"For juveniles like us at the core of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost, who were quite obsessed by the concepts created by Boris Vallejo, Frank Frazetta, HR Giger, Ron Cobb, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley, an utterly dedicated sword and sorcery movie such as the original Conan The Barbarian (1982) fell on deeply fertile soil. I owned every Conan book by Howard, including the unfinished ones completed by L. Sprague de Camp et al, and in spite of the fact that Conan The Barbarian deviated quite significantly from Howard's original stories, John Milius' film managed to capture the spirit of Conan's Hyborian Age to astonishing perfection.
My contemporary obsession with this movie thus at times approached alarmingly fanatical levels. Likely among the mildest of those were various visual, musical and lyrical references to Howard's prose, as can be found on Morbid Tales, Emperor's Return, To Mega Therion, and Into The Pandemonium.
This was all of course eons ago, and it is thus by now as much an ancient saga as Conan's story was when Howard wrote it down under the guidance, as he said, of Conan's ethereal spirit. But some of my closest friends back then walked this path with me, just as some of my friends of today share such sentiments."
No comments:
Post a Comment