FUNGUS AND THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN IN LOVECRAFT AND BEYOND

© Musty Moldy Melvin song from Tim Noah’s In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo

F

ungus. Just saying the word feels like a mouthful of something slimy and spongy that is seriously testing your gag reflexes. But why are we simultaneously so disgusted by and fascinated with it?

Humans have a peculiar relationship with fungi. Penicillin was spawned by mold, but black mold can be lethal. Aspergillus negroni also survived a trip to space with a killer radiation chaser. Martian habitats can be built from mycelium, the network of roots beneath surface fungi, which extend their fingers deep into the eldritch realm of the rhizosphere, where who knows what else may creep. Eating mushrooms can mean dinner a trip to some hallucinogenic neon hell.

In the case of one unfortunate soul shooting up shrooms, it can also mean fungus growing in your blood vessels and taking over your brain.

Earthlings also cannot count out the possibility that deep beneath the sun-blasted surface of Mars, there might be fungal growth in the depths where it cannot be annihilated by killer radiation. Some scientists believe that there could be life—albeit microbial life—beneath the frozen Martian desert. Fungus qualifies.

 Fungal creatures have terrorized B-horror for decades. Just ask anyone who was morphed into a monster walking mushroom after an alien fungus encounter in Matango. Even some of the creepiest characters in kids’ shows from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, which have now been swallowed up by even creepier 3D ponies and princesses, cover the monster under the bed in fungus. You only have to watch the Musty Moldy Melvin song from Tim Noah’s In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo to see what passed for nightmare fuel in 1985.

© Mantango - Fungal creatures have terrorized B-horror for decades. After an alien fungus encounter in Matango. 

The answer might lurk right in the heart of our terror. Fungus is no dandelion in the sunshine. Most species hide away in the shadows, if not total darkness, and with darkness comes the unknown. Fear of the unknown is a visceral human fear.

What is beyond understanding, which lives in the cracks and crevices of our imaginations, has always made us shudder. That may explain why H.P. Lovecraft had an almost masochistic fascination with the unknown. He turned these fears into everything from tentacled denizens of R’lyeh in The Call of Cthulhu to ancient fungus from the edge of space in At the Mountains of Madness. Exactly what unknowns Lovecraft was turning into these monstrosities (and whether they had anything to do with a past stained by racism) is irrelevant here. Take what emerges from his dream-shadows at face value. The unknown is the unknown.

At the Mountains of Madness may be Lovecraft’s ultimate song of fungus. Lovecraft’s darkness was not just a darkness but a cesspool that bred blasphemous things that still give us one more reason to leave the lights on. His group of explorers excavate the embodiment of their own dread when they unearth huge star-headed fungal life-forms that are obviously not of this planet and also not as dead as they seem. These are things that thrive in the back of your refrigerator, put under a hi-res microscope, and blown up to beastly proportions.

Mountains is not just a warning to stay the hell out of caves. As the scientists of the Miskatonic University Expedition trek into icy labyrinths or autopsy something that may or may not be alive, they plunge the scalpel further and further into the darkest depths of our own psyche as they navigate Poe’s “boreal pole”. Unfamiliar screams pierce the night. Acrid smells burn the nostrils. Dead dogs and trails of unrecognizable bodily fluids lead them further and further into an unknown that not only looms but swallows and digests.

For the uninitiated, suffice to say that autopsy was probably their worst idea.

Lovecraft was not just using fungal forms for shock value. If we are already preprogrammed to fear the unknown, then the Great Old Ones are those fears transmogrified into spongy flesh. The autopsy is an immersion into those fears where no one should dare to tread. However, will we be spared if we approach the very things we fear with wondering eyes and even a sort of reverence?

There is no answer to be found among those brutal cliffs, only the echoes of screams that remind us why we never want to venture too close.