t mean it figuratively—when Mary was a child, her father brought her to the churchyard where her mother was buried and she would continue to visit on her own after that. This became especially true when her father married their next-door-neighbor Mary Jane Clairmont, a woman who could never replace her own mother and who made Shelley’s home life unbearable. In her earliest years, Shelley used, “reading … [as] an act of resurrection,” due to feeling excluded from her father’s household after his marriage. In a sense, it is said that she “read,” or knew her family then determined her sense of self through her mother and father’s literary works. She would endlessly study her mother’s works during her younger years while sitting at her mother’s graveside.
The burden of this type of childhood was also expressed through Mary’s first work when she included a scene wherein Victor Frankenstein visits the cemetery where his father, brother, and bride were buried before leaving Geneva to search for the monstrosity that he had created. “As night approached, I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery … I entered it and approached the tomb which marked their graves … The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around, and to cast a shadow, which was felt but seen not, around the head of the mourner,” where Victor ultimately calls for revenge against his creation, “O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee, I swear to pursue the daemon … And I call on you, spirits of the dead; and on the wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work.” Godwin passed on his idealization of books being a sort of host for the dead, that to read a book by a departed author would be to know them entirely. Then again, Godwin was also fiercely interested in communicating with the dead, another trait that he passed to his daughter through that fateful visit to her mother’s grave.
[The dead] still have their place, where we may visit them, and where, if we dwell in a composed and a quiet spirit, we shall not fail to be conscious of their presence.
William Godwin, Literary Tourism, And the Work of Necromanticism
Necromantic Preoccupations of Her Father
Like father, like daughter; Shelley picked up her father’s proclivity for intrigue in the dead. Godwin often tried to connect his readers to the dead by encouraging the placement of illustrious graves. In his eyes, such a grave would honor them in their place of rest and give both the deceased and their mourners a way to stay on speaking terms, of sorts. He even expressed his desire to do so himself in quite an illustrated manner, when he said, “[he] would have [the dead] … around [his] path, and around [his] bed, and not allow [himself] to hold a more frequent intercourse with the living, than with the good departed.” He meant this of course as a means of conveying his desire to communicate with the dear ones he had lost in his lifetime and not in a sexual context.
Mary may have strayed from that viewpoint in a way, after she was introduced to an impassioned devotee of her father’s, Percy Shelley. The two spent much of their time together at the grave of Mary’s mother, where her father likely believed they were conversing about their reformist ideals. The truth lay a bit beyond that, however, as it was by her mother’s grave that she lost her virginity and pledged herself at sixteen to a twenty-year-old Percy. While it may seem creepy, to Mary the cemetery was more than just a resting place for the dead, she saw it as a place where all of life converged for her.
Learning all of this about Shelley definitely brings us some clarity on how she possessed the wit and imagination to create two new genres within literature—that of Science-Fiction horror, along with the brilliance of the first Apocalyptic Dystopian styles.
Georgia-based author and artist, Mary has been a horror aficionado since the mid-2000s. Originally a hobby artist and writer, she found her niche in the horror industry in late 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. Mary’s evolution into a horror expert allowed her to express herself truly for the first time in her life. Now, she prides herself on indulging in the stuff of nightmares.
Mary also moonlights as a content creator across multiple social media platforms—breaking down horror tropes on YouTube, as well as playing horror games and broadcasting live digital art sessions on Twitch.
One would not need to delve too far into the horror genre without the legendary name of Clive Barker popping up. Born October 5th 1952, this English author, director, playwright and visual artist is recognized as one of the most unique and imaginative minds to adopt the macabre. In the mid 80’s Barker rose to prominence, carving himself a spot as a leading horror writer with his Books of Blood series that, when released, featured a quote from none other than Stephen King stating: “I have seen the future of horror, and his name is Clive Barker”. Since then a great amount of his work has been translated to film, some of which (arguably the better) he even took it upon himself to write and direct. Barker wrote the screenplays for Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), both directed by George Pavlou. Displeased by how his material was handled, he moved to directing with the first in the extensive Hellraiser series, born from his novella The Hellbound Heart. To this day Barker branches into every area of the horror genre he can, his surreal and fantastically unsettling style inspiring thousands to look at horror just a little differently.
Ever the visionary, Barker has created legions of characters for his books and comic series, often painting them himself. His visual art had been featured in galleries across the United States, as well as featuring heavily in his own books, making his end products far more vivid forms of personal expression.
Barker horror adaptations and spin-offs in comics include the Marvel/Epic Comics series Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Pinhead, The Harrowers, Book of the Damned, and Jihad; Eclipse Books’ series and graphic novels Tapping The Vein, Dread, Son of Celluloid, Revelations, The Life of Death, Rawhead Rex and The Yattering and Jack, and Dark Horse Comics’ Primal, among others. Barker served as a consultant and wrote issues of the Hellraiser anthology comic book.
Barker’s short story The Forbidden (from Books of Blood) was adapted for the screen in Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman, and has been adapted again recently into a reboot of the same name. With this new modernisation of the classic 80s tale, it only stands to reason that a fresh new audience of moviegoers will be introduced to Barker’s madness, viewers who will be wondering what else has been crafted by such a unique maestro of morbidity.
BOOKS
The Damnation Game (1985)
Not long after publishing the first trilogy of Books of Blood in 1985, Barker set about writing his novel The Damnation Game, a Faustian story laden with all the dark eroticism and fantastical gothic style that readers have now come to expect from the man.
Recently released convict and avid gambler Marty Strauss finds himself in the employ of Joseph Whitehead, one of the richest men in the world. As Whitehead’s bodyguard, Strauss encounters an increasing series of unnatural and horrific events involving Whitehead and a demonic man named Mamoulian, who has some connection to a ‘deal with the devil’ made by Whitehead during WW2. With detailed subject matter ranging from cannibalism and incest to raising the dead and self-mutilation, this early vision of Barker’s was no less potent and uncompromising than the works it led to.
The Hellbound Heart (1986)
Keeping his gory, visceral style in the spotlight, Barker published his novella The Hellbound Heart in November 1986 though Dark Harvest’s Night Visions Anthology series.
Hedonistic criminal Frank Cotton, a man so enamored with sensory experience that he will harm anyone to achieve it, finds a puzzle box known as the Lemarchand Configuration, a device which when completed can summon a torturous demonic race known as Cenobytes. With no differentiation between pain and pleasure, these entities introduce whoever summons them to eons of horrific torture, sometimes transforming their victims to Cenobytes themselves.
In 1987 Barker wrote and directed a film adaptation known as Hellraiser, which later snowballed into the long-running franchise featuring Doug Bradley’s infamous Pinhead that we know and love today. After the success of the first Hellraiser flick, The Hellbound Heart was released as a standalone title by HarperPaperbacks in 1991.
Cabal (1988)
Cabal is Barker’s third novel and was published in the US in 1988 as part of a collection featuring it and several shorts from the sixth volume of his Books of Blood series. The story centres around Boone, a troubled young man suffering from a vague mental disorder, and his trusted psychiatrist Decker. Decker informs boon that he was responsible for a series of brutal murders in Calgary, though Boone can remember nothing of actually committing the heinous acts. Seeing himself as a monster, Boone begins searching for the legendary city of Midian, where other monsters had apparently found refuge.
In 1990 Barker wrote and directed a screen adaptation of the novel, entitled Nightbreed after the legion of downtrodden folk who inhabit Midian. Sadly the flick was a commercial and critical flop, Barker pointing out that this was due to the film company trying to sell Nightbreed as a standard slasher without any real knowledge of the lore behind the book. Cabal thankfully remains a classic, featuring tense storytelling, rich worldbuilding around the mythical city of Midian and one truly disturbing arch villain.
The Great and Secret Show (1989)
The first in a trilogy that came to be known as The Art trilogy by fans, The Great and Secret Show is Clive Barker’s fantasy novel which he describes as about “sex, the movies and Armageddon in Hollywood”. He also stated that it was the hardest to write of all of his books.
The story concerns Quiddity, a mystical dreamscape pictured as an ethereal sea, which two highly evolved men are locked in a decades-long battle for control of. Randolph Jaffe wants to leach power from the realm of Quiddity while Richard Fletcher would like the place untouched and untainted. Their battle seeps from this realm into the real world where reality itself is affected, as well as the fate of the entire human race.
Of course, in true Barker style, he has also been quoted to say: “”The sexual stuff has always been very strong in my books and this is no exception. There are scenes of profound weirdness that shouldn’t be talked about over a civilized dinner table.”
Imajica (1991)
Steering further into dark fantasy realms and away from his usual horror affair, Barker next released Imajica in 1991, proclaiming that it was his favourite piece of his writing up to that point. At a massive 824 pages on first printing, the epic describes Earth as the Fifth Dominion and chronicles its reconciliation with the other four Dominions, esoteric parallel realities known to none but a few on Earth. A vast and intricate story covering themes such as god, love, sex, gender and death, much of the content of which apparently came to Barker in dream form. Barker was so inspired by these dreams that he wrote Imajica inside of fourteen months, working twelve to fourteen hours a day.
The Thief of Always (1992)
The Thief of Always was something of a curveball for Barker, since it contained plenty of his surreal oddities in style and story, though refrained from his usual foray into dark sexuality to create a fable intended for children just as much as adults.
‘The Holiday House’ is a fictional paradise for children where a bored and disenchanted eleven-year-old named Harvey Swick one day finds himself. The house is indeed a paradise, where it is Halloween every evening, Christmas every night and seemingly has four seasons occurring in the space of a day. After spending time at the Holiday House, Harvey begins to uncover secrets about its elusive creator, Mr Hood, and a plot so hideous that he should want to leave the place forever and not look back.
This was a title in which Barker included his own art, both on the cover and featuring black and white illustrations of his throughout.
FILMS
Rawhead Rex (1986)
The script for Rawhead Rex was written by Clive Barker himself, though directing fell to George Pavlou, and the end result was a schlocky flop of a B-movie that, aside from later cult attention, garnered little to no worth to anyone involved. Adapted from another short in the Books of Blood series concerning a pagan creature predating Abrahamic religion who is inadvertently awakened by farmers in the Irish countryside. Aside from some of Barker’s classic subtext around ancient evil, sexuality and religion, the film was saturated in many of the expected tropes of 80s monster movies, pushing it more in line with a slew of other similar flicks.
A lot of the negative reception reportedly came from the design of Rawhead himself. Barker’s original concept for the monster was apparently that of a nine-food phallus with ground meat for a head. When Rawhead came out looking more ogre or gorilla-like, and not unlike a lot of B-movie monsters at the time, Barker felt dissatisfied to the point that he vowed to be much more involved in his later adaptations. This is considered the main reason he chose to write and direct Hellraiser (1987) next. He has even voiced an interest in remaking the film in his own vision, though his reboot of Hellraiser will quite likely be next in line.
Hellraiser (1987)
Hellraiser is not only Barker’s most famous and recognizable work but is a milestone for the horror genre to this day. Based on his 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser’s story centers around young Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), caught in a hellish struggle between her mother Julia, her criminally hedonistic uncle Frank and a gang of leather-clad, body-modded, extra-dimensional demons called the Cenobites. Frank is torn apart by chains upon failing to solve an ancient puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration, and after escaping the clutches of Hell begins to make his way back to the mortal world. He does so with the help of Julia, who kills men to feed his building form.
Most notable in this film is the performance of Doug Bradley as Pinhead, or ‘The Hell Priest’, the leader of the cenobites. The character was so expertly and chillingly portrayed as to spawn a series of over nine other films along with extensive series of comics and novels. Pinhead has even appeared as a playable character on multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight.
Far more than a simple horror, Hellraiser explored themes of religion, women’s agency, the pleasure-pain dynamic, ambition, hedonism, and of course sexuality as a conduit in the battle between good and evil.
Nightbreed (1990)
Operating somewhere in the midst between fantasy and horror, Nightbreed is an adaptation of Barker’s novel Cabal, wherein the disturbed Boone, here played by Craig Schaffer, is convinced of his murderous nature by the psychedelic therapist Decker, here portrayed by none other than David Cronenberg, and travels to find the mysterious city of Midian where he might find refuge.
After being shot to death by a police squad sent by Decker, and then mysteriously resurrected, Boone is given refuge in Midian and becomes acquainted by its quirky and visually striking populace of undead rejects. Boone must convince Midian’s people to fight back against his pursuers lest their secret be revealed to the entire world.
The film was a commercial and critical flop in its initial theatrical run, but has since become a cult success, with a director’s cut released in 2014, several tie-in comic books and two video games.
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Heralded by many as the best Barker adaptation since Hellraiser, The Midnight Meat Train is an adaptation of the 1984 short story of the same title. With a stellar cast featuring Bradley Cooper, Vinnie Jones, Brooke Shields and Ted Raimi, some top-drawer set pieces and an ending that leaves most viewers floored, this is undoubtedly the best modern Clive Barker experience there is on offer.
Directed by Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura (Alive), the story follows photographer Leon (Cooper) who is determined to capture the grit and seedy nature of New York’s subway system. As a character he is on the questionable end of the moral scale, committing such acts as photographing a sexual assault before making any attempt to stop it. He begins an obsessive habit of following serial killer Mahogany (Jones) also known as ‘The Subway Butcher’. While viewers are led to believe this will be a standard slasher affair, certain narrative curveballs ensure this will be a viewing experience you’ll not soon forget.
Joe first knew he wanted to write in year six after plaguing his teacher’s dreams with a harrowing story of World War prisoners and an insidious ‘book of the dead’. Clearly infatuated with horror, and wearing his influences on his sleeve, he dabbled in some smaller pieces before starting work on his condensed sci-fi epic, System Reset in 2013.Once this was published he began work on many smaller horror stories and poems in bid to harness and connect with his own fears and passions and build on his craft. Joe is obsessed with atmosphere and aesthetic, big concepts and even bigger senses of scale, feeding on cosmic horror of the deep sea and vastness of space and the emotions these can invoke. His main fixes within the dark arts include horror films, extreme metal music and the bleakest of poetry and science fiction literature. He holds a deep respect for plot, creative flow and the context of art, and hopes to forge deeper connections between them around filmmakers dabbling in the dark and macabre.
38 years after the release of the 1984 cult classic slasher film, The Mutilator, writer/director Buddy Cooper is bringing back the bloodbath with the long awaited sequel, Mutilator 2. Starring such horror icons as Terry Kiser (Friday the 13th Part VII, From a Whisper to a Scream) and Damian Maffei (The Strangers: Prey at Night, Haunt), as well as The Mutilator alumni Ruth Martinez and Bill Hitchcock, Mutilator 2 brings together modern horror and a taste of the 80’s fun that fans loved from the original.
You know a film has reached cult status when Rotten Tomatoes scores it at 24% but the diehards like James O’s review really brings it all to the table.
From 1984 comes The Mutilator. The Mutilator is unique is a few ways that set it apart from all the other slasher movies: First, it actually has a GOOD title and end song. It’s not 80s punk rock; it has a kind of jazzy feel to it. I like how this one lulls you into a sense of security by having the first two murders being almost bloodless, and then…WHAM! Gore galore! This one is very gory, and there’s one kill that almost made me throw up (the kill with the gaffe). It’s a great slasher movie, and definitely worthy of your time.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Alexander Taylor (Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street, Isolation, Paramount Plus’s Unknown Dimension: The Story Of Paranormal Activity, Arkansas, Eli Roth & Jason Blum’s Crypt TV) has signed on to score the upcoming sequel, from Bloody Disgusting’s article
Taylor said in a statement, “I’m so honored and excited to be a part of The Mutilator franchise. One of the best parts of this is the fact that Buddy Cooper is back! It’s rare for a legacy film to have the original writer and director come back, so you know this is going to be special. Buddy and I already have some cool themes and wild ideas for the score.”
Watch the Original 1984 Cult Classic Horror Film “The Mutilator” trailer on Youtube if you dare.
“I had 4 copies of The Mutilator (including a heavily edited family friendly version!) and a promotional standee as a kid, so to be joining this sequel, working with Bud Cooper, some of the original returning cast, and jumping back in to raise some hell with Terry… it’s surreal. I am beyond excited.” – Damian Maffei
Filming begins in 2022, so keep your eyes on The Mutilator movie Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Big.Insane.Ed) and Instagram (@the_mutilator_shop) pages for updates.
Tritone’s love of horror and mystery began at a young age. Growing up in the 80’s he got to see some of the greatest horror movies play out in the best of venues, the drive-in theater. That’s when his obsession with the genre really began—but it wasn’t just the movies, it was the games, the books, the comics, and the lore behind it all that really ignited his obsession. Tritone is a published author and continues to write and write about horror whenever possible.
While it’s true that the Necronomicon is a fictional book, there has been so much lore built up around about it that it has taken on a life of its own. H.P. Lovecraft imagined an ancient tome that accounted for the primordial cultures and lore of the universe he imagined along with them. This universe of course exists concurrently with the world that we are aware of, as if these locations and creatures that might cause someone to have an existential crisis just for knowing about them, exist just beyond our understanding. If this book really existed the way Lovecraft imagined it—and not just as a recreation of Lovecraft’s original idea—would be traceable and we probably would have seen the world end several times over by now.
Abdul Alzahred’s book was originally titled as “Al Azif,” in reference to the noise made by insects at night—although some scholars (both real and fictional) say that it may also correlate to the sound of demons howling—since it’s not a real tome, it sadly cannot be verified from an original source. Perhaps it’s due to the notoriety of this fictional book that has caused it to come to a point where it has almost become a real entity—or perhaps it was simply an inevitability that multiple people would eventually produce books titled Necronomicon in a way to cash in upon the gullibility of those who didn’t get such an elaborate inside joke. To those seeking the true Necronomicon, Lovecraft was truthful—he admitted that he invented the idea of this book as a prop for his incredibly involved tales of cosmic horror—but it remains such a dynamic symbol in the genre that many people are simply unwilling to accept that it was no more than a fictional creation.
Even though Lovecraft wanted to eventually write the Necronomicon himself, it seems that he considered it too great of a challenge—then at one point he also thought of writing an abridged version of the book, if only to put on display the bits that wouldn’t drive the readers mad. Shortly after he first mentioned the Necronomicon, it began to appear in the stories of his peers, other authors that wished to explore the idea of Lovecraft’s cosmos—this led to his fictional book to become more widespread and seem more authentic.
Who Was Abdul Alhazred?
Alhazred was a world traveler—born in Sanaa, Yemen, he was said to have thrived during the period of the Ommiade caliphs—lived in Damascus during the 8th century—and explored most of the Middle East and Europe. As a traveler, he visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis, then spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia
He was a remarkably intelligent person and an adept at learning and translating languages, it would be fair to say he was a scholar—if not an avid drug user. Alhazred would meditate while inhaling fumes from incense that included exotic ingredients—such as opium—and wait for knowledge to “fill him,” essentially alluding to the fact that his source of information for his historical tome is said to have been the cosmos itself. It’s possible that his moniker of the “mad Arab,” came from this unorthodox method of researching the universe. Lovecraft wrote of the Roba el Khaliyeh, or “Empty Space,” of the ancients as well as the Dahna, or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs—it was said to hold the protective evil spirits and monsters of death.
Many claims that Alhazred was simply mad, that there was no truth to his stories, but those that believe say that he visited the fabulous Irem—the City of Pillars—as well as having ventured into the nameless city that sat atop ancient ruins which housed a secret race older than all of mankind. Those who pretend to have explored out into this desert, tell tales that are strange and unbelievable, but in his last years Alhazred dwelling in Damascus, where the Necronomicon was initially created was the location of his final disappearance in 738 A.D. Concerning his disappearance—or his perceived death—there have been many conflicting and terrifying stories have been told. Being considered indifferent to the religious experiences of the people of his world, he instead worshipped entities he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Ebn Khallikan, a twelfth-century biographer tells that Alhazred was seized by an invisible monster in broad day-light and it
The real story behind the mad Arab is that H.P. Lovecraft invented the name Abdul Alhazred while imagining himself on adventures of Andrew Lang’s Arabian Nights when he was five years old. So as far as we know the most famous and diabolical mystical book of spells was created from the mind of a five-year-old boy that was born and raised in New England. Interestingly enough, later on in Lovecraft’s career, he was able to give the book some type of footing in the realm of plausible mythology, by referencing the Necronomicon in the same paragraph or sentence as other authentic books on the occult, such as The Book of Dyzan as well as Poligraphia.
The Necronomicon is a popular source of original stories—there is just so much information there to work with, both in a comedic and a horrific sense. We see on television that the book pops up most frequently within cartoons, where there doesn’t have to be an involved main story that it is referenced in. Some of the cartoons that are known to have referenced are shows such as, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Metalocalypse, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, The Real Ghostbusters, and The Simpsons. It makes sense that whenever a show requires a creepy book in the plot-line, the Necronomicon is the most obvious choice and it would probably thrill Lovecraft to no end to know how popular his creation had become. To know about more of the media culture that surrounds Lovecraft’s infamous tome, check out our article about the Seven Times the Necronomicon Appeared in Cinema.
Olaus Wormius, a priest in 1228, translated the original Arabic text into Latin, soon after Pope Gregory IX banned both the Latin and Greek translations, then the church officials seized and burned as many copies that they could find. There is additional lore that claims that Dr. John Dee, an Englishman and magician, in 1586 discovered a singular long lost copy of Wormius’ Latin translation of the Necronomicon. It’s said that Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelly, attempted to translate the work into English, but no fully finished text was ever published again.
The Real and Fallacious Ancient Occult Tomes
With Lovecraft’s writing, he intentionally referenced many different tomes—to give more authenticity to his own fake ancient creation by showing that it was by no means the only such thing in existence. Instead, he threw in both legitimate books, as well as fictional ones in order to build a mythology that might make people question what was real and what was not.
Georgia-based author and artist, Mary has been a horror aficionado since the mid-2000s. Originally a hobby artist and writer, she found her niche in the horror industry in late 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. Mary’s evolution into a horror expert allowed her to express herself truly for the first time in her life. Now, she prides herself on indulging in the stuff of nightmares.
Mary also moonlights as a content creator across multiple social media platforms—breaking down horror tropes on YouTube, as well as playing horror games and broadcasting live digital art sessions on Twitch.
Join "The Horror List" for Weekly Horror in your inbox
Recent Posts
Join The Horror List
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
