Movies and Philosophy Now: Hellboy and Escaping the Mountains of Madness

by Christopher Barr

“I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.”
- H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

In the absence of light, darkness prevails.

Hellboy, created by comic book artist Mike Mignola, tells the tale of a red-skinned demon, with filed off horns and a tail, who was summoned by Nazi occultists from Hell to Earth as an infant child during the winter of 1944. Hellboy was a name given to him by the Allied Forces, among them, Professor Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm who would raise Hellboy as his own. His true demon name is Anung Un Rama which translates into, ‘And upon his brow is set a crown of flame’. Sporting an oversized right hand made of stone, Hellboy grew up with a strong sense of humor and not a real sign of any of the evil that is commonly associated with demons from hell.

Hellboy works for the United States Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) in the comic book and the two movies. In the first movie Hellboy is up against the malevolent Russian supernatural, Grigori Rasputin who needs Hellboy as he is quite literally the key to open the portal, and release these monstrous creatures imprisoned in another dimension, to come help create some hellish utopia on earth.

Director Guillermo del Toro said “I hate structure. I’m completely anti-structural in terms of believing in institutions. I hate them. I hate any institutionalised social, religious, or economic holding.” Hellboy is a character that would absolutely agree with that quote. The film is about good and evil and the role that so-called abnormality plays in society, the film is about fighting against the structure of order and those that enforce it. Hellboy is seen as an outcast but like most outcasts, he’s got the biggest heart of them all, he’s got more humanity in him than most of the humans do, and that’s what makes him special.

On a sociological level the film deals with how society chooses to treat unfamiliarity and fear of the unknown. Del Toro is deeply influenced by the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the themes littered in all of his horror stories. Lovecraft was himself influenced deeply by the writing of Edgar Allen Poe, whose tales were filled with mystery and macabre.

Lovecraft was able to see the horror in the relationship between objects and the complexities of the languages that attempted to describe them. Lovecraft wrote in great length about the esoterically veiling of forbidden knowledge. Professor Dyer and his graduate student Danforth in Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness were both driven by curiosity and their scientific responsibility but this desire to unveil a mystery proved to be Promethean in nature. In the story they discovered a city hidden in the mountains, a city clearly not of human architecture but rather an alien structure. They discover that a race of ancient creatures lived there around the time when the moon was broken off from the earth. These Elder Things, were responsible for life on our planet, they were responsible for us. Upon the arrival of Dyer and Danforth, a primordial race of monstrosities awoken from their slumber, these Shoogoths were workers for the Elder Things but had a falling out with them and were vanished from the lands. Dyer regretted what they had learned of the Elder Things, who are similar to the Engineers in Ridley Scott’s film, At the Mountains of Madness plundered, Prometheus, but Danforth was not so lucky for what he saw over the mountains on their Antarctic expedition made him go mad, losing all sanity. Professor Dyer narrates his feelings and what lessons can be learned from not-knowing, at the end of At the Mountains of Madness.

“I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horrors made him scream out so insanely-a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”

Like del Toro, Lovecraft was also skeptical of structural institutions, especially religious ones. “All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don’t regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.”

Edgar Allan Poe said, “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” Poe influenced Lovecraft who influenced del Toro and these men, all Atheists, say religious beliefs and faith are scapegoats to true understanding, they saw them as ways to maintain ignorance in the face of reason without realizing it, they saw people fouling themselves into thinking they were right without actual evidence to support that fact. These men wrote about the supernatural and paranormal but always realizing the symbolic benefits of their fictional characters. Their monsters were metaphors for power and also the vastness and somewhat scary reality outside the Symbolic Order. The tentacles in Lovecraft’s stories are the horrors of forbidden knowledge, attaching themselves as they breathe monstrous life after being unleashed. The Shoogoths, trumping even Jules Verne’s Sea Mammoth, are massive greenish creatures featured most prominently in At the Mountains of Madness, they are shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, fainting self-luminous and are with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming with pustules all over. This is Lovecraft’s morbid encounter of the Real and that is to say the indescribable nature of the world outside of our symbolic linguistic understanding of it. This epistemological destruction is what Lovecraft is passing onto his readers as his own existential philosophy for life, and his warning that actual life outside of the human experience has no interest in the egos of men.

Lovecraft wrote of the Old Ones in many of his stories, many of which are mentioned in his grimoire, the Necronomicon. Lovecraft’s book of summoning ancient demons was thought by some to be a true account of the Old Ones that lived during the dark times before time became a measured practice, but he was okay with that, thinking this belief could build a background of evil verisimilitude.

~~That is not dead which can eternal lie.~~

~~And with strange aeons even death may die.~~

There is a pessimism that can be found in Oswald Spengler’s, The Decline of the West that speaks of a decadence of the modern West that was crucial to Lovecraft’s overall anti-modern worldview. Spengler wrote, “To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.”

For Lovecraft, the fundamental premise that common human laws, interests and emotions possess, have no actual validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large. He saw the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, as a way one must forget that such things are organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a trifling and temporary race called mankind. He like Einstein knew that we must reach beyond the limits of our sensory boundaries. We can’t end where we started but we must take caution in our exploration of what’s beyond the parameters of human thought. Lovecraft saw the outer limits as a necessary curiosity but also he feared the potential madness that could follow.

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is quite known for orienting madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. But Foucault also thought that a little madness can go a long way when one is pursuing enlightenment. He saw social structures, from a structuralism point of view, while using the language of phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of ‘the other’ as mad. These 2 + 2 = 5 people, a minority of society, were outcasts for noncompliance and often committed to mad houses for life. Iconoclasm is met with distain in conservative, religious god-fearing societies.

“…modern man no longer communicates with the madman (…) There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rapture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.” - Michel Foucault

Hellboy, a modern day ‘madman’, had to be kept locked in a vault in order to keep him from the public. The ideology of demonology is so entrenched in the collective consciousness of average people that believing a red demon is there to help rid the world of evil, would be too much for their fast food minds to comprehend. So he is hidden, he is a secret, a myth, he is a preposterous belief by some. He is looked at with the same judgemental eyes that befell upon the Frankenstein monster; where no matter what he does to help he will always be looked at as an abomination.

Because some old white guy is behind the wheel of the car, holding the future of our species in the backseat, and is so impaired with greed and power to willingly stop before he drives us all off the cliff, we are all likely doomed. Poe, Lovecraft and del Toro knew all too clearly that the very naissance of civilization itself was a project birthed out of forbidden knowledge. We opened Pandora’s Box and let out our own Gods and Monsters, ones that have grown out of control to a point that, like Lovecraft’s fictional Elder Things, we too must retreat from our home, possibly never to return. We can only hope that the prevailing darkness is met with the light of reason and the Gods and Monsters are caged in their box yet again.