Sight&Sound - 04.2020

April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 49

Corman’s talented production designer at AIP,
directed Die, Monster, Die! (1965) with Boris
Karloff, a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The
Color out of Space’, and then a much groovier,
psychedelic version of The Dunwich Horror in

1970. As the 60s dream curdled, Lovecraft’s
      cosmic doom seemed to speak to the age.
      There were rock bands called H.P. Lovecraft,
      Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan had started
      worshipping Lovecraft’s old god Cthulhu, and
      editions of Lovecraft’s entirely fictional black-
      magic grimoire, The Necronomicon, emerged
      and developed an entirely independent life.
      The history of Lovecraft adaptations in
      part follows the trajectory of low-budget
      horror cycles. Jess Franco’s Euro-horror
      factory produced the bizarre and joyless erotic
      thriller Necronomicon (aka Succubus) in 1968,
      but borrowed only the title from Lovecraft.
      Dan O’Bannon would eventually direct his
      own version of ‘Dexter Ward’ called The
      Resurrected (1992), but in the 1970s Lovecraft’s
      fingerprints are all over O’Bannon’s script
      for Alien (1979), and the whole look of the
      creature was borrowed by Ridley Scott from
      H.R. Giger’s book of nightmarish paintings
      of biomechanical hybrids that was released
      under the title Necronomicon in 1977. The
      Necronomicon would pop up again as the
      book that accidentally conjures demons in
      Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). Meanwhile,
      O’Bannon’s old film school friend John
      Carpenter directed The Thing (1982), based
      on a 1938 pulp sci-fi story by John Campbell
      that owed everything to Lovecraft’s earlier
      novella set in the furthest reaches of
      Antarctica, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’.
      In the 1980s, Lovecraft’s universe of mad
      scientists raising up tentacular monsters
      was perfect fodder for SFX-driven body
      horror. Charles Band’s crazy outfit Empire

International Pictures produced some

enduring gross-out body horrors, including

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), based

on Lovecraft’s shocker ‘Herbert West – Re-

Animator’, and the follow-up From Beyond

(1986), from another minor Lovecraft tale.

From Beyond contains some memorable

forehead-sprouting third-eye acting work

from cult actor Jeffrey Combs, but the

titillating S&M vision of sexual transgression

in the dimension beyond is more Clive

Barker than H.P. Lovecraft. The Hellraiser

franchise (1987-) took over this territory

soon after. Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), from

the same Empire stable, was suitably abject,

if not directly derived from Lovecraft.

After Empire Pictures collapsed, Gordon

directed several more Lovecraft adaptations,

including the sombre Castle Freak (1995) and

Dagon (2001). Gordon’s version of Dreams

in the Witch-House (2006) marked a move

to TV adaptation, anticipating another key

shift for the production of horror. This year,

Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams are producing

the HBO adaptation Lovecraft Country, from

Matt Ruff’s novel that directly addresses

Lovecraft’s notoriously racist and nativist

views. Ruff turns them against themselves

in a plot about African Americans fighting

Klan worshippers of Lovecraft’s old gods.

After 2000, the rise of both the New

Weird in literature and CGI in film has

made Lovecraft the sweet spot for many.

There are now more than 200 writer

credits for Lovecraft on IMDb, the numbers

rising significantly in the last decade. The

influence oozes out in many directions. In

the mainstream, Alex Garland’s Annihilation

(2018) was a troubled version of Jeff

VanderMeer’s New Weird novel that seeks to

revise the Lovecraftian default disgust at the

tentacled other. Guillermo del Toro’s squidgy

imagination owes much to Lovecraft, and

the saga of his repeated attempts to raise the

budget for an adaptation of ‘At the Mountains

of Madness’ keeps fans on tenterhooks.

That the legendary eccentric Richard

Stanley finally returns to cinema with a

Lovecraft adaptation makes perfect sense.

Meanwhile, the ambition to explore a

sense of creeping metaphysical dread at the

arthouse end of horror has a debt to Lovecraft

as much as David Lynch. Films such as Spring

(2014) and The Endless (2017), both by Justin

Benson and Aaron Moorhead, or Trey Edward

Shults’s It Comes at Night (2017), would fit

Lovecraft’s definition of cosmic dread.

Probably the most striking development,

though, is the rise in short films, exploring

the digital effects made possible after the

breakthrough of Gareth Edwards’s micro-

budget, lap-top designed Monsters (2010). This

has brought affordable CGI to the killer Bs

and smaller, independent filmmakers. Out

of this batch, and for Lovecraft connoisseurs,

it is worth seeking out Andrew Leman’s The

Call of Cthulhu (2005), and his feature-length

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), both made

for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

They are faithful silent adaptations, made

in a murky, oneiric black and white, and

appear to swim directly out of a toxic 1920s.

As Lovecraft’s wizards and swamp-

priests chant the awful promise that “dead

Cthulhu waits dreaming” to return again,

we have to face, whether we like it or

not, that there is a sliver of visual culture

that is now soaked in Lovecraft’s toxic

sublime of anxiety, awe and dread.

Heads will roll: John Carpenter’s Lovecraft-influenced The Thing (1982)

Boris Karloff in Die, Monster, Die! (1965)