User blog comment:Bravo6whisky/What makes a pasta "Lovecraftian"?/@comment-6862307-20140309142309

It has to do with a story that is heavily influenced by or otherwise resembles the themes and concepts explored by Lovecraft. Lovecraft's brand of horror, or as he dubbed it "Weird Fiction," is a form of surrealistic science fiction/horror that typically involves 3 key concepts:

1. Insanity:  Lovecraft's father was put into a mental institution and even Lovecraft himself once found himself interred in one, though his reasons for ending up there weren't as severe as his father. As such he's had a fascination with insanity and Lovecraft's stories often involve people going insane past the point of help and reasoning. However, as is also often the case - the insanity isn't the end of it..

2. Body Horror: Body Horror is actually one of my favourite subsets of the horror genre. Body horror, occasionally also referred to as Venereal Horror, refers to horror that relies on taking something familiar to all of us - the body of a human or animal, more commonly human and in the case of Lovecraft, both, - and twisting it and perverting it into something repulsive, twisted, and a hideous shadow of its former self. This can happen by disease (Hence why its sometimes called "Venereal Horror"), by some supernatural curse, the follies of science, etc. In the case of Lovecraft, he often likes combining the human body with features of sea life or microscopic organisms. Frequently you will have people growing barnacles, sprouting tentacles, having waving cillia burst from their flesh, etc. and often he will invent creatures or aliens that have these features while also mocking the human form by giving them slightly human features. This leads to my next big point..

3. The Unknown:  This is arguably the most distinct aspect of Lovecraft's horror, though truly it would not be complete with the others as well. Lovecraft often explores the theme regarding creatures and entities, often alien, that exist in our world that lie so far beyond the realms of human comprehension that their presence distorts the reality around them. Often merely gazing upon these creatures or saying their names cause the aforementioned insanity and body horror effects to come into play, and as you continue reading his stories the aspects of the unkown only become more and more grandiose and strange; in fact, a great irony but nonetheless excellent aspect he works into his stories is that the more he explains about the beings, the stranger they become. Many actually end up revealed as beings older than any other life in the known universe and some even control the flow of time and space, which would suffer without them.

I hope this has helped some.