Jazz is lovecraft-pilled

August Derleth once wrote a piece about H. P. Lovecraft. In the piece, he coined a new term: "Lovecraftian". Derleth described a Lovecraftian tone as "the indescribably horrific existing in a kind of refutation of the humanely rational." He described a husband beating his 1930s housewife to death because he was possessed by the Great Race of Yith in their astral wanderings. "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," he'd say as he's clobbering her to death. This, he said, would qualify as almost perfectly Lovecraftian.

I fear "I Am Jazz" enters into Lovecraftian territory. The .webm to the left shows a simple domestic scene. The women look like average Anglo-Saxon mothers. They're relaxing on the chesterfield. One fancies they might be discussing the superiority of foregone British custom when we cut to them. But it slowly dawns on us in mounting reels of dread that in the parlour, with spectral expressions on their haggish, twisted faces, they're talking about the woman's frail son's descent into ancestral madness.

Despite the odious implication and the producers' forlorn hope to desperately conceal this unspeakable horror, the average person is driven through gales of feverish delirium. Nevertheless, the viewer is entranced. We're drawn further into the cyclopean edifice of this ruinous domain. The ethereal arabesque abhorrence of the abominable blasphemy they're uttering, the cantillate quality with which they're coldly reciting the long dead words, it summons this starry malevolence that almost unnameably couples with the viewer's basic sense of what is euclidean.