How Lovecraftian is Apostle (2018), anyway?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Apostle, images of violence and blood, and mentions of racism.

Many a horror fan and purveyor of all things cosmic and monster-kind, has reached the point in their fandom life of disavowing H.P. Lovecraft. Not all of us have — and to be honest, I tend to mistrust those who haven’t — but many reach that point. I have. The violently racist language and belief espoused both in his writing and outside of it far outweigh the supposedly seminal contributions he made to the horror genre.

This leaves Lovecraft adaptations and Lovecraftian-inspired works in a definitively murky territory. Now, I’m just one person, and I’m white. It isn’t necessarily for me to say what could make a Lovecraftian piece work. Generally, I avoid direct adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories altogether. For one, they rarely if ever have a critical eye out for Lovecraft’s virulent racism, and for two, they’re often just … B-movie schlock that ends up more laughable than unsettling.

Films or shows that borrow from the concepts of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and create something totally new with them, however, might be a different story. Maybe. If we’re feeling generous. Admittedly, sometimes, maybe even often, they fall directly into the same traps of violent, racist other-ing as the original works. Every once in a while, though, someone does something clever.

To the end of trying to restore my faith in Lovecraftian-inspired fiction, I took a breath and searched “Lovecraft” on Netflix. For the sake of thoroughness, I also searched “Cthulhu.” Despite the 2019 adaptation of Color Out of Space recently moving to Netflix, I don’t plan to watch it. Even if Lovecraft wasn’t who he was as a person, I think I am probably allergic to Nicolas Cage. Apostle was one of the first results of each search.

I did some Googling, particularly to find out what about Apostle was so Lovecraftian, anyway? The premise, from what I knew of it, didn’t sound like it sat too close, aside from the very broad strokes of a fish-out-of-water protagonist wrestling with a nefarious cult. Also, I have a hard time looking at Dan Stevens’ face without getting upset, in the wake of still being fundamentally hurt and angered by the writing decisions made on Legion prior to its cancellation. Still, Bloody Disgusting is one of my go-to, trusted sources for horror news and impressions. If they’re calling a film Lovecraftian over and over again, albeit without explaining how or why that’s the case, I listen.

If you want to watch Apostle without spoilers, this would be a good place to stop reading. If, however, you’re like me and wanted to know how much cosmic would be in Apostle’s horror before committing to it, consider this an attempt at an answer. This is certainly not a final or a conclusive answer — as ever, your mileage may vary — but after several unsuccessful Internet searches, I thought: well, for goodness’ sake, why not just answer the question myself? I have a confession to make. I may have done a slightly embarrassing amount of research leading up to writing this. Still, that helped me pull out some key threads or themes from Lovecraft’s work over the years, and I’ll look at them in the context of Apostle one at a time.

Before we get into that, though, it bears mentioning that Apostle may in some ways resemble two different movies between its first and second half. While the shift in tone has netted the movie some skepticism or even criticism, honestly, I think it worked. It planted Thomas Richardson, our protagonist, squarely within a legacy of both film noir detectives and the investigative Lovecraftian narrators we see in, for instance, The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) or The Call of Cthulhu (1926).

As we soon discover, though, Thomas also bears some resemblance to early Lovecraft protagonists in another way. He traverses the narrative as a traumatized — and arguably para-suicidal, given the palpable danger of his mission — laudanum addict. He is reminiscent of the titular Outsider of The Outsider (1921), as well as the predating narrator of Dagon (1917).

Much like these two unnamed characters, Thomas experiences danger and terror in the dark, and follows after his sister with the same fervency as the Outsider’s pursuit of light and company. Indeed, he even asks her to “be the light that guides him to eternity” in the last moments of the film. However, unlike the descent into misery of Dagon’s narrator and more like the conclusion the Outsider reaches, Thomas arrives at a certain acceptance of his newfound monstrousness toward the end. I’ll return to that later.

Now that we’ve established our entry points with Apostle’s protagonist, the first thread I want to pull on is the idea of “illusory appearance.” This is essentially, the idea that the surface of something does not reflect its reality. This theme doesn’t immediately seem to apply to our protagonist’s experience as he enters the story fully aware that he’s infiltrating a dangerous cult. However, it takes a particularly interesting turn around an hour and eight minutes into the movie, when he first encounters the truly supernatural elements at work behind the cult.

Apostle’s story (in general) is full of creatures that don’t look quite right. The newly-born livestock are malformed and don’t survive long. The plants don’t grow as they should, withering and turning toxic on the stalk. There’s a Silent Hill-esque shambling being with a wicker head and face covering, for … some reason. These are images common to folk horror, within which is the genre I would most readily affix Apostle. An example of this can also be seen time and again in Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space (1927). The most striking of these, however, might be the film’s central goddess herself.

The creature here is referred to only as “Her” and “She.” Incidentally, it rather instantly evokes (at least in me) a memory of Lovecraft’s He (1925), a story in which the narrator-protagonist’s pursuit of knowledge and exposure to history leads him directly into the waiting, warping hands of a falsely-faced creature far older than its appearance and demeanor initially suggest. Beyond that, though, it raises the question of why she appears humanoid at all.

This isn’t a question the film itself explicitly answers, although by the end I had a theory that I’ll return to. For now, suffice it to say that the uncanny, the unheimlich if you will, permeates both manifestations of the goddess’s appearance. She is bipedal; she speaks, though not necessarily in a recognizably human language. Additionally, the arrangement of her limbs and eyes and mouth resemble those of a human being. Almost. Nearly.

In most Lovecraftian stories, the entities of the Cthulhu mythos don’t care about appearances. Those that do take on human guises are (generally) not of the Elder Things. They are usually corrupted shells of human beings who have unnaturally prolonged their lifespans, like in He or The Festival (1923).

However, one exception to this rule of thumb stands out, and that is The Whisperer in Darkness. In The Whisperer in Darkness, a creature of unknown identity and semblance literally steals the hands and face of a human corpse to masquerade as a man named Henry Akeley. Theorizing in the wake of this writing has suggested the entity here might be Nyarlathotep himself, an Elder One who has also used human-adjacent guises to interact with mortals before.

Now, of course, the unfolding of Apostle’s story situates the entity at its core somewhere decidedly other than conventional understandings of Lovecraftian evil. While capable of destruction, corruption, and violence, we come to understand that she isn’t inherently bad. However, the need to consume flesh and blood suggests she probably isn’t inherently good either.

Still, she relies on a human-adjacent guise when she chooses to communicate with the human beings around her. While this veers away from the colossal, uncaring indifference of most Lovecraftian beings, it resonates with the idea that she may only look humanoid to the wilfully self-deluding eyes of human beings who can’t comprehend or interact with her any other way. That is something that echoes through The Whisperer in Darkness at its climax, too. The idea of illusory surface or appearance also manifests in the dealings of the “average” members of the cultist society.

They are isolated from the outside world and are forbidden to read books from the mainland. Many of them either have no way of knowing the truth behind their circumstances, or have deliberately turned a blind eye. This also touches on the idea of “merciful ignorance” that permeates some of Lovecraft’s writing. This appears most notably in the opening passage of The Call of Cthulhu, as well as recurring throughout At the Mountains of Madness. By being kept in the dark, or staying in the dark, depending on how you choose to read the rank-and-file cultists’ degree of agency here, these people incidentally are shielded from the true horrors of what they and their leaders have been doing, and why.

They have no idea that the goddess they serve has been imprisoned and abused by their new leadership in a grab for power that, unsurprisingly, backfires rather spectacularly once our protagonist shows up. They don’t have a clue what Quinn’s increasing desperation and need for control will drive him to. This is both a blessing and a curse, as it keeps them from becoming paralyzed by the realization of their complicity. Yet it also keeps them from questioning anything their leaders tell them to do.

However, this ignorance does not ultimately protect them from the reprisals upon which hinge the climax of the film. These events that ultimately force them to flee, or die. While it is true that the supernatural or “alien” element at the center of Apostle does not reach the truly cosmic or global scale of Old One indifference and cataclysm seen in Lovecraft’s later works — most notably The Call of Cthulhu itself — it reverberates with the smaller, more intimate scales of some of his earlier writings. Apostle isn’t a global story. It’s a location-locked one, and as such the violent reprisal unleashed upon the cultists is restrained to the bounds of the island upon which the film takes place.

In this sense, then, it reminded me of “The Colour out of Space” -— the short story, not the film adaptation — inflected with perhaps some more explicit ethical commentary. Indeed, the nature of many entities and intrusions from outer space in Lovecraft’s work is precisely that they are indifferent to humanity. They existed before humans, will exist after them, and in that framework, human beings and their livelihoods are insignificant specks.

However, when I reread “The Colour out of Space” in preparation for tackling this article, an underlying thread stood out to me. The more the community in the story, and its scientists, poked and prodded at the meteorite, the more its harmful influence on the surrounding land and people grew. In essence, having a proprietary interest in its nature, design, and purpose led to things growing worse for them.

Apostle takes this idea and sharpens it to a point. In a compelling, fresh take on the idea of cosmic indifference and magnitude, the entity at the center of Apostle’s focal island lashes out at the climax of the film. It does so precisely because humanity has demonstrated the same self-interest and self-absorption as the three professors in “The Colour out of Space.”

By trying to own and control something so much larger than them, something that existed before them, and will continue to exist after them, the human beings of Apostle have been served a nasty, violent reminder that they cannot and will not possess these ancient, unfathomable beings. They are also reminded that they will not be able to bend them to their will. Thus, those very few who do remain alive in some way that are tied to the island, rather than being killed or managing to flee, are far from blameless.

Malcolm is still tethered to the goddess, expected to serve penance for his misdeeds in the previous cycle of life, death, and violence. Thomas is a former Christian missionary, previously spinning a very conveniently biased tale of good intent and desire to spread love to a community that “showed him the devil” by torturing him for his uninvited intrusion. While the revelation of Thomas’s backstory does pull on some threads of racist othering, which I don’t think was really necessary at all; there would have been better ways to exhume Thomas’s loss of faith and his moral failings. It does, at least, lend itself to an understanding where Thomas was and is the one in the wrong, if we approach it from a critical vantage point.

Thus, the entity at the center of the story does not really understand shades of innocence or guilt. These have no place in the moral frame of a Lovecraft-esque being. With that in mind, Malcolm, Quinn, Frank, and Thomas are all in their own way consumed, while the blameless, the brainwashed, and the taken-advantage-of flee in droves.

I’ve referred several times already to the scope and nature of time in Lovecraftian literature and the offshoots it has inspired; specifically in the context of lifespans. This pattern ends up splitting into two recurring themes. The first of these, often referred to as “denied primacy,” is the idea that there was intelligent life that far predates humanity, and indeed far predates any records held by humanity.

The existential fear of this concept is, essentially, that human beings are not stewards, rulers, or primary denizens of Earth’s surface. Their cultures and societies are infinitesimal and insignificant set against the much, much older Outside that is so far beyond their comprehension. Denied primacy doesn’t reverberate throughout Apostle as much as (perhaps) it could, but it’s definitely there. It is most pointedly brought to the forefront by a scene in which Thomas discovers a series of wall paintings depicting the entity that inhabits the island, and a previous community of worshipers.

This brings to mind one of the most tense moments in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. There is a point in which the travelling expedition exploring the Antarctic discover (among other things) art that makes two things crystal clear. The Elder Things precede humanity, and humanity was created by the Elder Things for no particular reason other than amusement and servitude.

While again, the goddess imbuing Apostle’s island with life isn’t as malevolent as these entities appear to be, the direction of the human-to-creature relationship is meant to be clear. They are meant to offer of themselves to her in blood and flesh, and in exchange she will allow their livelihoods to flourish. It’s when humanity reaches beyond its bounds and seeks to possess her, instead of serving her as they “ought to,” that life withers and decays. Beyond that, madness and calamity spreads, and ultimately death and destruction ripples across the cultist ranks.

The other branch of Lovecraftian time is encapsulated in a theme usually referred to as “unwholesome survival,” which is understood to mean “the theme that some things, and some beings, outlive what would be from the ordinary human viewpoint their rightful existence.” At first glance, this isn’t a concept that particularly applies to Apostle, given that so many people die. However, we do conclude the film with what could arguably be an interesting twist on the idea. Reaching the climax of the film, you think that Thomas has “freed” the goddess by killing her, thus ending the cycle for good and perhaps allowing the land to heal and recover.

Bzzt. Wrong. As Thomas finally succumbs to the wounds he’s sustained during the film — though not before seeing his sister escaping to safety at last — we see the surrounding plant life rise up and claim his body for its own. This ending was confusing for many, prompting several “explainer” articles to crop up after its release. The conclusion is essentially this: Thomas, in accepting his death and sacrificing of his flesh and blood to the earth, has become the goddess’ new vessel. True enough, this doesn’t fit the usual understanding of unwholesome survival. It is rarely an idea applied to beings that aren’t human or mortal to begin with. Nonetheless, I think it still works, and here’s where my theory comes into play that I hinted at earlier.

I don’t think the body within which we encounter the goddess is truly hers. I think she looks like something else under the guise, something we can’t really comprehend or reproduce. I think she has done this — or something similar to it — before. If humanity learns nothing and seeks to enslave her once again, who’s to say she won’t find a new body to claim for her own when Thomas Richardson’s body weakens and decays as her previous vessel had? Talk about a spooky cautionary tale, right?

In conclusion? If you were hoping for a classically Lovecraftian film containing winged fish-faced creatures with tentacles that far predate any kind of recorded life, and the existential dread of things unfathomable and uncaring, lurking just beyond what you can conventionally see; Apostle probably isn’t it. For that, I would recommend John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country once it premieres on August 16th of this year.

If, however you are looking for a contemporary retooling of some old Lovecraftian themes on a small and intimate scale. If you want something rendered in bleakly beautiful detail, with a hefty dose of brutal, jarring gore and human cruelty, then pull up a chair. Until next time, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.