Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Lovecraft Investigations
88 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M start the year talking about a hypothetical fourth season of the BBC podcast, "The Lovecraft Investigations."
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Season Recap & Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. We interviewed David Icke. We talked about cases of actual false flags. We reviewed academic articles on conspiracy theory theory. We probably paid too much attention to Uncle Sam's Snuff Factory. And we tried to surprise each other with little known conspiracy theories. And now on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Uh, so, um...
00:00:27
Speaker
Anything happen over the break? I watched some films, read a few comic books. I listened to a few podcasts. Oh, it reminds me, no new season of the Lovecraft Investigations last year. In fact, I checked the BBC website. Apparently there's not going to be a season four. We should definitely devote the first episode of 2022 to that. Hmm.
Hosts' Introduction & Birthday Banter
00:00:57
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. The first episode for 2022, momentous, I suppose. I, of course, am Josh Edison, sweltering slightly here in Auckland, New Zealand. They, of course, are Associate Professor M. Dentith, sweltering for us, for all I know, in Zhuhai, China. And you know... I assume you just swelter there generally, just all the time. You know what's on my mind?
00:01:30
Speaker
A little tune, Georgia. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear whatever your name is. Happy birthday to you.
00:01:48
Speaker
That is correct. Why was he born so beautiful? Why was he born at all? He's nobody used to anyone. He's nobody used at all. England, England football chant has started. I have no how this ends. Yes. So what what is it like to be 9000 years old?
Cultural Perspectives on Christmas
00:02:06
Speaker
Oh, it's not bad. It'll do. So I'm still just a little bit distracted because you use the phrase on my mind, which immediately brings the song Georgia on my mind by Ray Charles.
00:02:15
Speaker
into my head and it unspools in its entirety and I really can't control it. So I'm just gonna, if you see me going misty eyed I've just got up to the bit about other arms, reach out to me, other eyes smile peacefully, so on and so forth. Surely I'm the person who should have Georgia on their mind. Are you Ray Charles? Sometimes.
00:02:34
Speaker
Sometimes. Well, there we go. No, it is 2022, as is the style of the time I've aged another year yesterday, as it happens at time of recording. We've done the whole Christmas New Year, although I suppose for you, I mean, what's what's Christmas and New Year like in a country that doesn't really celebrate Christmas and celebrates New Year at a different time?
00:02:55
Speaker
So Christmas is very commercialized and that you really only can tell it's Christmas when you say go to a cafe or a bar and they've put up a Christmas tree, sometimes with snow, sometimes without, or you go to the supermarket and you realize that playing in the background are Western Christmas songs. And then you go, I don't miss this at all. I don't miss this at all.
00:03:19
Speaker
As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past,
Humorous Critique & Podcast Theme
00:03:21
Speaker
I worked, I think, four Christmases at a department store and, yeah, no, I get fairly severe flashbacks on hearing store music, Christmas carols. The Paul McCartney one, that wonderful Christmas time, I hate it so much. So much. I mean, there's a lot to despise about Paul McCartney, that Christmas song.
00:03:42
Speaker
that frog chorus song, almost the entirety of The Beatles. I mean, really, that man has done so much ill to this world. I'm surprised that it's Tony Blair that people talk about as being England's premier war criminal. Although he did look quite fetching and that Peter Jackson documentary recently when he was all young and hairy. So I mean, there is a great bit where the police storm the roof and you can see Paul McCartney look over to the corner, look at John Lennon, then go, whoo hoo.
00:04:11
Speaker
Ooh, as he burst into another song. So, 80 for that rationale. I'll now take back Tony Blair is in fact the worst person in the UK. Good. Anyway, we're not actually here to rank the UK's worst people. Although we could. We really could. We do actually have other plans. We're just gonna ease into the year with a nice, simple, easy topic that will allow us to basically ramble on about whatever we feel like, I think.
00:04:38
Speaker
in stark contrast to our usual episodes. Yes, we're very business-like normally, very business-like. You don't get this kind of a verification in a normal episode of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. By this time, we're already knees deep in content and definitely not riffing on whatever takes our fancy until such time we go. It's been five minutes. We should probably talk about conspiracy theories. Maybe you should get back to it. Yeah, yeah.
00:05:03
Speaker
Okay, but anyway, I suppose, though, we should at least stick to tradition and play a little chime or a sting or something now before we get into the main bit
Lovecraft Investigations Discussion
00:05:11
Speaker
of the episode. It seems appropriate. It's true. Appeals to tradition are never fallacious.
00:05:20
Speaker
So, yes, as suggested in the intro at the top there, we want to talk about the Lovecraft investigations. Now, we have talked about it before on this podcast, but mostly in the patron bonus episodes, I think, except, of course, episode 250, which we devoted entirely to the second
00:05:39
Speaker
Lovecraft investigation serial The Whisperer in Darkness, where we basically talked about it as though it were actually a real true crime podcast and neither of us have ever heard of HP Lovecraft, which is
00:05:56
Speaker
Not actually true. Inconceivable to quote HP Lovecraft's famous film, The Princess Bride. Exactly. Now, just to get it out of way, at the beginning, HP Lovecraft, horrible racist, even by the standards of the time. I think we'll just take that as read, because otherwise we'll feel obliged to mention it. If you want to know just how much a racist HP Lovecraft was,
00:06:24
Speaker
look up the name of his cat and don't just look up the name of his cat look up the reactions of his contemporaries to the name of his cat because even his contemporaries are going dude
00:06:39
Speaker
Now I should also point out there's been a kind of rehabilitation, not of HP Lovecraft in the last few years, but of the Cthulhu mythos that Lovecraft created. So HP Lovecraft, terrible human being, and
00:06:54
Speaker
an awful lot of the Cthulhu mythos that HP Lovecraft generated actually does rely on fear of the other. So there are numerous stories in the Cthulhu mythos canon where basically the enemy is a person of color.
00:07:10
Speaker
But there has been recent work by people who like the idea of cosmic horror to try and take the Lovecraft out of the Lovecraftian mythos and focus on the fear of the cosmic other and remove the racism from those stories.
Adapting Lovecraft to Modern Narratives
00:07:25
Speaker
And so the Lovecraft investigations is in that particular vein. They're doing Lovecraftian stories, so they're looking at the Cthulhu mythos, but they're not engaging in the inherent or essential racism.
00:07:39
Speaker
that Lovecraft thought was kind of part and parcel of that kind of fiction. So if you haven't listened to them, the Lovecraft investigation, they weren't called the Lovecraft investigations to begin with, of course, that was sort of a label that I think didn't come around until the third
00:07:55
Speaker
serial. But it started as the case of Charles Text Award, which, if you know about Lovecraft, you'll recognise as the title of one of his stories. And it followed a fictional podcast called The Mystery Machine with a couple of fictional investigators called Matthew Heywood and Kennedy Fisher. And they were sort of a true crime, a fake, it was a podcast about a fake true crime podcast.
00:08:20
Speaker
investigating the mysterious disappearance of this Charles Dexter Ward fellow and then getting drawn into a story that was based on the actual Lovecraftian one. Fortunately for us, being aficionados of Lovecraft's work, but also people who have a podcast about conspiracy theories,
00:08:39
Speaker
A large part of their adaptation was to bring in a big sort of overarching conspiracy, and where the case of Charles Dextaward is basically about sort of a guy who resurrects a wizard from several centuries ago who he was related to, and wakeyness ensues, they sort of broaden the whole thing into the idea that there's this whole cult that the wizard was part of, who worship a Mesopotamian deity called Ippu Aya,
00:09:09
Speaker
And so they bring all this element into it. And then as they did the series that came along after that, where they adapted other Lovecraft stories, which weren't originally related, but they all sort of tied them together kind of using this conspiracy as a
00:09:25
Speaker
as a bit of a framing device, and I think it works pretty well, don't you? Yes, I mean, I think the first series was possibly the better of the three in that the first series is very much trying to be a very plausible true crime podcast. By the time the second series ends, there's a conspiracy involving the British government, and you end up going, how are they letting this podcast be broadcast on the BBC?
00:09:54
Speaker
if they're exposing governmental plans to cover up ancient elder gods. So by season two, the true crime format didn't really work. But as an adaptation of Lovecraftian stuff for the modern day, it was remarkably well done, even if too many episodes ended with Kennedy Fisher screaming.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yes, yes, there was quite a lot of sort of cliffhangers of her suddenly encountering something horrible and screaming, and then that was the end of it, and then it comes back later and stuff like that. And also, especially the latter two episodes, The Whisperer in Dark, the signal is The Whisperer in Darkness, which if you haven't read it is sort of about, the original story is about a guy who ends up encountering these sort of cosmic space beings that have
00:10:47
Speaker
that remove people's brains and stick them in jars and then wear their faces to deceive people and the punchline of the whole story is the guy escaping in the middle of the night and on his way out notices the face and hands of the guy he thought he was talking to lying to inside and realizing that all along he'd been speaking to one of these creatures wearing someone else's face.
00:11:10
Speaker
And they talk about that, but then they bring in the Rendlesham incident, England's area 51. They talk about numbers stations. They talk about all sorts of other stuff. And so by the end of that one, it does get quite confused and metaphysical and does kind of end on a lot of just sort of
00:11:29
Speaker
garbled shouting and jumbling and random noises and not quite knowing what the hell is happening, and then finishing up with a conclusion where they say, we're not really sure what happened, but here we are. As were the listeners. And so then the third one was The Shadow Over In's Mouth, the famous story of the guy who comes to a town to find out it's full of fish people.
00:11:51
Speaker
which had that wonderful musical adaptation by the HP Lovecraft, what are they? Recreation Society, whatever they're called? Yeah, something like that, the HP Lovecraft. Where they made it a musical, which included the song, it's beginning to look a lot like fish, man.
00:12:09
Speaker
And yes, so then the Shadow of Rinsmith, and that's when they actually start bringing in just all sorts of crap. The cats, the alpha cats, get in there a bit at one point, don't they? And they all, some giant conspiracy and waking up the dreaming elder gods and so on and so forth. And I'm pretty sure in the end, some sort of magical portal opens up, Matthew Heywood gets sucked into it trying to save Kennedy Fisher,
00:12:36
Speaker
And then it sort of ends with Kennedy saying, I need to go and find Matthew Haywood. But again, a large part of that driven by a confusing jumble of noise that deliberately obfuscated what was going on. And the other thing to note is that by this particular point in time, the storylines, the concept of Pleasant Green becomes kind of preeminent. And it turns out that the writer of the Lovecraft investigations had had a previous trilogy
00:13:05
Speaker
of short stories on the BBC about the inhabitants of this place called Pleasant Green. So effectively, there was a connection between a self-created mythos and the Lovecraftian mythos, which kind of took over the narrative drive of at least the last series of the Lovecraft investigation.
Speculation on Series Continuation
00:13:24
Speaker
So it sort of had an open ended, you know, there was room for a sequel, there was room for it to continue, but from the sounds of things, it's not going to. But
00:13:35
Speaker
That then gives us license to speculate on where possibly it could have gone. And we get to spend the rest of this episode talking about Lovecraft-y stuff and basically making shit up, which is the way we like it. So I mean, I think we both agree it would sort of, if it were to continue, it would sort of have to follow Kennedy Fisher hunting down leads and encountering weird stuff in his search for Matthew Haywood.
00:14:02
Speaker
which, as they did for the previous three ones, would give the writers license to just drag in whatever the hell else they wanted. Personally, I think my favourite Lovecraft story is probably The Colour Out of Space, which a couple of years ago was made into a movie with Nicolas Cage. I think the movie was actually superior because it had the advantage of having been made after the movie The Thing existed.
00:14:32
Speaker
and also had Nicolas Cage, just Nicolas caging out all over the place. And Llamas. You may not be aware of this. And Nicolas Cage didn't actually exist in the time of HP Lovecraft. Easy for us to forget in this day and age. It's true. I mean, he really is at the mountains of madness. So, I mean, you could imagine all sorts of different ways that
Film Adaptations of Lovecraft's Work
00:14:57
Speaker
The story could be brought in there, the colour out of space. Again, if you're not familiar, that is about a mysterious meteorite that lands on a man's farm and starts poisoning the land all around it and then eventually the
00:15:13
Speaker
plant life and then the animal life and then the people as well. It all gets horrible and weird and cosmic, but given that the earlier ones had already got into the idea of UFOs and stuff like that, which also got mixed up with weird Aleister Crowley sort of magic and all sorts of stuff,
00:15:30
Speaker
You could very easily talk about the mysterious meteorite and investigations around that and all sorts of wackiness. You could easily imagine a way to bring this in, especially since they'd already talked about UFOs and stuff from space, although I think the Rendlesham incident stuff they ended up with.
00:15:48
Speaker
having more to do with a magical Aleister Crowley sort of ritual or something to bring in. I'm sure you could bring in a weird meteorite that has bizarre effects on the land around it as either some sort of emissary of Ippkuaia from the cosmos or just something that these covert department of works government places would have to cover up and so on and so on and so forth.
00:16:14
Speaker
And if they were lucky, they could they could bring in like llamas and and Nicolas Cage, swearing like a maniac as he punches the roof of his car for no really good reason other than it's Nicolas Cage. And apparently, according to the director of The Colour Out of Space, whose name has completely escaped me, even though Richard Stanley, who has a incredibly fascinating career, Richard Stanley said that when they were filming The Colour Out of Space,
00:16:42
Speaker
Nicholas Cage could replicate that kind of unhinged Nicholas Cage performance.
00:16:48
Speaker
every single time they re-shot a scene. So people kind of assume that Nicolas Cage is just one of these weird actors who you say, run, and he suddenly just starts doing any old thing. But apparently it is very considered and very measured madness, as if you want him to do the same take again from a different angle, he can replicate every single verbal tick and car punch that you require.
00:17:16
Speaker
Nicholas Cage is quite a man. I think it's fair to say. Have you seen Pig? No. Now I understand Pig was sort of marketed a little bit as, oh Nicholas Cage does take in sort of another in the series of middle-aged men doing action, but I understand that's not really true and it's more just sort of a
00:17:41
Speaker
of meditation on loss and food and pigs. So there is a modicum of violence in pig, but it is it is much more the story of a man, his relationship with this truffle hunting pig, and the fact that he just wants to go back to the thing he loves the most, which is feeding his pig fried truffles.
00:18:02
Speaker
Anyway, we've given our self-licence to go completely off topic, but that might be a bit far off topic. To go back, where would you see the Lovecraft investigations going? Well, I'll tell you where I wouldn't take it, and that would be with my favourite story, The Mountains of Madness, in part because even though I think The Mountains of Madness is Lovecraft's greatest work,
00:18:25
Speaker
I also think it's basically unfilmable or is never going to make for particularly gripping audio. In fact, it actually shouldn't work as a story at all. So the Mountain of Madness is basically a travelogue between two scientists in the Arctic
00:18:41
Speaker
who discover the remains of an ancient city belonging to a race called the Elder Beings or the Elder Things and they're going through the city reading the various cartouches on the wall which give you the history of this particular race with the way that they came to power and prominence
00:19:01
Speaker
and then due to genetic manipulation of entities upon the earth cause their own downfall the story ends within getting to what is meant to be the last holdout of the elder things towards the core of the earth hearing the vicious screams of the creatures the elder things created which destroyed their civilization and then fleeing the sea. So essentially it's a story about two men
00:19:26
Speaker
reading carvings and having conversations with one another, which is why, even though I've always thought it was an admirable goal that people like Gelmordo Del Toro wanted to make a movie based upon the mountains of madness, I actually never thought it was ever going to work, because there is no story other than, I say on chap,
00:19:47
Speaker
What do you think this cartouche says? Well, I think this cartouche tells us about the third epoch of the Elder Things upon the Earth. Hmm, that is interesting. What about this cartouche over here? Oh, well, that's the fourth epoch.
00:20:00
Speaker
So it would be great to have, say, a mention in a hypothetical fourth series of Lovecraft Investigations, where they hear about how, say, the Department of Works, or one of the organisations opposed towards the Department of Works, has been excavating the remains of an ancient city somewhere down in the Arctic.
00:20:23
Speaker
But it's not actually so, from memories actually it's the Antarctic where the Elder City is isn't it? So it's the South Pole, not the North Pole. So the idea that they've found the remains of the city and part of the cover-up is working out exactly what's going on there.
00:20:40
Speaker
But it certainly isn't something which you could base an entire storyline upon, but it would be a nice reference. So I would definitely bring in a reference to the Mountains of Madness there, but I certainly wouldn't make it the central pivot of my story.
00:20:55
Speaker
Have you have you read the script of the del Toro? No, I have not proposed one. There's some actually let's let's while we are a podcast talking about another podcast, let's just briefly plug another podcast. There's a podcast called the best films never made where a couple of Hollywood inside is one of them.
00:21:14
Speaker
that Jodorowsky's Dune documentary and the other guy most recently wrote the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. And they've had this podcast of basically movies that never got made. Depending on who they're talking to, it can turn into a just sort of an inside Hollywood sort of thing as these filmmakers talk about their careers and the funny things that have happened to them.
00:21:40
Speaker
And one of the things they had talked about was Guillermo del Toro's The Mountains of Madness. And it sounds awesome, but also like it would never work. He brings into a lot of actually much like the Color Out of Space movie does. He gets a lot of the thing into the air as the members of the expedition sort of get infected by these creatures and turn into various monstrosities themselves.
00:22:08
Speaker
I was a little bit confused because there were about four different storylines happening. There's this mysterious person who's possibly the Nyarlathotep, this other Lovecraftian entity who's in there for no obvious reason other than that he's there.
Exploration of Lovecraft Adaptations
00:22:24
Speaker
They bring Cthulhu into it at the end of it, presumably because the studio said no it's Lovecraft, there has to be Cthulhu there.
00:22:30
Speaker
So, whereas at the end of the story, one of the people, as they're flying out of there in an aeroplane, sort of looks back at the city and is driven mad by something he sees, whereas in this film, it's quite explicitly Cthulhu popping up that makes the guy go crazy. And actually that suddenly reminded me of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. Historical Society. Have you seen the adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu? Yeah, the Blake & White one.
00:22:59
Speaker
Yes, yeah, that was very well done. I thought it was made
00:23:06
Speaker
made in the style of the time when the story would have been written? Yes, so they've made a 1930s style silent film, and they filmed it in the way things would have been filmed in the 1930s, including the style of effects that you would have found in the 1930s, which was kind of the downside of the adaptation of the Whisper in Darkness. Yeah.
00:23:29
Speaker
It looked the part of a black and white film, but they also use CGI to do some of the effects and it really didn't work. No, no, you know, obviously to actually the practical effects required for these these alien space beings.
00:23:44
Speaker
would have been too hard for an amateur production. CGI is easier, but it was very obviously CGI in what was meant to be an old style black and white film. But yeah, I kind of agree. Mountains of Madness is kind of one of the classics, but it wouldn't really lend itself to a podcast about what that at least started off as a true crime series investigating these
00:24:06
Speaker
weird local habitings. Unless it's a truly, truly cold case because we have to find out who murdered these elder things. Yes, I don't quite think that would work. It was the giant penguins, Josh. No one ever talks about the giant penguins in HP Lovecraft. No, but that's true. There are giant penguins in HP Lovecraft.
00:24:25
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know. My other favorite one, and again, one that certainly couldn't build a whole episode around because it's so short, basically is the tree on the hill, which is a very short story, a very short, short story about a guy who goes wandering in the local mountains and things go a little bit weird and he's suddenly not sure where he is and goes to sleep under a strange looking tree.
00:24:53
Speaker
has bizarre dreams of an alien environment, then wakes up miles away all ragged and torn as though he'd been sort of running and scrambling and crawling to get away from where it was that he'd been, takes some photographs he'd shown to his friend,
00:25:13
Speaker
who just so happens to be an expert in sort of ancient religions, and also has access to this mysterious crystal that's just been excavated somewhere, and also happens to know that it just so happens to be the right sort of celestial conjunction for stuff to happen, and basically sort of investigates these photographs and realizes that it was some
00:25:39
Speaker
weird incursion of strange stuff and that the photograph in the photographs when examined correctly the weird tree is actually a giant hand reaching out of the earth and it's all just a little bit spooky and eerie but again something that you could
00:25:52
Speaker
bring reference to. I'm sure they could very easily have this be one of the weird things that people encounter, but not something you could base a whole episode around. I would probably try to conclude the series with a fourth serial based upon HP Lovecraft's dream cycle.
Plot Development & Cosmic Stakes
00:26:13
Speaker
Now this is
00:26:14
Speaker
an interesting choice on my perspective because actually I think the Dream Cycle stuff in HP Lovecraft is some of his weakest work but there's an awful lot of it and it's unified by this notion of this character called Randolph Carter who is a kind of expert dreamer in the world of the Cthulhu mythos and the story The Dream Quest of Unkown Kadath
00:26:37
Speaker
is basically a case where Randolph Carter has this very elaborate dream in which he goes to a city, he has a variety of different adventures, eventually he meets Nalahotep, which is one of the major recurring characters in the Lovecraft investigations. Nalahotep tricks Carter
00:26:59
Speaker
into thinking he's going to be released back into the real world but actually takes him to the court of Azathoth who's another major character in the Lovecraft investigations where he's going to be trapped for all time and then Carter at the very last minute realizes that if he's in a dream he can escape this prison simply by waking up.
00:27:21
Speaker
Do I say to conclude the Lovecraft investigations in a fourth serial, you would do something on the lines of this. So you have Matthew Heywood, who's now being abstracted from the world into pleasant grain, which in my version of the story is going to be another name for the city of Kadath.
00:27:41
Speaker
And he ends up being in psychic communication with Kennedy Fisher. They've already established that Kennedy Fisher has powers of some kind in the first three serials. They end up having a kind of dual investigation. So he's broadcasting what he's seeing in Pleasant Green slash Kadath to Kennedy, who is investigating a way of bringing him back from the dream world into the real world.
00:28:07
Speaker
Eventually, he is tricked by Nala hotep slash it kawaii into thinking he's about to go free, but is actually brought towards the slump, the slumbering as a thought, and his presence will wake at us off from the dream, which will then wake at the south. So we'll wake at us off from the dream when at the south wakes from the dream, the world ends, as was told in the first or sorry, the second and third Lovecraft investigation serial.
00:28:37
Speaker
And then Kennedy realizes that she's experiencing all of this in a dream herself. So if she can wake from that dream, then Hayward, Nalahotep and Athasoth will be trapped for all time inside that dream.
00:28:54
Speaker
as long as she never dreams that dream again. So she wakes from that dream, and then she gets members of the Department of Works to basically erase her character and make her anew, which was something that was heavily suggested at the end of Serial 3.
00:29:11
Speaker
that one of the recurring characters was in fact a former Department of Works agent who had basically been reprogrammed and didn't remember who she was. So Kennedy basically ends up being erased. Her personality is erased so she will never dream the dream to allow Heywood to wake Ethelsoft up.
Incorporating Real-World Mysteries
00:29:31
Speaker
And then I would also, in some kind of coder, because they were really, really keen from season two onwards to having coder episodes, have an episode that basically suggests that everything post season one was never actually broadcast. In fact, it's just been they were recording these things, they thought they were releasing them to the public, but the Department of Work was just ensuring they were put into the archives, because as I mentioned at the top of the episode,
00:30:00
Speaker
By season two's end, it doesn't make any sense that any of the stuff is going public without there being huge consequences. Yes, exactly. And I think while
00:30:14
Speaker
It would be a challenge to make it that story makes sense as a podcast, because if this is all happening psychically and in dreams, how would it be recorded? But yeah, by this point, we're kind of beyond the conceit that it's actually a podcast being recorded for real. And I mean, I suppose you could say the Department of Works could have all sorts of magical dream recording equipment, or you could get some sort of psychic projection. So that
00:30:41
Speaker
phenomena of where people take recordings and they look for voices in amongst the noise which there is a an actual name for this phenomena and it's completely escaped me so the idea would be that all of
00:30:59
Speaker
Heywood's communications would be kind of cleaned up versions of the supposed ghost noises. So they take these recordings, they clean them up. So you put a filter over his voice and then you kind of get the impression that they've done a lot of work to drag his voice out of the static and noise of the recordings they make when Kennedy dreams.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah, actually, one of the good things that the podcast format did allow for was some sort of spooky moments where they're recording themselves out in the field, and then the microphones pick up something spooky, which they themselves don't hear, and so they aren't aware of until they go and listen to the recording back afterwards. So yeah, it could work. It could definitely work. BBC, if you're listening,
00:31:46
Speaker
We'll write the series for you, probably. I mean, as long as they give us some money. And also we don't step on the toes of the actual creator. And we can somehow get the actors back. And we can work out how to do remote recording because, I mean, we can barely do remote recording at the moment for two people on a podcast. Imagine trying to do it for an entire crew.
00:32:09
Speaker
Now, of course, the other thing about the Lovecraft investigation is that it has a lot of fun bringing in other things, not just Lovecraft related. So as I said before, they talked about the Rendleship incident quite a bit in The Whisperer in Darkness. And we talked about the Rendleship incident specifically so that we could then
00:32:29
Speaker
talk about the Whisperer in Darkness podcast. They talked about number stations, which we talked about a long time ago. They talked about the Somerton Man case, which I don't know that we've ever covered. That's the one of the guy whose body was found in Australia with no distinguishing sort of
00:32:44
Speaker
um labels or marks or anything and just this weird scrap of paper with a Hebrew phrase I think Tamam should on it and it was all he appeared to be some sort of a spy but nobody quite knew what the hell he was doing or how he got there and anything like that they brought him and they're still trying to solve this case today so there was a
00:33:03
Speaker
I think the podcast Futility Closet had a few updates on that because they they would like to be able to work out who this person is and they thought that maybe if they disinterred his body they could do genetic testing but it turns out the way they had preserved the body basically had denatured the DNA.
00:33:22
Speaker
And so the kind of genetic forensics that people use now in genetic genealogy just wasn't going to work. So it still remains a mystery as to who this person was who turned up in a beach in Australia wearing a suit.
00:33:36
Speaker
presumably from overseas and people are going, we don't know where he came from, we don't know where he was going, but we just know he died.
Future Narrative Themes
00:33:45
Speaker
Most mysteriously, yes. So there's plenty of scope for other stuff like that more. I mean, there's no shortage of other UFO material if they wanted to go back into that well. I would bring in Terrence McKenna, the famous British
00:34:00
Speaker
psychogeographer and advocate of hallucinogenics, who had this really interesting view about mushrooms. So he didn't trust mushrooms as in psychedelic mushrooms, because the mushrooms told him they came from outer space.
00:34:17
Speaker
But he knew the mushrooms were lying. I would link Terence McKenna and his interesting view on mushrooms to the Lovecraftian poem, The Funky, from Yougoth. And also, I think you could get a lot of MK Ultra in there as well.
00:34:34
Speaker
with its with its mind manipulation and government conspiracies. It's very sort of could be either the sort of thing the Department of Works gets up to or the kind of thing they fight against. And then now you've seen the Banshee chapter, haven't you? Great film. Great, great. Yes, which is which links MK apparently I didn't realize until recently, the guy basically wrote it as an adaptation of Lovecraft's From Beyond.
00:35:00
Speaker
and ties MKUltra into the whole sort of from beyond seeing into alternate parallel universes or parallel realities or something. So there's again plenty of scope for doing the same sort of thing in this.
00:35:18
Speaker
But most likely, most likely it is not to be. And all we can do is imagine to ourselves, which we have been doing for the past sort of half an hour, 40 minutes or so. And I don't know that there's much more to say. Is there much more to say? Well, the only thing is in your notes that we need to find an excuse to bring Herbert West into all of this. Oh, of course.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, because the reanimator's story is perhaps not Lovecraft's finest work, but frankly, they made into some movies with, what's his name, Jeffrey Combs, that are just fabulous. And I really think there needs to be some sort of connection there somehow. So years ago, there was discussion about the original proposed third
00:36:05
Speaker
I'm getting Herbert West reanimated. Okay, HP Lovecraft reanimated. That would be a completely different experience. The third Herbert West film to the third reanimated film. And the original premise was he was going to be the physician to the White House. Because as the director pointed out, when Kissinger reappeared for the W. Bush presidency, an awful lot of people went
00:36:31
Speaker
I thought he was dead. So he's going to riff on the idea that all of these public servants that everyone assumed had died suddenly reappear in a White House administration. And they're all acting just every so slightly skeweth.
00:36:48
Speaker
and it turns out that the person in charge of keeping them healthy is one Herbert West. But instead they made a really bad third re-animator film in a prison. Was that the one in the prison? Yeah, no. I think I fast-forwarded a lot of that one. But anyway, I think that's enough. I think that'll do for our first episode of
00:37:09
Speaker
2022, we've kind of taken
Episode Conclusion & Audience Appreciation
00:37:11
Speaker
it easy. We've picked a nice, soft topic that we can just wrap it on about things that we things that we are interested in and would have liked to have talked about anyway. And and that's what we did. And that's what we've done. And now we are done. And I think that's all there is to it. That is indeed all there is to say. Or is it? Because, of course, we then have to once we finish recording this episode, go and record a bonus episode for our beloved patrons.
00:37:38
Speaker
which we're going to do a little bit more current eventsy, I think, as we often make the Patreon bonus episodes. So there has been, contrary to what we suggested back in the intro at the start, some stuff has happened while we've been on our little summer break. There's the Ghislaine Maxwell stuff happened.
00:38:00
Speaker
COVID anti-vax stuff happened. A bit of local stuff here with local MP getting up to wackiness. That Novak Djokovic fellow, he's been up to all sorts.
00:38:12
Speaker
Um, and, and also we can't get past the fact that for the past several patron bonus episodes, now we've been talking about what we think is going to happen in the new Matrix film. And, uh, now after the gap, we've both seen the new Matrix film. So I think we're going to have to talk about the new Matrix film that may end up taking up the bulk of the, the patron bonus episode. We, we, I make no guess.
00:38:35
Speaker
Here's a hint of what's going to be Josh is going to like half the film that I wasn't so keen on and I'm going to be really keen on the half that Josh thought was a bit meh. Well Quite possibly. Yes. I think that may be a Proper summation if a little spoilery now
00:38:56
Speaker
I think that's it. I think we're done. We are done. I think we're actually done. We've done an episode. We've shilled the patron episode. I suppose I should say, if you want to listen to the patron episode and you're not currently a patron, then just go to Betrayal.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. You mad crazy fool. If you are a patron, you of course have our eternal love and gratitude. If you're not a patron and you don't want to be in, well, that's for your one of our listeners as well. And we'd like you just fine, just the way you are.
00:39:24
Speaker
just the way you are. Oh Billy Joel, what a mad man. No Nicholas Cage thought. No, no Nicholas. Is anyone Nicholas Cage? Could anyone be Nicholas Cage other than Nicholas Cage? Nicholas Cage is the most Nicholas Cage-y Nicholas Cage that's ever Nicholas Caged.
00:39:45
Speaker
No, so I think we'd better leave it there before we destroy our minds, just like Arbut in that episode of Community when he tried to understand Nicholas Cage, and bring things to a halt in the traditional way with me saying goodbye. And me saying Nicholas Uncaged? The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me, Dr. M.R.X. Denton. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
00:40:16
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.