If you watch horror or science fiction movies of any decade after the 1950s, you will see slime monsters: viscous jelly creatures that pour onto the screen like runny, green jello. These creatures all began with H. P. Lovecraft (though you never see anyone ever acknowledge this debt). Tales of slimy monsters were largely unknown before HPL began publishing in the 1920s. I can think of a couple of Pulpers, such as Thorp McKlusky’s “The Crawling Horror” (Weird Tales, November 1936) and “Slime” (Weird Tales, March 1953) by Joseph Payne Brennan, but these came after HPL.
Lovecraft began it with “The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, March 1927) and, even better, “At the Mountains of Madness” (Astounding Science Fiction, February-April, 1936). If you watched a young Steve McQueen in The Blob (1958), you were watching Lovecraft. Stephen King was quite clearly working in the Mythos tradition in Creepshow (1982) as Jordy Verrill. The idea of the slimy monster that can cover you like a wave did not originate with Stephen King, either, in “The Raft” from Creepshow 2 (1987). Need I say it – Lovecraft.
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