Rock Music Studies

ISSN: 1940-1159 (Print) 1940-1167 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrms20

H. P. Lovecraft, Heavy Metal, and Cosmicism

Carl H. Sederholm

To cite this article: Carl H. Sederholm (2016): H. P. Lovecraft, Heavy Metal, and Cosmicism,
Rock Music Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19401159.2015.1121644

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2015.1121644

Published online: 29 Jan 2016.

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 Rock Music Studies, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2015.1121644

H. P. Lovecraft, Heavy Metal, and

Cosmicism
Carl H. Sederholm

H. P. Lovecraft, the author of tales such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow over
Innsmouth,” and “The Colour Out of Space,” has never been so popular as he is
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now, in the early decades of the 21st Century. Adaptations and appropriations of his
work may be found across various media, including television, movies, board games,
internet memes, Youtube videos, toys, video games, fan fiction, graphic novels, and
music. Though many people recognize, even champion, this influence, very few have
discussed the way this influence has impacted heavy metal music, one of the most
important genres for keeping his work and many of his ideas alive. Over the years,
several people have come to understand something of Lovecraft’s importance to the
genre from once-popular songs like Metallica’s “Call of Ktulu” or “The Thing that
Should Not Be.” Iron Maiden’s classic album Live After Death also included a pas-
sage taken from Lovecraft on the cover art, thereby connecting both the band and
the creature known as Eddie to Lovecraft’s larger mythos. Since those days, Love-
craftian components have multiplied rapidly, especially in more extreme kinds of
metal, becoming not only part of the music and lyrics, but also part of the iconogra-
phy of album art (and sometimes even tattoos). Even though Lovecraft’s influence is
fairly easy to recognize, its significance has yet to be explained adequately, particu-
larly for the way it shapes heavy metal’s own brand of cosmicism. In my paper, I
discuss Lovecraft’s influence on the music, but, more importantly, I will also suggest
ways in which Lovecraft’s work also connects to heavy metal’s own implied mythos.
Put another way, I will suggest that certain strands of heavy metal music is—as
Lovecraft called his own fiction—weird and that they share a common understand-
ing of the tenuous nature of human existence, the mysterious qualities of the
universe, and the simultaneous hope for—perhaps even a fear of—living forever.

Introduction
Although few scholars would deny that H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) has an endur-
ing influence on heavy metal music, the extent and significance of that influence
has yet to be explored to the degree it requires. When Lovecraft’s connection to

Ó 2016 Taylor & Francis

 2 C. H. Sederholm
heavy metal does come up it is usually in ways that are too brief or too broad,
gestures to the most obvious references without sufficient elaboration and analysis.
The longest discussion of the topic, Gary Hill’s The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, pro-
vides a useful survey of the field, including original interviews with musicians who
claim Lovecraft as an influence, but the book was not written for a scholarly
audience. Nevertheless, Hill makes it impossible to ignore the extent of Lovecraft’s
impact on heavy metal. In his words, “as rich and populous as Lovecraft’s own
wealth of writing is, the music inspired by that work is even more varied. It is
without question just one demonstration of how Lovecraft’s work continues to live
on well beyond his own existence” (17). My purpose in this article is not only to
discuss the variety of ways Lovecraft finds his way into heavy metal but also to
explore, drawing on insights from Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, how
a song entitled “The Key” by Head of the Demon may be discussed in light of
Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror.”
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In recent years, Lovecraft’s fame has been growing rapidly, but this has not
always been the case. Lovecraft’s stories originally appeared in pulp publications
with relatively low circulations and even fewer readers. Nevertheless, Lovecraft has
routinely had a loyal following, many of whom corresponded with him during his
lifetime and also went on to writing careers of their own. Robert Bloch, the author
of Psycho, is perhaps the best known of these readers-turned-writers. Subsequent
generations discovered Lovecraft’s stories through Arkham House reprints and
cheap paperback collections of the selected stories. Stephen King, who also writes
in a Lovecraftian vein from time to time, discovered the author by rummaging
through a box of things his estranged father left behind. In the age of the Internet,
Lovecraft’s popularity has expanded in unprecedented ways. Adaptations of, and
allusions to, his fiction, his monsters, and his legacy regularly appear in Internet
videos, board games, graphic novels, video games, music, and film; there are also
thousands of Lovecraft-related crafts, novelty items, stickers, memes, and t-shirts.
For example, consumers may purchase Cthulhu plush dolls, Miskatonic class rings,
or knitted ski hats that include Cthulhu-like tentacles jutting from beneath the jaw
line. Whereas previous generations worried that Lovecraft’s fiction would not
survive its popular origins, there is now no escaping its place in popular media.

Heavy Metal Studies

Heavy metal music has also experienced dramatic shifts in popularity, especially
since its commercial heyday and decline in the mid-1980s. It has also become the
object of increased academic attention. Books such as Deena Weinstein’s Heavy
Metal: The Music and Its Culture (1991) and Robert Walser’s Running With the
Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993) helped establish
core questions about the nature and purpose of the music, its conventions and
compositions, style and lyrics, fans and fashions, assumptions and themes, not to
mention its impact and significance. Since those important beginnings, scholars
 Rock Music Studies 3

have continued to expand the field by raising new questions, challenging received
conclusions, and calling for increased attention to the significance of the various
subgenres of extreme metal. Among the more recent volumes, Jeremy Wallach,
Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene’s edited volume Metal Rules the Globe
(2011), Keith Kahn-Harris’s Extreme Metal (2007), Natalie J Purcell’s Death Metal
Music (2003), and Michelle Phillipov’s Death Metal and Music Criticism (2012)
stand out for their critical approaches to the global significance of the genre and
the cultural relevance of the more extreme elements of metal music. Aside from
these works, there are also an increasing number of papers, articles, theses, and
books that are shaping the future of the field. Since 2010, the International Society
for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS) has been gathering materials toward a compre-
hensive bibliography of writings related to heavy metal as they appear not only in
academic settings, but also across media. In late 2014, the ISMMS started Metal
Music Studies, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal. All this attention to
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heavy metal has created valuable opportunities for academics to continue studying
a genre that was once seen as little more than a threat to cultural stability and
moral values.
Like other forms of popular art and expression, heavy metal music regularly
makes use of direct and explicit adaptive practices. Fans across the globe enjoy dis-
covering the explicit connections between favorite songs and their sources. Many
teenagers encounter Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, in
connection with Iron Maiden’s song of the same name. Scholars are also beginning
to take note. Craig Bernardini, for example, addresses the relationship of Masto-
don’s Leviathan album to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in terms of cultural and
literary prestige. Likewise, Bryan Bardine examines the way Gothic elements may
be traced through the music since Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album. Simi-
larly, Carl Sederholm focuses on the way heavy metal music has sometimes turned
to Edgar Allan Poe as a means of exploring problems of madness and insanity.
With respect to Lovecraft, Joseph Norman’s discussion of extreme metal and
the Cthulhu Mythos captures some of the core components—the themes, ideas,
and approaches—that the music and the mythos share. For example, Norman
argues that Lovecraftian “mythical and mythopoeic references permeate the lyrics,
imagery, and music of ‘extreme metal’” (194). He also addresses the way the most
extreme subgenres of heavy metal—especially death metal, black metal, and doom
metal—foreground Lovecraftian ideas in their lyrics, musical ideas, and perfor-
mance techniques, including, perhaps, the rough and growling extreme vocal styles
common to the genre (196). Norman rightly points to certain “essential qualities”
that extreme metal shares with the Cthulhu mythos; in fact, his conclusion that,
through heavy metal, “the horizons of the ever-expanding mythopoeia of Cthulhu
become wider still” helps connect the music and the mythos in ways that begin to
reach beyond simple notions of influence (206). Like Norman, I also discuss the
shared qualities between heavy metal and Lovecraft’s fiction in light of the ways
the former expands our sense of the latter. My point differs from Norman’s in that
 4 C. H. Sederholm
I also suggest that both the music and the fiction share an interest in weird expres-
sion, or the means of reflecting on the vast, and sometimes frightening, nature of
the universe and humankind’s fragile place within it. I begin my discussion of these
topics by first addressing the ways scholars have understood Lovecraft in light of
adaptation theory; from there, I provide an overview of Lovecraft’s impact and
influence on heavy metal music, including references both to music and to some of
the popular artwork found on metal album covers; I conclude with an analysis
of “The Key,” a song by the band Head of the Demon that adapts elements of
Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror.”

Adapting Lovecraft
Critical approaches to H. P. Lovecraft and adaptation have not always fared well,
mostly because scholars have most often fixed their attention on the transition of
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stories into films and whether or not the latter are faithful to the former. The result
is often little more than a bland comparison and contrast or discussions of an
adapted text’s fate after falling into the grasp of Hollywood screenwriters, directors,
and producers rather than a robust study of adaptation. But as Linda Hutcheon,
Thomas Leitch, and others have argued, adaptations ought to be understood as
complex intertexts and not just as lesser—unfaithful—works of art. Fidelity, in
other words, is simply the wrong criterion for analysis; the term is heavily bur-
dened with moralistic and condemning overtones that bring to mind metaphors of
human behavior rather than providing a useful way to understand adaptive art. As
Thomas Leitch writes, “Fidelity to its source text—whether it is conceived as suc-
cess in re-creating specific textual details or the effect of the whole—is a hopelessly
fallacious measure of a given adaptation’s value because it is unattainable, undesir-
able, and theoretically possible only in a trivial sense” (161). Imagine, for example,
a discussion of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator based solely on questions of fidelity
to Lovecraft’s serialized story. Doing so risks overlooking Jeffrey Combs’s darkly
comic performance or the film’s own broad and unforgettable use of humor and
camp. Removing those elements from the film, whether out of concern for or com-
mitment to Lovecraft’s original story, could deny its unique status as a work of art.
Julian Petley’s article on Lovecraft and film adaptation fortunately turns schol-
arly attention away from such strict questions of fidelity, but nevertheless falls into
a related critical trap—the attempt to speak in terms of faithfulness to broader and
vaguer notions of “feel” or “spirit” or “aura.” As Petley writes, “fidelity to the letter
of their literary sources will not be the criterion used to analyse the films under
discussion, but, rather, fidelity to the particular spirit of Lovecraft, and the extent
to which these films radiate a distinctly Lovecraftian aura” (44). Although appeal
to a Lovecraftian aura or mood might carry some weight—many Lovecraft scholars
embrace films like Ridley Scott’s Alien precisely because of the prevailing atmo-
sphere they create—it places too much emphasis on potentially unclear and
unhelpful terms. What exactly are things like “Lovecraftian elements” or a
 Rock Music Studies 5

“Lovecraftian aura” (36)? Although such expressions make a certain commonplace

sense, they do not work hard enough to formulate new ways of thinking about
Lovecraft and adaptation. Petley begins to reach beyond these limitations by sug-
gesting that the films he addresses capture something of Lovecraft’s cosmicism, his
bleak world-view, and his “mechanistic view of human life” (46). Ultimately, how-
ever, Petley suggests that Lovecraft’s work simply cannot be adapted as successfully
as it can be transmuted into work that captures an elusive sense of spirit or aura.
A better approach is to link Lovecraft and adaptation in terms of “cultural
selection,” an idea Hutcheon borrows from Richard Dawkins to explain that some
narratives “adapt better than others” not only because they flourish in different
environments but also because audiences may recognize enough of a narrative to
identify it as Lovecraftian (167). This is especially true when adaptations feature
non-human monstrosities like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Nyarlathotep, creatures
that have an increasingly common place within popular culture. Moreover, the
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endless proliferations of Lovecraft-inspired videos, crafts, games, art, music, and

more also suggest a general widening and deepening of the popular context for
Lovecraft’s work and ideas. Taken together, the body of Lovecraft-inspired texts
will likely continue to proliferate within popular media, shaping the ways people
recognize and understand his work. Addressing the ways texts permeate boundaries
and borders, Michel Foucault suggested that “the frontiers of a book are never
clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal
configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to
other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (23). Love-
craft’s Cthulhu Mythos belongs to several such vibrant and intertextual systems of
reference; in the case of heavy metal, Lovecraft’s fiction is caught up in a network
that includes not only the music, but also lyrics and album art. Before examining
how “The Key” by Head of the Demon may be read in terms of such intertextual
(and adaptive) themes, I will first provide some of the context for the ways
Lovecraft found his way into the larger world of heavy metal.

Heavy Lovecraft
One of the earliest connections between Lovecraft and rock music comes from the
band H. P. Lovecraft, a late-’60s psychedelic rock group known for expansive
songs, stirring vocal harmonies, and its fascination with Lovecraft’s brand of weird
fiction. In terms of heavy metal music, though, the most important founding
moment comes from Metallica’s popular instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” found
on their second album, Ride the Lightning (1984). Though there are no lyrics for
this track, the music certainly establishes a lurking sense of menace and mystery,
precisely the stuff of Lovecraft’s story. On their next album, Master of Puppets
(1986), Metallica recorded “The Thing that Should not Be,” another Lovecraftian
track that includes references to things like a “great Old One,” the “Crawling
Chaos,” and “hybrid children” who “watch the sea” for an awakened and awful
 6 C. H. Sederholm
monster. More of a Lovecraftian pastiche than a direct adaptation, “The Thing that
Should not Be” nevertheless draws on the themes of madness, secret cults, and
hybridization so important to tales like “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Call
of Cthulhu,” and others. Perhaps most importantly, the lyrics also feature the
words “Not dead which eternal lie/Stranger eons Death may die,” a modified ver-
sion of Lovecraft’s infamous couplet “That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And
with strange aeons even death may die” (Lovecraft, “Cthulhu” 156). A passage
from the Necronomicon, this “much-discussed” couplet is strange and unclear,
bringing to mind a triumph over death but not likely the kind hoped for in the
major world religions (156). Worse still, readers learn from “The Call of Cthulhu”
that the passage likely has further layers, “double-meanings,” that may signify more
about Cthulhu’s own dark return than anything to do with human beings (156).
Lovecraft was never one to provide too much explanation. His creatures, and their
mysteries, belong outside human comprehension.
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Lovecraft’s couplet has appeared elsewhere within heavy metal music, most
often in lyrics but sometimes even on album covers—as in the case of the art for
Iron Maiden’s Live After Death album (1985). Derek Riggs, the artist behind the
image, is also famous for creating the zombie-like creature on the cover. Variously
known as “Eddie,” “Edward the Head,” or “Edward T. Head,” the creature is both
mascot and symbol, a figure who has graced the covers of most Iron Maiden
albums and singles over their entire career. He also appears at every live perfor-
mance, usually as a menacing animatronic figure that momentarily shambles onto
the stage, threatening band and audience alike. According to Riggs, the band never
provided much artistic direction for his creations, so he developed his covers
according to his own wishes (Popoff 74). Eddie’s first appearance—on Iron Mai-
den’s eponymous debut—was meant to convey the image and attitude of early ’80s
British punk culture; fortunately for the band, it also gave them a popular mascot
whose appearances also include video games, action figures, and various items of
clothing, including limited edition pairs of shoes based on album covers (Morgan
and Wardle 171). On the cover of Live After Death, Eddie, no longer the street
thug of an earlier generation, is now shown rising from the grave, his posture tri-
umphant, his arms freed from their shackles, his gaze turned to the sky. Above
him, a lightning bolt strikes the cartouche on his forehead, not only regenerating
his body but also illuminating the space around his head and body; its electric
charge also causes a flame to burn around him. Behind and to his right, a grave-
stone juts sideways from the ground; on its face, Lovecraft’s infamous couplet
(slightly modified) serves as an epitaph to the once-deceased Eddie. Eddie’s appar-
ent triumph over death within inches of these infamous words connects him to his
Lovecraftian predecessors, granting him powers beyond human comprehension.
Even though there are no other allusions to Lovecraft on Live After Death, the
author’s name and the use of his couplet on the album cover prompted fans to
seek more information concerning the mysterious H. P. Lovecraft. For many
 Rock Music Studies 7

people, Derek Riggs’s cover art for Live After Death holds pride of place because of
its striking imagery and its clear allusion to Lovecraft.
Before Riggs helped introduce Iron Maiden fans to H. P. Lovecraft, Michael
Whelan’s diptych entitled Lovecraft’s Nightmare A and Lovecraft’s Nightmare B
(1981) had already drawn the eye of hundreds of readers to the mysteries of Love-
craft’s fiction. In fact, Whelan, one of the most significant living science fiction and
fantasy artists, has probably done more to connect Lovecraft to heavy metal than
any other artist. Though Lovecraft’s Nightmare A and Lovecraft’s Nightmare B were
originally created as a two-panel work, Del Rey publishers broke it into six sections
to use as cover art for their editions of Lovecraft’s tales. Those covers have become
so popular that the images they portray—including a giant and grotesque eye, a
hooded figure showing off his rotting skeleton, skulls on pikes, a monster lurking
in a window, and a tree comprised of ghoulish faces—have become an iconic part
of many readers’ early experiences with Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s Nightmare most
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famously found its way into heavy metal by appearing, in a slightly modified form,
on the cover of Obituary’s classic album Cause of Death (1990). Part of Lovecraft’s
Nightmare also appeared on Demolition Hammer’s Epidemic of Violence (1992).
Lovecraft’s Nightmare is also the inspiration behind hundreds of tattoos, including
one on the left forearm of Tommy Dahlstrom (the lead singer for the Swedish
death metal band Aeon).1
Connections between Lovecraft and heavy metal abound; what makes them sig-
nificant comes from the ways they share a fascination for things best described as
“weird,” that elusive Lovecraftian term most often used to label both a genre and a
point of view. S. T. Joshi, whose book The Weird Tale addresses the topic directly,
turns away from offering any single definitive understanding of the term and
points, instead, to certain attitudes, themes, and moods to suggest that “certain
authors develop certain types of world views that compel them to write fiction that
causes readers to question, revise, or refashion their views of the universe” (Joshi
11). Lovecraft’s own definition of the concept is perhaps even more helpful. As he
writes in Supernatural Horror in Literature,
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breath-
less and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and
there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming
its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and
particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature. (Lovecraft, Super-
natural 15)

Even though Lovecraft is describing weird tales specifically, his ideas should not be
limited to discussions of literary texts alone. Lovecraft’s work regularly appeared in
magazines that included weird cover art and in-text illustrations. Moreover,
Lovecraft encouraged the creative associations of authors who wrote stories that
drew on elements of his own fictional world; many even went on to develop their
 8 C. H. Sederholm
own Lovecraftian worlds, complete with mysterious books, awful monsters, and
nervous narrators. Following Lovecraft’s death, “The Cthulhu Mythos” continued
to lend itself to seemingly endless acts of expansion, adaptation, and development.
As Michael Saler explains, “The Mythos continued to acquire a mythic reality of
its own. New fiction, films, role-playing games, computer games, comic books, and
other forms of mass culture have extended Lovecraft’s Secondary World, amplify-
ing it while usually remaining true to the rational and secular parameters he estab-
lished” (147). Michel Houellebecq also comments on the ever-expanding quality of
the mythos, underscoring its ritual-like dimensions. As he explains it, “to create a
great popular myth is to create a ritual that the reader awaits impatiently and to
which he can return with mounting pleasure, seduced each time by a different rep-
etition of terms, ever so imperceptibly altered to allow him to reach a new depth
of experience” (37).
Houellebecq describes the joys of reading and rereading; he also brings to mind
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an essential component found in theories of adaptation. If reading within a popular

myth brings connection, pleasure, seduction, and increased depth of experience, so
may the various adaptations, developments, or extensions of that myth. As Linda
Hutcheon reminds us, adaptation has a repetitive quality at its very core, one that
may deepen understanding, experience, and point of view. Adaptation transforms
repetition, adding new perspectives to stories told at other times and in other ways;
such a dynamic notion of repetition helps achieve the condition that Hutcheon
calls “repetition without replication” (7). Though Houellebecq’s analysis of
Lovecraft does not concern adaptation explicitly, his description of the author as a
“generator of dreams” nevertheless captures an essential part of his adaptive appeal
(42, emphasis in the original).
When he turns to rock music, Houellebecq no longer writes exclusively in terms
of Lovecraft’s influential myth making; instead, he suggests that both the music
and the author mutually recognize each other. He writes, “Even rock music, usually
so distrustful of all things literary, has made a point of paying homage to him—an
homage, one might say, paid by one great power to another, by one mythology to
another” (42). Houellebecq’s metaphor of two powers or mythologies, paying
mutual homage to one another, suggests that rock music—or, for our purposes,
heavy metal music—does not merely appropriate Lovecraft, but also joins with him
in exploring notions of the weird, that dread feeling that the laws of the universe
are capable of radical suspension and that humans are always in peril. Lovecraft
and heavy metal pay homage to one another by acknowledging—together—the
strangeness of the universe and the infinitesimal place of human beings within it.
To overlook this shared interest is to misunderstand one of the most significant
ways the author and the music bow to each other in recognition. As Patrick Bruss,
the creative force behind the band Crypticus, explains, “I see my songs as short
horror stories. I usually include at least one mad/evil protagonist, some kind of
monster or mystery, & lots of flowery language. I consider myself the musical
equivalent of a Weird Fiction writer.” Even though Crypticus does not have the
 Rock Music Studies 9

same influence as bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden, Bruss’s comments suggest
that Lovecraft’s influence is deeper than a casual reference to an Elder God here or
an eldritch mystery there.

Looking inside the Head of the Demon

Head of the Demon, a heavy metal band from Sweden, takes its thematic and musi-
cal cues from H. P. Lovecraft directly. In the band’s promotional materials, the
record label explains that “H. P. Lovecraft is an inexhaustible source of inspiration
for those who play metal, and tributes to the great visionary of Providence have
been countless. Head of the Demon are ones who have seen the faces of the Great
Old Ones, yet all but eschew the usual clichés based upon tentacles and unspeakable
horrors” (Ajna Offensive). This statement establishes the band’s passion for Love-
craft and his work, signaling to listeners that the musical materials will parallel the
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themes and interests of a favorite author and not just make a few off the cuff allu-
sions. In this sense, the members of Head of the Demon are also suggesting that
they use Lovecraft more authentically than many other bands. The habit of distin-
guishing one band from others in terms of authenticity is complex and contradic-
tory, subjective and unreliable, but it is nevertheless a common way for bands to
establish themselves as the heaviest, or most dangerous, band within an already
overcrowded field. Whether Head of the Demon successfully establishes ties to
Lovecraft remains to be seen, but the band’s statement nicely connects to Lovecraft’s
own claim that weird fiction must reach beyond horror clichés in its approach to
raw, unfettered horror, horror that seems to suspend natural laws. As he puts it,
“the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” (Supernatural 15). This “something
more,” that sense of menace that threatens to change all that human beings really
know and understand, is the essence of Lovecraft’s notion of the weird.
Head of the Demon likewise suggests that “in order to see the true horror and the
unfathomable depths narrated by Lovecraft, you do not need to travel to the edge of
the cosmos: just look in our own head...in the demon’s head” (Ajna Offensive). This
statement is obviously self-reflexive and could probably be understood simply as a
promotional effort to sound aggressive, bold, or frightening. Still, the unusual juxta-
position of the listener’s head with the demon’s head not only brings to mind Poe’s
conception of terror as “not of Germany, but of the soul,” but also Lovecraft’s con-
sistent use of narrators whose minds are forever shaken by forbidden and long-lost
knowledge (621). To put it another way, Head of the Demon establishes its brand of
music as a combination of what happens in a diseased mind and what happens when
that mind encounters unknown and unknowable forces.
Although the band claims a broadly Lovecraftian conception of their music, one
of the most explicit adaptive moments on this album may be found on “The Key,”
a song that draws on the story “The Dunwich Horror” for inspiration. The lyrics
to the song state:
 10 C. H. Sederholm
Yog-Sothoth
Is the gate
Where the spheres
Lie in wait
Only they
From beyond
Can make it
Multiply and work
The Old Ones
Walk serene
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Un-dimensioned
And unseen
Past and present
Now and future
All are one
All are one!

Without some understanding of Lovecraft’s fiction, these lines could be difficult to

understand: Who (or what) is Yog-Sothoth? What does this passage mean when it
refers to the Old Ones and their “Un-dimensioned” state? What does it mean to
say that “past and present/now and future/all are one/all are one” in this context?
They are, after all, based on a famous passage from “The Dunwich Horror” in
which Dr Henry Armitage translates from the Necronomicon a passage concerning
the entity Yog-Sothoth and his seeming ability to cross between time as it passes
on earth and as it passes in the realm of the Old Ones. As the passage states,
“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and
guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows
where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through
again” (Lovecraft, “Dunwich” 219). Within the story, this information helps readers
cross the divide between understanding the nature of Yog-Sothoth and understand-
ing the mysterious events taking place in Dunwich. The result, as is often the case,
is a nearly overwhelming coupling of the earthly and the cosmic, the mundane and
the mysterious, the rational and the unspeakable, the human and the monstrous.
Adaptations are pleasurable, as Linda Hutcheon explains, because of the way they
connect “the comfort of ritual with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remem-
brance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is
change” (4). Understanding heavy metal’s adaptive uses of H. P. Lovecraft requires
 Rock Music Studies 11

an awareness of this play between repetition and change, not to mention the complex
interrelations between stories across media, between writer and reader, and between
songwriter and audience. An adaptation like “The Key” may be understood not only
in light of the play of familiarity and unfamiliarity, but also in terms of Wolfgang
Iser’s notion that narratives necessarily have gaps that provoke a reader’s active
understanding of a given text. As Hutcheon writes, “as we watch and listen, we do
not free associate; instead, we fill in the gaps” (76). Likewise, H. Porter Abbott writes,
“there is no way that a narrator can avoid calling on listeners or readers to bridge one
gap after another” (121). Lyrics, as in those to “The Key,” should be understood not
as failed attempts to reproduce stories, but as retellings of them through intertextual
cues, references, and allusions. Given their common verse-chorus-verse-chorus pat-
tern, lyrics also depend on a mixture of repetition, setting, theme, or attitude rather
than retelling a story exactly as it was written. In “The Key,” all the words borrowed
from “The Dunwich Horror” underscore the elements of Lovecraft’s tale enough to
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clue audiences to their adaptive status. In this case, Yog-Sothoth is, in fact, the key.
His place in the song not only brings to mind Lovecraft’s mythos, but also connects
song and story in meaningful ways.
The lyrics, however, create only part of the relevant connections between “The
Key,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and Lovecraft. Musical adaptations are obviously
made up of more than words; otherwise there would be little change in genre,
medium, and approach. The music must play some role in the overall meaning of
the song and help establish significant connections to the source material. As
Robert Walser argues, “verbal meanings are only a fraction of whatever it is that
makes musicians and fans respond to and care about popular music” (26). Many
heavy metal fans too—sometimes even some of the musicians themselves—report-
edly put less emphasis on lyrical content than they do on the actual experience of
the music, its rhythms, melodies, and sound (39). How, then, does “The Key”
invoke elements of “The Dunwich Horror” through music? One of the more inter-
esting elements of the song is that it is not constructed out of any particular mode
or key but is instead built out of several riffs with a drone on either the low A or
the low E. The first riff, played on the guitar, begins with a low A, jumps up an
octave, and climbs back down mostly through half steps. This pattern alternates
with a second riff, this one built around a tritone, a dissonant interval formed by
two major triads played a tritone apart. The tritone of the note E, for example,
would be B flat. Traditionally known as diabolus in musica, the tritone has been a
staple in heavy metal at least as far back as Black Sabbath’s debut album and is
used to suggest evil or transgression. Moreover, these arpeggiated tritones descend
in chromatic half steps each time they are repeated, giving listeners a constant
sense of dissonance, confusion, and constant downward movement. Put together,
the riffs in “The Key” challenge a stable sense of key, thereby putting listeners in
an uncomfortable and unfamiliar condition. The slow tempo of the song adds to
this by suggesting a larger pattern of slow, yet addled, deliberation connected to an
unconventional meditative or incantatory space. This suits the repetitive nature of
 12 C. H. Sederholm
the words while also resonating with their possibly incantatory purposes. To put it
another way, the music to “The Key” creates feelings of power and madness,
precisely the same kind of thing that comes from “The Dunwich Horror’s” own
use of the Necronomicon.
The lead singer’s vocal timbre also provides important connections to
H. P. Lovecraft and “The Dunwich Horror.” Whereas most heavy metal singers
typically shout, shriek, or growl, the vocalist here delivers his text in a rich baritone
voice, but not as traditional singing. Instead, he combines speech, rhythm, and
melody, not quite singing but not quite speaking. Since the vocal passages are
directly mirrored by the rhythm and notes of the guitar, the overall effect feels
more like chant or a sacred recitation than a simple performance. The singer’s
voice is also filtered through echo and reverb effects, suggesting that he is speaking
from a space, place, or condition outside a stage or studio. To put it another way,
the performance of the text suggests it is being used for purposes beyond mere
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quotation or allusion. Even though the song does not identify its narrator (even
the band members do not seem to have names), it is not likely Henry Armitage
from “The Dunwich Horror.” A more likely candidate is Abdul Alhazred, the so-
called “mad Arab” who wrote, created, or brought the Necronomicon into existence.
At the end of his narration, the speaker laughs with the kind of crazed intonation
one hears in a horror movie, the kind that typically signifies the loss of sanity and
control. Given the nature of his text—a possible summoning of Yog-Sothoth—we
may assume that the narrator’s understanding of the world is now strained, that he
has gone mad with his use of arcane knowledge. To understand Yog-Sothoth is to
understand human frailty and human despair.
One impression coming from Head of the Demon is that they are introduc-
ing listeners into a representation of mystical or sacred space, a kind of alterna-
tive church, a place where Lovecraft’s Old Ones are praised, if not directly
summoned. Implying the possession of quasi-religious powers or entering into
ceremonial or unconventional sacred spaces is increasingly common in heavy
metal music and performance. Many bands refer to their live performances as
rituals rather than concerts or gigs; others draw heavily on occult language and
lore to connect their lyrics with a larger mystical or transcendent discourse;
extreme metal bands often structure the music on their albums to suggest a
ritual setting, thereby giving the album as a whole a greater mystical charge, as
though it came from outside the commonplace conventions of the world. As
Elizabeth Clendinning and Kathleen McAuley explain, a significant body of
metal songs, including several that refer specifically to Cthulhu, draw on “chant
passages” taken from Lovecraft and from several other sources including world
mythology, Satanism, and Judeo-Christian texts and blend them to create a syn-
cretic heavy metal sound, one steeped in faith traditions both real and fictional
(246). As Clendinning and McAuley explain, the purpose of these chant pas-
sages, particularly in songs dedicated to Cthulhu, is never literally to worship or
summon real monsters, demons, or Old Ones, but to establish a mood that
 Rock Music Studies 13

“mirror[s] performances in world religious traditions where successful aural

representation of a ‘sacred’ event is equally or more important to audience
understanding than direct access to the language of performance” (246). In
other words, heavy metal music and performance draws on various faith tradi-
tions and practices to signify the creation of its own quasi-spiritual place. Heavy
metal, of course, is not a religion nor should it be confused with religion. Most
of the time, in fact, the music and lyrics convey an attitude or a posture rather
than representing some kind of reality. Nevertheless, some metal music, includ-
ing many Lovecraftian adaptations, implies an analog to sacred space. No mat-
ter the packaging, though, the music does convey mostly a sense of excitement
and power. As Clendinning and McAuley write, “it is the knowledge of this
communication with Cthulhu as evoked by the title, audible refrains, and music
itself, that creates an atmosphere that can channel the dark imagery and energy
of Cthulhu into an enjoyable and transcendent metal experience for the fans”
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(253).
Clendinning and McAuley rightly claim that the music is mostly about creating
an “atmosphere” for the fans, but they do not develop the connections to sacred
space as much as they should have (256). The idea of an intersection between
heavy metal and religion may seem far-fetched, but, as Timothy Beal explains,
there are intriguing connections between monstrosity and religion that are worth
exploring. As he writes, “the experience of horror in relation to the monstrous is
often described in terms reminiscent of religious experience. Both are often charac-
terized as an encounter with mysterious otherness that elicits a vertigo-like combi-
nation of both fear and desire, repulsion and attraction. Both religious experience
and horror are characterized as encounters with something simultaneously awe-
some and awful” (7). Similar things might be said of the connections between
Lovecraft and heavy metal.
Since adaptations typically have some kind of purpose in repeating certain
stories, how does a song like “The Key” respond to or extend Lovecraft’s original
story? One way it does so is by confidently repeating Yog-Sothoth’s significance as
the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Old Ones. By drawing on the passage
from the Necronomicon rather than the details of the story itself, the song gives the
power of the words themselves significant weight, perhaps an attempt to over-
shadow the human efforts to stop Yog-Sothoth from finding the gate and coming
to the world. Lovecraft’s stories, after all, usually stand as reminders that any
human victory is little more than a delay en route toward an eventual—and awful
—end. Not knowing when this dark conclusion will occur, readers and listeners
alike are left to contemplate the strange powers of a creature like Yog-Sothoth, his
mysterious ability to cross through time and space, and his ability to unleash the
unspeakable. By emphasizing the language of Lovecraft’s mysterious Necronomicon,
“The Key” expands the context of “The Dunwich Horror,” bringing Lovecraft’s
fears, his monsters, and his cosmicism directly into the discourse of early
21st-century popular culture.
 14 C. H. Sederholm
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note
[1] Some of the material in this paragraph—and the two preceding it—is slightly reworked
from the introduction to the forthcoming book The Age of Lovecraft, to be published by
the University of Minnesota Press.

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Notes on Contributor
Carl H. Sederholm is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and chair of
the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University. He is the
co-author of Poe, the “House of Usher,” and the American Gothic, the co-editor of Adapting Poe:
Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture and the co-editor of the forthcoming The Age of Lovecraft.