Underrated Lovecraft Movie Adaptations

Like Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft has been adapted to the screen on countless occasions. Filmmakers have returned to his stories of cosmic horror and dark science again and again for many reasons: the nightmarish scope of his imagination and the inescapable dread summoned up by his alien gods — the "Great Old Ones," like Cthulhu, whose limitless power makes it one of the most memorable monsters in popular culture. Though his language can be archaic, the horror in Lovecraft's best work is all-consuming and unforgettable — in short, perfect material for any aspiring horror director. 

Among the most memorable takes on his body of fiction are Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, while the HBO series Lovecraft Country, while not a direct translation, does a fine job of encapsulating the tone and scope of his work. But there are numerous other feature and short films based on Lovecraft's stories, many of which will satisfy diehard horror fans and devotees of the author's work. Following are some of the lesser-known but still worthwhile screen versions of Lovecraft's enduring stories.

The cosmic and mystical elements of Lovecraft's fiction — space gods, dimensional travel, forgotten magic — found favor among the counterculture of the 1960s, which in turn led to a renaissance of sorts for the horror author. Film producers seeking to tap into that audience's ticket-buying potential also resulted in a modest boom in Lovecraft film adaptations during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Directed by Daniel Haller — who served as production designer on The Haunted Palace and helmed Die, Monster, Die! – and co-written by future Oscar winner Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), 1970's The Dunwich Horror starred Dean Stockwell (Battlestar Galactica) as Wilbur Whateley, a student of the occult who sought Lovecraft's infamous book, the Necronomicon (which lent its name to the ancient spell book in the Evil Dead franchise), to bring his father, the monstrous Yog-Sothoth, to Earth. The film deviates from the source material — most notably in the depiction of Wilbur, whose hipster vibe is a far cry from the half-human in Lovecraft's story — and often feels dated by an abundance of psychedelic imagery and wobbly special effects. But Haller does well in evoking the reality-warping qualities of Lovecraft's Old Ones, Stockwell is the right kind of creepy-intense, and there's a terrific freakout-styled score by Les Baxter. 

A 2009 film adaptation took greater liberties with the story, but did benefit from the presence of Stockwell, who played the heroic professor battling Wilbur (Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs) for the Necronomicon.

Though perhaps not as well-known or appreciated by as wide an audience as Re-Animator, 1986's From Beyond offers another outrageously unique and gore-soaked take on Lovecraft's fiction from co-writer/director Stuart Gordon. The film adopts the core premise of Lovecraft's 1920 short story, which envisions a machine called a "resonator" that can stimulate the user's pineal gland (a pea-sized gland in the brain that may help regulate sleep and some hormonal levels) and allow them to perceive other dimensions, as well as the beings that live there.

Gordon also echoes Lovecraft's notion that seeing those creatures might prove bad for the viewer's sanity, but as with Re-Animator, ups the stakes to nightmarish levels. In the film, the resonator grants its users unimaginable power and pleasure, but at a terrible cost: its inventor, Dr. Edward Pretorius (a name-check of Ernest Thesiger's creepy scientist in Bride of Frankenstein), is so driven by his lusts that he mutates into a monstrosity, while Re-Animator vet Jeffrey Combs, as Pretorius's assistant, develops a taste for human brains. From Beyond is freaky to its core, but also retains Lovecraft's vision of terrors that exist just beyond the realm of our perception.

In his second and final effort as director (after Return of the Living Dead), Alien and Total Recall co-writer Dan O'Bannon oversaw this 1992 adaptation of Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward which, despite positive reviews for his unique approach to the material and some impressive practical effects, only received a modest rollout on home video. 

Chris Sarandon (Fright Night) stars as Ward, a chemical engineer obsessed with his ancestor, a 18^th century necromancer. O'Bannon and writer Brent V. Friedman add a layer of noir to the material with private detective John Terry (Lost), who is hired by Sarandon's wife (Jane Sibbert) to investigate her husband's increasingly unstable behavior. The horror and mystery genres mix well under O'Bannon's guidance, and The Resurrected benefits from Sarandon's performance as both Ward and his ancestor, as well as gruesome monster makeup effects. Unfortunately, its distributor, Interstar Releasing, was shuttered by its parent company, Westinghouse Broadcast, which doomed the pic to a VHS-only release.

Lovecraft's 1926 magnum opus, "The Call of Cthulhu," which details the rise of a global cult devoted to the colossal octopoid monstrosity Cthulhu, posed several problems for any potential film adaptation. The story itself is told by a narrator gathering information from seemingly unconnected print sources — scholarly notes, news items, a police report — which in print form, adds a layer of mystery, but feels disjointed as a visual device. There's also the problem of Cthulhu itself, described as "a mountain [that] walked" which caused insanity in those who viewed it — something that would require expansive (and expensive) visual effects. 

Enter the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), a group of former gamers turned producers of a diverse array of Lovecraftian content, including podcasts, audio books, music, and several movies. They came up with a novel solution for the story's unwieldy structure: they made Call as a silent movie. The approach — which the HPLHS dubs "Mythoscope" — works surprisingly well: silent movies were told in a fragmentary way that perfectly reproduces the jumble of sources that spell out the monster's arrival. It also places the story in its proper time frame, and the limited special effects allow the filmmakers to produce a budget-conscious but still impressive stop-motion Cthulhu. The success of Call allowed the HPLHS to produce a second Lovecraft adaptation, The Whisperer in Darkness, told in the style of Universal horror of the 1930s.

Over the past three decades, Lovecraft's sizable roster of short stories and his enduring popularity have made him a go-to for any medium, from films and television to games, comics, audio books, songs, and even musicals. Dozens upon dozens of short films have also been made from Lovecraft's stories, and one of the most stylish and eerie of these is 2010's Die Farbe (The Color), which moves Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space to Germany. 

Director Huan Vu retains much of the source material, which concerns a meteorite that, upon crashing to Earth, produces a strange "color" that impacts the plants, animals, and finally, the people on a remote farm. It may seem to be a strange choice to shoot a film about an alien color in black and white, but it's a clever one, too — since the color is supposed to be unlike anything on Earth, the audience must use its imagination to envision it (though Huan also adds a tinged CG effect). The stark shadows of the photography and slow but steady pace of the film ultimately generate more chills than most full-color, bigger-budgeted takes on the story.

Though he never shied away from grisly images in his work, Lovecraft himself might have been surprised to see the graphic excesses that some filmmakers used to adapt his stories; one wonders what the staid New Englander would have made of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space, which really puts the cosmic in "cosmic horror." The South African writer-director, best known for Dust Devil (and his ill-fated attempt to remake The Island of Dr. Moreau), recruited none other than Nicolas Cage to play the head of a farming family that undergoes bizarre transformations after a meteorite begins to produce a strange and powerful "color." 

Stanley pulls out all the stops in depicting the effects of the alien presence on anything it touches; the results, from tainted water to merged alpacas, are frightening, and barely require Cage to kick into eccentric acting overdrive to heighten the sense of otherworldliness. The critical success of Color spurred Stanley to announce that he planned to make a trilogy of Lovecraft films, with the next project a new version of "The Dunwich Horror" – bringing us nearly full circle in this review of little-seen but watch-worthy Lovecraft movies.