Cthulhu ratings
Some individual characters in fiction are so prolific, with so many variations and interpretations and inspiring so many spin-offs, that they become an entire genre of monster design unto themselves.
Especially if they’re in the public domain.
Today I’m gonna talk about one of them that I’ve been a fan of since I was a teenager: Cthulhu.
If you don’t know who Cthulhu is, yes you do, you know who Cthulhu is. He’s the big green squid-faced baddie from H. P. Lovecraft’s short story THE CALL OF CTHULHU who’s stuck at the bottom of the ocean, drives people insane, and will end the world when he wakes up. His name has become synonymous with “cosmic horror” and “Lovecraftian horror” despite only being mentioned briefly in three of Lovecraft’s stories and featuring in just one.
Everyone knows who Cthulhu is. Especially after the surge in popularity that he saw in starting in the 2000s. Cthulhu is a recurring character on SOUTH PARK now. Our cup runneth over with Cthulhus.
So, I’m taking it upon myself to rate the Cthulhus (at least, 8 specific ones). You’re all welcome.
Some quick rules:
I’m not rating any Cthulhu that I’ve already talked about before.
No characters that only look like Cthulhu, but don’t fill a similar role in their respective media (so no Davy Jones from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST, as much as I love the performance and visual effects there).
They do gotta look the part, though - so I’m skipping over characters that are functionally Cthulhu, but have totally original designs (like C’thun from Warcraft, Emrakul from Magic: the Gathering, or Bill Cipher from GRAVITY FALLS).
Rules 2 and 3 don’t narrow it down as much as you might think - most of this list is different takes on the Big Guy himself. But that comes with the territory.
So go ahead, rip off your clothes, smear profane symbols on your pallid flesh with human excreta, set your bloody offering aflame, and start chanting.
Let’s do this.
THE SHORE
THE SHORE is a 2021 indie horror game in which a man stumbles into madness and monsters as he looks for his daughter on a beach full of eldritch idols. Praised for its atmosphere and graphics, the game’s version of Daddy ‘Thu is straightforward and classic. It’s exactly what you’d expect. A real Cthulhu’s Cthulhu.
And I mean all that in the worst way.
The basic elements of Cthulhu’s design - humanoid, clawed hands/feet, octopus head, bat wings, green - are boring. A big muscled humanoid with an angry face and otherwise normal proportions isn’t impressive or noteworthy, and it especially doesn’t visually convey the character’s core themes of “infectious madness” and “world-shattering revelations”.
Acting like Cthulhu’s very appearance splinters your sanity when he looks like this is like refusing to say the word “zombie” in a zombie movie: feels like you gotta do it, but it also takes the audience out of it.
The big guy in 2005’s THE CALL OF CTHULHU
To be fair, these are problems within Lovecraft’s original text; his design was pretty generic from the start. A big reason why the Cthulhu Mythos and cosmic horror are so associated with tentacles is because that is literally the only distinctive element of Cthulhu’s visual design. And I get that there are folks who are more fans of Lovecraft’s works than of the ideas in them, who especially prize recreating them with “accuracy”. Folks like the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, whose 2005 film THE CALL OF CTHULHU adapted Lovecraft’s story in the form of a 1920s-era black-and-white silent film.
But if you’re not one of those people - if you want to view these stories more as cosmic horror than as period pieces - then this look isn’t doing you any favors.
I chose THE SHORE because I wanted to spotlight a lovingly made indie game, but this slot could’ve been represented by almost any mainstream depiction of Cthulhu, particularly those for whom Cthulhu is their whole brand (like almost everything put out by Chaosium Inc., who publishes the Arkham Horror board games and the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG). The only thing I want to point out about this specific design is that the wings are especially bad. They have more in common with Halloween clipart of a bat than any plausible anatomy. I can’t even picture them opening.
THE SHORE isn’t a bad game, and at times it does get more creative with its visuals (including a cool moment with a creepy obelisk), but the star of the show is pretty dim.
Rating
This is where the bar is for your bog-standard Cthulhu.
Let’s see if we can do better.
RICK & MORTY
The intro sequence for the animated series RICK & MORTY is a montage of the main cast in a bunch of over-the-top weird situations, often involving grotesque monsters, to set up the show’s edgy hijinks. Each season has its own montage, with some scenes in it being previews of things to come in that season, and the rest being red herrings. Each season’s intro ends with Rick’s flying saucer running away from this particular baddie, right before it swallows the camera and we get the title drop.
This scene hasn’t appeared in the show so far, so we have no idea if it’s the Cthulhu, but it’s definitely a Cthulhu, so I wanted to talk about it. As overplayed as Cthulhu is, I actually like this little scene, and I think it’s a smart inclusion for the title sequence.
RICK & MORTY has a strong iconoclastic streak, with most of its episodes dedicated to pastiches and take-downs of popular media (“It's like INCEPTION, Morty, so if it's confusing and stupid, then so is everyone's favorite movie”) - so bringing an icon that everyone’s supposed to regard as supremely scary into the title sequence of their sci-fi comedy is a good call. At the same time, although the characters are often “above” whatever they’re mocking, they also tend to get in over their heads against legitimately dangerous things (a mugger pointing a gun at you is still threatening even if he’s dressed like the Hamburglar), so again, Cthulhu specifically is a good choice because he’s supposed to be scary.
Design-wise, this Cthulhu has just a couple little twists to put the show’s own spin on it. Extra eyes is pretty common in Cthulhus (especially among fans who’ve seen H. P. Lovecraft’s own drawings of the Big Guy, which give him 6 eyes), but it’s still a fine choice. The hairy forearms are more novel, as is dropping the hind limbs for a tail. But my personal favorite part is the way we fly into its mouth at the end of the sequence.
I’m always down for a gullet lined with teeth, but the fact that its mouth opens with a beak (like real-world cephalopods) is a nice blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail. Plus, most generic depictions of Cthulhu don’t bother to address the question of his mouth at all, instead leaving it implied behind his tentacles.
The last little thing I wanted to point out here is shown right before the mouth shot.
This Daddy’s a daddy.
That’s cute.
Rating
Fun, and just a little bit inventive enough to put it above the baseline.
And the cute kid is definitely merchandisable.
THE SIMPSONS
Hell yeah. Now this is the work of a guy who was asked for Cthulhu and had fun drawing one up instead of just going “yeah sure another one of those here ya go”. This is surprisingly dope.
Of course, Cthulhu has appeared in THE SIMPSONS a few times, and always in their non-canon Halloween episodes.
His first appearance was in Bongo Comics’ “Treehouse of Horror Issue #19”, where Bart and Milhouse summon Cthulhu to dunk on Principal Skinner, only to realize that they have no way to un-summon Cthulhu afterwards.
Cthulhu also features in the show’s “Treehouse of Horror #29”, where Homer beats Cthulhu in an oyster-eating contest, because Homer Simpson has basically just been Garfield for a while now.
But the version of Cthulhu that I pictured above is from the title sequence for “Treehouse of Horror #24”, which was directed by Guillermo del Toro. The sequence is full of references to del Toro’s films, from the famous (HELLBOY) to the obscure (CRONOS) to the “Wait, del Toro directed that?” (BLADE II). While del Toro hasn’t made a film with Cthulhu in it yet (not for lack of trying), he remains a fan, so it makes sense that del Toro would be the first one to bring him into the series that will never die.
This specific version of the Big Guy is the work of creature designer and storyboard artist Guy Davis, who also did work on the monsters for other del Toro films (like PACIFIC RIM and CRIMSON PEAK).
I like this look. Again, they make Cthulhu less boring by just giving him some extra stuff (this time, extra eyes and extra arms), but there’s some particularly neat flourishes with the mouth - both in the unique look of the mouthparts themselves, and in the two tusk-like tentacles on either side of them. One of Davis’ initial designs featured a head shaped like a hammerhead shark, which would’ve made it the only entry on this list with a truly novel head shape.
Lastly, the whole thing is drawn and shaded in a way that reminds me of the distinctive art style of Mike Mignola, the artist behind the original Hellboy comics, which feels intentional, but looks cool even if it isn’t. It makes Cthulhu seem more out-of-place in Springfield.
Rating
Pretty wild that a version of Cthulhu from THE SIMPSONS is more inventive than so many of the ones by die-hard Lovecraft fans.
JUSTICE LEAGUE
Cthulhu isn’t just for references, though - plenty of other media have added Cthulhu (or something Cthulhu-adjacent) to their canon, for the times when they want to dabble in a bit of cosmic horror.
For example, Marvel Comics has the dark god Shuma-Gorath, a Dr. Strange villain who I first met in crossover fighting games.
Shuma-Gorath as a playable character in 1997’s MARVEL SUPERHEROES VERSUS STREET FIGHTER
It uh. Turns out this wasn’t very representative of what the character is like in the comics.
Shuma-Gorath as it appears in 2013’s MIGHT AVENGERS VOLUME 2, issue #2
But Shuma-Gorath isn’t Cthulhu-shaped, so we’re not talking about Shuma-Gorath here.
DC has also taken a couple stabs at Cthulhu. The one that I’m gonna be rating is the main antagonist of “The Terror Beyond”, a two-parter from the animated series JUSTICE LEAGUE that first aired in 2003.
Now, despite Cthulhu being in the public domain, JUSTICE LEAGUE still decided to file the serial numbers off when bringing the eldritch baddie to the show. Thus, instead of featuring Cthulhu, an otherworldly god from the alien domain of R’lyeh, “The Terror Beyond” introduces us to Icthultu - an otherworldly god from the alien domain of Relex.
And Icthultu is literally just a big floating Cthulhu head.
That’s it. That’s the design. Step one, take the one recognizable part of Cthulhu. Step two, there is no step two. Send tweet.
They don’t even do anything interesting with this concept, like suggest that this is only the part of Ichthultu that our puny minds can comprehend, or something. He’s just a big head with tentacles. He grabs the heroes with those tentacles. Then they fly into his head, and punch him in the brain to kill him.
His brain is guarded by a monster, so that’s an element they added, I guess. It’s a virtually featureless black lump with a mouth full of pointy teeth. It goes down after taking a single superficial stab wound from one of its own claws. Woo.
The most interesting thing I can say about Icthultu is that they got Rob Zombie to do the voice. It’s not, like, a particularly memorable performance or anything (no shade to Mr. Zombie). But it’s something that makes you go “huh, neat”, unlike everything else going on with this guy.
Rating
Just about as lazy as it gets.
TERRARIA
TERRARIA is a 2011 crafting-and-adventure game, like a 2D MINECRAFT. Players explore and sculpt environments, gather resources, and work their way up to tackling various enemies and boss monsters. The final boss in most versions of the game is the Moon Lord (pictured above), who is Cthulhu.
For years, the only glimpses into the underlying story of TERRARIA came from in-game enemy descriptions and stuff like private messages from the developers (who at one point joked that the Moon Lord was actually Cthulhu’s brother, Steve). Then on the game’s 8th anniversary, they finally dropped some genuine lore on the TERRARIA forums which confirmed that, yeah, Moon Lord is Cthulhu. He got cut up by some ancient heroes and has been biding his time on the moon instead of slumbering in the sunken city of R’lyeh, but otherwise it’s the same Daddy ‘Thu.
Now, while the Moon Lord’s design has a lot of clearly human anatomy (down to the fingernails), which I normally knock eldritch monster designs for, it does one thing that distinguishes it from the vast and crowded field of Cthulhus:
It has no aquatic elements or imagery.
Fan art of TERRARIA’s Moon Lord, by DeviantArt user carboncornbread
It’s not hard to see why most depictions of Cthulhu take their design in a marine direction: Lovecraft’s original story said he was currently stuck at the bottom of the Pacific ocean and described his head as “octopus-like”. Even when people don’t take that to mean “his head is literally an octopus”, tentacles are still strongly associated with marine life (very few terrestrial animals have tentacles, and none are as well-developed and prominent as those of cephalopods). When you’re designing something whose head resembles a sea creature and who is commonly depicted as rising out of the sea, making it look like it’s native to the ocean seems sensible.
But Cthulhu isn’t native to Earth, much less Earth’s oceans. After all, the ancient city of R’lyeh that’s said to contain his unliving body is a sunken city - it wasn’t built underwater.
Even Icthultu, who otherwise doesn’t have any aquatic elements directly in his design (because there’s almost nothing to his design to begin with), is still associated with marine life in his episodes: most of his hideous forces are sea monsters.
TERRARIA’s version of Dead Daddy who Lies Dreaming instead tries to re-center the “cosmic” in “cosmic horror” (or, at least, the “luna” in “lunacy”), and that’s honestly refreshing. It makes me much more appreciative of Moon Lord than I would be, given that it is otherwise a pretty typical head-and-hands video game boss design.
Also, the eyes in his head and hands turn into mouths full of wiggling needle-like teeth when you deal enough damage to them, and that’s just rad. I always love it when two completely incompatible pieces of anatomy swap places. Plus, I think the odd eye in the middle of Cthulhu’s forehead and the hamsa-like placement of eyes in the palm associates this incarnation more with arcane knowledge than sea monsters.
I love sea monsters, don’t get me wrong. I just think it’s neat that TERRARIA went somewhere different, that still draws on the same source material.
Rating
Cool to see a dry version of Cthulhu (good for you, big guy).
Also, hand-eye-mouths!
PATHFINDER
Pathfinder is a tabletop roleplaying system built on top of Dungeons & Dragons. This particular illustration is by Scott Purdy, and appears in PATHFINDER ADVENTURE PATH #46: WAKE OF THE WATCHER, a sourcebook containing adventures and resources for several Lovecraft icons - including, of course, the big green squidface himself. It depicts a scenario where Cthulhu attacks the pirate city of Riddleport, and it wonderfully illustrates a common way that people misunderstand a specific element of Cthulhu’s design: his size.
I’m not here to “set the record straight” on exactly how big Daddy is. In the original short story, Cthulhu was compared to a mountain that “walked or stumbled”, but also one character momentarily injures him by ramming his boat into Cthulhu like Ursula from THE LITTLE MERMAID, which suggests a slightly less geologic scale. Also, everyone in the story that saw him went crazy and died, so really, who knows.
Either way, the point is that he’s really, really big.
But I think a lot of people miss the point of him being that big.
Like so many monsters in Lovecraft’s stories, Cthulhu represents a disaster on a scale that humans are powerless to interact with. In these stories, humanity is only alive by the luck of happening to avoid these disasters for now. Cthulhu isn’t imprisoned or restrained - it’s just that “the stars aren’t right”. Our annihilation is just the matter of a cosmic die roll. One day, a wayward gamma burst from some quasar could turn Earth into a smear of ionized plasma. One day, Cthulhu could wake up.
Cthulhu’s size, as well as his placement in the ocean, is an expression of these themes. The universe is big and dark, and what we don’t know can hurt us.
So to emphasize this, people like to emphasize Cthulhu’s size. That’s reasonable. Some folks then take it to mean that the reason why Cthulhu is dangerous is just because he’s big. Which is kinda true, but only metaphorically.
But if you miss that metaphor, you end up focusing on what Cthulhu is and isn’t bigger than - as so many fan works do. The modding community for SUBNAUTICA - an exploration game set in an alien ocean inhabited by big critters - is full of people trying to one-up each other with the biggest monster eVaR!!!, and of course Cthulhu got tossed into the mix there too.
Lovecraft wrote THE CALL OF CTHULHU in 1926, many years before the idea of titanic monsters stomping all over human cities was well-established imagery in pop media. The Big Guy was never meant to be looked at as just another kaiju trading punches with Godzilla.
In the context of fantasy settings specifically, there is one thing that the painting of Cthulhu attacking Riddleport reminds me of.
In October of 2015, the trading card game Magic: the Gathering released its 68th expansion, which included this awesome art by Craig J. Spearing depicting some fantasy adventurers facing off against a behemoth octopus.
This would’ve been just another cool piece in Magic’s pile of great art, if not for some king who posted a crappy photo of the card with that art to Reddit with the caption “hit him with ur crossbow steve”. And that’s what I think of, when I look at that painting by Scott Purdy showing a bunch of ships firing cannons at Cthulhu.
The Cthulhu in this painting doesn’t represent the end of civilization by a stroke of cosmic misfortune; he’s just some big dude in a setting full of other big dudes. He’s gotta get right up to you to punch ya, just like any other dude, and then you get to hit him back, and look up how much damage your crossbow does to him in a table somewhere and see how many times you gotta hit him before he goes down.
I’m not saying everyone’s gotta play with these characters the way I prefer. There’s definitely fans of simulationist systems like D&D that want to play games where they get to work out the details of what it would be like interacting with an impossible-to-interact-with pop culture monster. And honestly, I get the appeal. Reinventing a wheel you already love can be lots of fun.
But I do think you’re not really leveraging Cthulhu as Cthulhu if the central thing about him, the main characteristic making him threatening, is simply how large he is.
Rating
hit him with ur crossbow steve
Cthulhu Evolution
Oh wow.
Oh fuck.
Holy shit. Fucking…what?!
OK, so in 2020, figure manufacturer Gecco released a series of statuettes depicting novel takes on monsters from Lovecraft’s works by Japanese sculptors, titled “Cthulhu Evolution”. And the star of that series, hands down, is this piece by Takayuki Takeya - which is absolutely the boldest re-interpretation of Cthulhu I’ve seen so far.
Takeya just demolishes the conventional image of Cthulhu and rebuilds the character from the ground up. Here, the “octopus-like” head is envisioned not as a literal octopus, but as the head of a human being suffering from truly extreme hydrocephalus. Instead of being leathery and bat-like, Cthulhu’s wings are enormous and rubbery and writhing, clearly incapable of being used to achieve flight in any conventional way - an element that reinforces Cthulhu’s otherworldly nature (Takeya explains that he envisions this Cthulhu flying “through some incomprehensible power”).
And the tentacles!
The way most people try to go extra with Cthulhu is to just add way more tentacles (you see a bit of this in Guy Davis’ design, for instance). Takeya goes in a completely different direction, and instead of burying the anatomy with tentacles, he blurs it with them. The lower face and wings seem suffused with the idea of tentacles, making them wriggly and slippery while evading any neat contours that would explain what is actually going on. And pulling that off in a real-world object that you can hold and examine is especially impressive.
One of my favorite details in this design is on the back of its left wing, where it appears to open into…orifices? wounds?…almost as though Cthulhu’s physiology were constantly kneading and reweaving itself. It touches on the type of uneasiness you get when looking at certain kinds of AI-generated art.
Modern creature designers trying to convey Lovecraft’s themes have to grapple with Lovecraft’s own lack of imagination: Why would such an otherworldly being have such a familiar and recognizable body plan? How do you make Cthulhu really alien, while keeping it recognizably Cthulhu?
Lots of excellent artists address this by complicating or disrupting the otherwise familiar tetrapod body plan that Lovecraft outlined - they replace appendages with tentacles, they give it eyes in unusual quantities or places, they exaggerate proportions to make them less human, etc.
In a truly inspired move, Takeya actually leans into the humanness of Cthulhu’s anatomy, and plumbs the uncanny valley for ways to make humanity more alien. Instead of using the human body as a scaffolding on which the other design elements are mounted (the way traditional designs of Cthulhu just look like a guy with a mask, gloves, and wings), Takeya uses the human body as a lens through which something very inhuman is imperfectly and gruesomely refracted. This is an awesome way to depict, as Takeya explains, “how he might look to humans”.
It’s one thing to say “oh, this is just the imperfect image your puny brain is forming”, but this is one of the few designs that sells me on that idea. This really does look like the result of a brain trying to represent something it doesn’t quite have a handle on, and failing.
And if you’re going to put a human face on Cthulhu, you might as well do some buckwild shit like slice it open horizontally starting in the middle of the eye sockets, leaving it looking like an eyeless living CT scan of itself, complete with a heterogeneous mass of even more tentacles for brains.
This is the feature that’s least connected to the source material, but that helps it keep the overall look just out of reach of the familiar.
This design does for Cthulhu what SHIN GODZILLA did for its own familiar big green monster.
If I sat down with a movie that promised to include Cthulhu, and then Daddy ‘Thu looked like this, I’d be shocked and disgusted and fascinated. And that makes this easily the most exciting Cthulhu I’ve seen so far.
Rating
oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god
SUCKER FOR LOVE
SUCKER FOR LOVE is a dating sim first released in 2020 as part of the indie game bundle DREAD X COLLECTION: VOLUME 2, which later got expanded into a standalone release as SUCKER FOR LOVE: FIRST DATE in 2022.
You play as someone who once had a vision of an eldritch monstrosity in a nightmare, and have since then become obsessed with occult rituals to summon that creature so that you can make out.
After some cajoling, the creature - a thicc Cthuloid babe named Ln’eta - agrees to go out on a date with you, provided you use your newly-acquired Necronomicon to perform some rituals for her first.
So. I mean.
What more is there to say?
Rating
Obviously the version that understands the source material best.
No notes.
