I've heard various HPL stories described as being "his most Poe-like." Though it's true that Poe is probably HPL's greatest influence, Poe had many aspects to his work, so it makes a difference as to what aspect one thinks HPL was imitating.
"The Unnameable" is HPL emulating Poe's penchant for oddball philosophical pieces disguised as fiction. I've argued elsewhere that Poe's "Morella" is the author's take on the Aristotelian "A is A" argument, in that the narrator's daughter suffers when he first addresses his daughter by her mother's name.
"The Unnameable" is a hard-to-follow colloquy between two characters, Carter and Manton, that takes place near an abandoned house. Conveniently enough, their argument is settled when they are attacked by an unnameable something or other, though for a change, both potential victims survive. There are no "Mythos" associations in this brief tale-- I for one don't consider this "Carter" in any way related to the "Randolph Carter" who appears in a few Mythos-stories-- and I imagine that the two movie "adaptations" had to make up anything resembling a conventional story.
2 comments:
If memory serves I tried to watch the first movie once and I think I finished...maybe. It wasn't very good at all. I remember boredom.
I also may have seen the first of the two, but the memory has faded. Seems like it just got turned into a haunted house story.
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