Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth’s 5 Favorite H.P. Lovecraft Stories

Cradle of Filth leader Dani Filth is a known horror enthusiast and he’s here to tell you what his five favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories are.

Casual fans, of course, are familiar with the famed writer from Providence, Rhode Island as the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. Dozens of his works have been the source of inspiration for countless metal bands, from Black Sabbath (“Behind the Wall of Sleep”) and Metallica (“The Call Of Ktulu”) to heaps of black metal artists.

Often utilizing the New England area as setting inspiration, Lovecraft’s short stories ranged from the aforementioned mythological creature to occult phenomena to tales featuring casts of creepy characters with dark, sinister ambitions.

Born in 1890, Lovecraft authored over 100 short stories during his lifetime, dying in 1937.

Artfully and intensely descriptive, one does not have to stretch the imagination very far at all to see the obvious connective tissue between Lovecraft and Dani Filth.

See Filth’s favorite Lovecraft stories further down the page. But first…

What You Need to Know About Cradle of Filth

From: Suffolk, England

First Album: The Principle of Evil Made Flesh (1994)

New Album: The Screaming of the Valkyries

Cradle of Filth’s 15th album comes four years removed from Existence Is Futile. It’s quite rare to see a band so deep into their career and catalog with this much creative heft to keep the momentum moving ever-upward.

The Screaming of the Valykries is another late-career triumph, marking the studio debuts of guitarist Donny Burbage (Aether Realm) and keyboardist/vocalist Zoe Marie Federoff, both of whom joined in 2022.

The band’s lineup has been continuously injected with new blood and it seems to keep pushing Cradle of Filth to lightly experiment with their sound. From ’80s goth shimmer to classic metal guitar leads, it all neatly fits within the band’s established sonic framework.

READ MORE: The 25 Best Metal Albums of 2000

For our purposes here (Lovecraft) and those classic metal touches, third single “White Hellebore” is the ideal preview.

Of the song, Filth says, “The wintertime flower of the title reminds us scintillatingly of our own mortality, flourishing in seasons of dying light and cold, frozen earth. Blossoming in the shadows, this Hellebore’s flowers draw us deeply into the stygian darkness with her. In context of this song, the White Hellebore of the title is an alluring woman not too distant in danger from the predatory black widow, fostering both hope and despair; A poison and an elixir, she is stunning to behold but ever deadly to taste.”

The frontman continues, “This video — reeking of Lovecraftian gothic horror — presents the White Hellebore as a movie starlet who survives the grave through her dalliances with dark occult forces, a necromantic mystic tryst that an overzealous morgue attendant encounters with terrifying results, complimenting the song’s unholy matrimony of melody and mayhem.”

Listen below.

Cradle of Filth, “White Hellebore” Music Video

Cradle of Filth’s ‘Screaming of the Valkyries‘ is out March 21 on Napalm.

Follow the band on Instagram, Facebook and X and head to the Cradle of Filth website to see all of their upcoming tour dates. They’ll be co-headlining the Chaos and Carnage North American tour with Dying Fetus, alongside special guests Fleshgod Apocalypse, Ne Obliviscaris, Undeath, Vomit Forth and Corpse Pile.

See Dani Filth’s 5 favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories below.

DANI FILTH’S 5 FAVORITE H.P. LOVECRAFT STORIES

The Hound

The Hound is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in September 1922.

It contains several references to the body of lore known as the Cthulhu Mythos which these five stories I’ve chosen come from.

The first time the appearance of one of Lovecraft’s most famous literary creations — The Necronomicon — occurs, is in The Hound.

Only a few pages in length, HP Lovecraft is properly showing off when penning long overly-descriptive passages about “dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial” in this story of two grave robbers with a morbid museum who steal a scared amulet from an avenging howling monster hellbent on its return.

Proper Tales From the Crypt-style action. And I’m here for that.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Whilst visiting a dreary, isolated coastal town ripe with creeping decay, the protagonist of the story runs into a nightmare of horrid discovery — the malformed inhabitants of Innsmouth have interbred with Deep Ones; dark aquatic entities who appear from the depths of the ocean as emissaries of Dagon.

I particularly love the unsettling creeping unease this story provokes, the “gradually fallen into ruin and rot” fishing port of Innsmouth actually reminds me of a few shitty coastal towns I’ve visited in England over the years, complete with what’s known as the “Innsmouth look” — the turning into a gape-faced fish person.

The Call Of Cthulhu

What else can I say? Cthulhu is my spirit guide.

The great disfigurehead of modern pop culture, Cthulhu, the ravager of madness, rises from his ancient, aquatic slumber in this well-tongued tale.

What starts with arguably the most effective intro paragraph of Lovecraft’s chittering career, the story lumbers through a series of spidery accounts, revealing secret cults and mysteries surrounding the Great Old One. All before coming face-to-face with the risen, tentacular God.

I found the end echoing in fear but i was also strangely disappointed to find out just how easy it is to dispatch a Great Old One (at least for now).

It turns out we needn’t have shat our pants through sheer dread of a titanic nightmarish cosmic squid monster after all!

That being said, this is still cosmic horror at its most slithery best, leaving the reeling feeling that one has glimpsed something indescribably vast and beyond our human ken.

The Dunwich Horror

A really creepy family drama this one!

The Whateley’s grotesque Texas Chainsaw clan summon an invisible monster and a group of Miskatonic University faculty members well-versed in the Cthulhu Mythos, rally to prevent the entity from tearing New England a new one.

Again, the dreaded book Necronomicon makes an appearance, as does Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold.

I used to think this story was something to do with the village called Dunwich up the coast from where I live in Suffolk, where the once-thriving port town was swept into the sea mid-13th century by a massive storm, leaving behind nothing but ghosts, fairytale and the occasional church bell tolling from under the waves.

But I was wrong, it wasn’t.

At The Mountains Of Madness

Film director Guillermo Del Toro has long talked about wanting to get this film made, even creating a trailer and getting Tom Cruise onboard to star as the geologist William Dyer.

Dyer, who serves as part of an expedition to the uncharted, frozen wastelands of Antarctica, is with the team that discover a labyrinthine alien civilization literally chockablock full of cosmic wonder and ancient terror still very much present on Earth. Unfortunately the budget for said proposed blockbuster was deemed too high by the studio and shelved.

This story though, full of mythos lore, serves to tie together a number of Lovecraft’s stories and was the first I ever read by the author.

Plus it influenced one of my favorite movies, John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its bleak wintry otherworldliness and murderous, shapeshifting horror.