Is Lovecraft supposed to be scary?

In my experience Lovecraft is creepy, and not scary. The concepts in some stories are so striking and strange that they stick with you for a long time, becoming a little part of your unconscious. They're not going to make you jump at a bump in the night, but if you walk your dog past an abandoned house you might imagine some eldritch horror waiting inside. Or you might see a sleepy fishing village and think of the dark rituals they might perform when all the tourists have gone home. You look at things a little differently sometimes.

So creepy. Not scary

To borrow a phrase from the psychedelic community, appreciating literary horror requires the right set and setting. The ideal would be to read at night, alone, in the dark, perhaps with rain or howling wind, along with being relaxed and focused enough to really get into the story. It also depends on the story, "The Nameless City" and "The Festival" both creep me the hell out, where "The Colour Out of Space" was more, as you described, fascinating.

In any case though I don't think you're going to get terribly shaken by any of his stories, writing is just removed enough from reality that it's hard to get the visceral kind of fear you can get with say, a horror film.

It's more existential horror - we're basically powerless when compared to everything else out there in the universe, sometimes to the extent that we can't comprehend it.

I generally compare Lovecraft to The Twilight Zone - less jumpy, more thinky.

But I'm not really scared, or terrified by any of his work so far, as I would normally with Horror fiction. Instead, I'm just entertained and fascinated by it. Is this normal? Are you supposed to feel like that with Lovecraft?

I was a kid in the 1980s, I remember doing duck-and-cover drills in second grade in case the Cold War got hot and the nukes started flying, and I remember knowing that the drills were nothing but a placebo.

When you grow up knowing that the world could end in nuclear holocaust at any time and there's nothing you can do about, then it's hard to find much to be terrified by in contemporary horror fiction, let alone the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

I almost wish I had a time machine so I could go back to Rhode Island in the 1920s. I'd bring a ThinkPad with videos of nuclear weapons tests and some spare batteries, go to Providence, drop in on Lovecraft, and say, "Hey, Howard, you want to see some blind nuclear chaos? Check this out."

It depends, but yeah I remember reading "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (or whatever the name is in English) and thinking all the way that I would do the same thing and that it sounded actually pretty cool. I found Edgar Allan Poe's tales actually more terrifying, especially those about people falling into madness just because, without any eldritch being involved or anything. I also find much scarier tv shows about real crime or realistic serial killers than anything involving the demon or ghosts or whatever, so I guess it depends on your perspective.

Then some other stories are creepy in the way that @Kijafa mentions.

If you really want to be scared in a Lovecraftian setting, try playing the pen-and-paper RPG Call of Cthulhu.

This is just my personal take. I feel like older horror is harder to be scared by because I have to do more consciously to buy into being scared. One of the major themes that Lovecraft uses is forbidden knowledge and insights that come with immense costs; this is not inherently scary but I believe any reader at any point in history would have related to that idea in about the same way because none of us have any idea of what "forbidden knowledge" is.

Some themes have survived really well, e.g. going to spooky places and experiencing spooky things, forgotten guilt catching up with you.

In contrast, other major themes like "shady foreigners" and "secret heritage" have simply not stood the test of time. Even if you take out the inherent racism, the theme of "the other" is not as pointed as it used to be. Going out and seeing the world is something sold to us as a good thing. Genetic analysis companies compete on the basis that they can reveal to you MORE about unknown heritage and that discovering you are actually Irish and not German is quirky, but cool. E.g. Shadow over Innsmouth doesn't scare me at all.

There are some collected works by modern authors that revisit Lovecraft's work to reframe it in a way that makes it scary to a modern audience. For example, Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror is a 'blood curse' + 'forbidden knowledge' kind of story.

Wilbur is the child of a human woman and an Outer God. He is grotesque but still human. Old Whately, Wilbur's grandfather, tries to steal a book to summon the Outer God, and comes to the attention of Occult Scholars. In the end, Wilbur succumbs to his dark heritage and becomes a complete monster, screaming for his Outer God father, thrashing until the scholars and police can destroy him.

In the revisit, we get a retelling from someone in Dunwich who fills in important details lost in the original story. Many of the occult details are the same; Wilbur is still a grotesque half-Outer God child, Old Whately still seeks occult help, Occult Scholars still come to Dunwich -- however we also learn that Wilbur is loved by his family. The Whatelys protect him and adapt to him to try to give him a normal life. Old Whately travels to get help from Occult Scholars who see in Wilbur an opportunity to test their theories and spells. They lie to the family and the resulting struggle results in Wilbur becoming a grotesque monster who is then put down and mourned by the people of Dunwich. He goes on to say that he and others resent the scholars for what they did to the Whatelys and their perceived heroism in the official (Lovecraft's) account.

I feel that the revisit to Dunwich Horror took a dated horror trope, the 'blood curse', and added a more modern trope to it, 'abuse of authority,' to make that story, in my opinion, better and more horrific.