The setting of Call of Cthulhu is a darker version of our world, based on H. P. Lovecraft's observation ( from his short essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature ) that " The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

The term was first coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent of Lovecraft, who used the name of the creature Cthulhu — a central figure in Lovecraft literature and the focus of Lovecraft's famous short story The Call of Cthulhu ( first published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928 )— to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors.

Although not formalised and acknowledged as a mythos per se, Lovecraft did correspond with contemporary writers ( Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Lieber – a group referred to as the " Lovecraft Circle ") – and shared story elements: Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in the short story " The Children of the Night " ( 1931 ), and in turn Lovecraft mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in the stories " Out of the Aeons " ( 1935 ) and " The Shadow Out of Time " ( 1936 ).

He had been severely affected by several tragedies occurring in a short period of time: Robert E. Howard's death by suicide ( 1936 ), Lovecraft's death from cancer ( 1937 ) and the deaths of his parents, which left him exhausted.

Black Sabbath's " Behind the Wall of Sleep " appeared on their 1970 debut album and is based on Lovecraft's short story " Beyond the Wall of Sleep ".

" Gramma ", a short story made into a film in the 1980s anthology horror show The New Twilight Zone, mentions Lovecraft's notorious fictional creation Necronomicon, also borrowing the names of a number of the fictional monsters mentioned therein.

Lovecraft's short story " The Rats in the Walls " makes reference to Trimalchio, reading, " There was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter.

* Robert Harrison Blake, a character based on Robert Bloch from H. P. Lovecraft's short story " The Haunter of the Dark "

According to Lovecraft's short story, R ' lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific and the prison of the entity called Cthulhu.

The name was first applied to the creatures in Lovecraft's short story " The Whisperer in Darkness " ( 1931 ), elaborating on a reference to ' What fungi sprout in Yuggoth ' in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth ( 1929 – 30 ) which described the contrasting vegetation on alien dream-worlds.

Lovecraft's horror short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth says that he originally came from Panton.

For example, one of the " hints " that Raglan James leaves Lestat is a copy of H. P. Lovecraft's short story, The Thing on the Doorstep.

It appears, inter alia, as an illustration in Jorge Luis Borges ' famous essay " A New Refutation of Time ", and may have inspired H. P. Lovecraft's 1918 short story " Polaris ".

Lovecraft's short story.

A 2004 article in Skeptic Magazine states that Däniken took many of the book's concepts from The Morning of the Magicians, that this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient astronaut theory originates in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories " The Call of Cthulhu " written in 1926, and " At the Mountains of Madness " written in 1931.

Ligotti has stated that many of his short stories make allusions to Lovecraft's Azathoth, although rarely by that name.

Considered one of the best short stories of Lovecraft's early period, aspects of the The Cats of Ulthar would be referenced again in the author's works The Other Gods and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Lovecraft's short story, " The Call of Cthulhu ".

They first appeared in Lovecraft's short story " The Shadow Out of Time " ( 1936 ).

In Lovecraft's short story The Dunwich Horror, Yog-Sothoth impregnates a mortal woman, Lavinia Whateley, who then gives birth to twin sons: the humanoid Wilbur Whateley, and his more monstrous unnamed brother.

Lovecraft's short story " Out of the Aeons " mentions the Cardiff Giant, contrasting it with the real mummies on display in the fictional Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Massachusetts.

Lovecraft, in his short work " The History of the Necronomicon " ( written 1927, published after Lovecraft's death, in 1938 ), made John Dee the translator of one of the versions of his mythical book of forbidden lore The Necronomicon ( an example of Lovecraft's use of the technique of ' pseudo-authenticity '), much nonsense has been written connecting Dee and Enochian magic with The Necronomicon.

Jason Colavito claims that von Däniken plagiarized many of the book's concepts from Le Matin des Magiciens ( Morning of the Magicians ), that this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient astronaut theory originates in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories " The Call of Cthulhu " and " At the Mountains of Madness ".

Call of Cthulhu is a horror fiction role-playing game based on H. P. Lovecraft's story of the same name and the associated Cthulhu Mythos.

Progressive metal band Dream Theater's song " The Dark Eternal Night " is based on Lovecraft's story " Nyarlathotep ".

Lovecraft Historical Society produced a silent film version of Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu.

Shub-Niggurath is first mentioned in Lovecraft's revision story " The Last Test " ( 1928 ); she is never actually described in Lovecraft's fiction, but is frequently mentioned or called upon in incantations.

The reference to " Astarte ", the consort of Baal in Semitic mythology, ties Shub-Niggurath to the related fertility goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in Lovecraft's " The Rats in the Walls ", and implies that the " great mother worshipped by the hereditary cult of Exham Priory " in that story " had to be none other than Shub-Niggurath.

The Black Goat may be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan ( 1890 ), a story that inspired Lovecraft's " The Dunwich Horror " ( 1929 ).

Despite similarities in theme and name, Nyarlathotep does not feature at all in Lovecraft's story " The Crawling Chaos ", ( 1920 / 21 ) an apocalyptic narrative written in collaboration with Winifred V. Jackson ( aka Elizabeth Berkeley ).

Lovecraft's story, as both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.

Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.

The story was frequently anthologized even during Lovecraft's lifetime, including in Dashiell Hammett's 1931 collection Creeps by Night.

In " The Call of Cthulhu ", Lovecraft's characters encounter architecture which is " abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours ".

Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft's works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories.

French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, describes " The Call of Cthulhu " as the first of Lovecraft's " great texts ".

Wright ( who suffered from Parkinson's disease ) continued to publish stories by Lovecraft, Smith, and Quinn, though he was more selective than Baird ; he rejected Lovecraft's " At the Mountains of Madness ", " The Shadow Over Innsmouth " and ( initially ) " The Call of Cthulhu ", among other stories.

Ancient astronaut theory has been used as background or main topic in many fictional works such as Lovecraft's short story " The Call of Cthulhu " ( 1926 ), the movie Stargate ( 1994 ), the movie Knowing ( 2009 ), the movie Prometheus ( 2012 ), the TV show Earth: Final Conflict, and innumerable comic books, manga books and video games.

Lovecraft's " The Call of Cthulhu ": " Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched.

A 2004 article in Skeptic magazine states that von Däniken plagiarized many of the book's concepts from The Morning of the Magicians, that this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient astronaut theory originates in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories " The Call of Cthulhu " and " At the Mountains of Madness ".

Thomas E. Fuller's Atlanta Radio Theatre Company performed H. P. Lovecraft's " The Call of Cthulhu ", which was broadcast via radio live from onsite.

Lovecraft's first mention of the Old Ones appears in his most famous story, “ The Call of Cthulhu ” ( 1926 ), where he uses the term in reference to Cthulhu's spawn.

Call of Cthulhu role-playing game has taken its description of the byakhee from the creatures in Lovecraft's " The Festival ", but it is uncertain whether Lovecraft and Derleth's creations are one and the same .— Harms, Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, pp. 42.

The story contains the first mention of Abdul Alhazred, a fictional authority on the occult who would later be mentioned in most of Lovecraft's major Cthulhu Mythos stories, including " The Hound " ( 1922 ), " The Festival " ( 1923 ), " The Call of Cthulhu " ( 1926 ), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward ( 1927 ), " The Dunwich Horror " ( 1928 ), " The Whisperer in Darkness " ( 1930 ) At the Mountains of Madness ( 1931 ), " The Dreams in the Witch House " ( 1932 ), " The Thing on the Doorstep " ( 1933 ), and " The Shadow out of Time " ( 1934 ).

A webcomic, Lovecraft is Missing, debuted in 2008 and takes place in 1926, before the publication of The Call of Cthulhu, and weaves in elements of Lovecraft's earlier stories.

The game is based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, author of The Call of Cthulhu and progenitor of the Cthulhu Mythos, and in particular being an reimagined adaptation of Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

" According to GameSpy, " this disturbing slice of Lovecraft's America is well worth the time to visit, even with a few missteps ," adding that " despite the occasional missteps, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a more than fitting tribute to its literary inspiration.