If you watch modern genre cinema, H.P. Lovecraft is the most adapted author who has never had a hit movie. His fingerprints are everywhere. You see his tentacles in the MCU (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), his cosmic nihilism in prestige TV (True Detective), and his creature design in virtually every monster movie post-1980.
Yet, if you look for a “definitive” high-budget adaptation of a Lovecraft novel—a film that carries the weight and cultural footprint of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—you will find a void.
Why is the father of cosmic horror simultaneously the most influential and the most unfilmable author of the 20th century?
I like to think anyone who ever tried it got mad in the process.
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The point with Lovecraft stories is that they work from the words, and in the readers heads. Trying to put them on the screen would break this link, and destroy the essence.
Think about the story “The Color out of Space”. The book describes it as a color that has never been seen on earth before. This might work in a black and white adaption, but in color, it would be underwhelming to say the least.
I love that the rule (with horror) that the mind is capable of imagining things much darker and scarier than anything you can put on paper. The moment Lovecraft’s monsters appear on scene, the magic is lost, they’re not supposed to be humanly conceivable. It’s not easily commercialisable like capitalism demands of literally anything nowadays
They did make The Colour Out of Space into a movie starring Nicolas Cage and… well while I won’t say it was good, it definitely wasn’t underwhelming.
I watched “Dagon” recently.
Good effort, they worked hard to stick to the idiom.
Was still “so bad it’s good” - clearly neither a Hollywood budget or European art.
Color Out of Space??
It was a small studio, as for many other latest productions. Which is totally fine by me. The only lovecraft"ish" adaptation in the last years with some big name behind i can think of, are a couple of episodes for Del Toro’s “Cabinet of Curiosity”.
great call out. the most recent one was well made, i think. having said that, i cannot personally bring myself to watch them more than once. i find them too disturbing. i even walked out on The Curse back in 87.
My guess is that it’s hard to separate his setting, and the aura of fear of the vast unknown, from his xenophobia. There’ll always be trace elements of his mindset there, or weird dead spots where the interpretation avoids something everyone knows is there, unless one specifically acknowledges and challenges his racism in a modern interpretation like Lovecraft Country (which is more a deconstruction than the original material). Something like The Call Of Cthulhu or The Shadow Over Innsmouth can too easily feed into metaphors about malevolent foreigners.
I think it’s extremely easy to separate his literature from his xenophobia. I’ve read a list of of parallels from the shadow over Innsmouth and to be honest they feel really forced
i think it depends what we mean by this.
i agree with OP that Lovecraft’s xenophobia is intrinsic to what he has created, and why he did so. but i don’t think that in itself is a bad thing. reading his work doesn’t make ppl xenophobic. nor is his work, nor adaptations, become beholden to becoming some kind of “treatise against foreigners.”
he experienced a deepset fear, and expressed and explored that fear. art can help make us reflective, and that’s a boon.
This.
I feel that the Lovecraft is not the same than Lovecraft work. RPG, comics, and other stuff that get inspired by Lovecraft rarely depict the impossible to understand unknown. They are more related with an otherness threat. If if those are unbelievable, they are not unconcievable. Moreover, Lovecraft rarely depict antagonists.
I think that the mainstream adaptation of Lovecraft, adapt the mainstream Lovecraft culture.
I feel you; I miss the sens of deep otherness. I think it’s may be a subversion and make it a tolerant depiction.
If you ask me is just that studios think we are too lazy to be interested in complex themes.
