With the inaugural season of Lovecraft Country well underway and Color Out of Space now available on Shudder, the Year of Lovecraft remains in full swing.
H.P. Lovecraft‘s works tapped into the fear of the unknowable, of horrors vast and incomprehensible. His brand of cosmic horror made humans look so frail and obsolete by comparison. In a present where the future seems so unknowable and dangerous, it makes perfect sense that filmmakers would tap into those fears, now more than ever.
Still, Lovecraft’s influence on the genre has long been seen and felt. These ten movies movies draw from the author’s work, either directly or indirectly, using it as inspiration to deliver memorable tales of terror…
Re-Animator
When you think of Lovecraftian horror, it’s near impossible for Stuart Gordon’s seminal horror comedy not to pop in mind. In a loose adaptation of “Herbert West-Reanimator,” Jeffrey Combs steals the entire film as the eccentric medical student with a reanimating reagent that unleashes complete chaos at Miskatonic University. Gordon adds his voice to the Lovecraft story, turning Herbert West’s tale into a full-on splatstick horror-comedy that paints the walls red.
Castle Freak
Drawing from the short story “The Outsider,” Castle Freak marks the third Lovecraftian partnership between director Stuart Gordon and actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. The second being From Beyond. Castle Freak is arguably the most mature of the three. Combs plays John Reilly, a man looking to make amends with his wife Susan (Crampton) after a devastating accident left their son dead and teen daughter blind. After inheriting a castle, they travel there to stay until the estate can be liquidated. Of course, they’re unaware a deranged, disfigured beast inhabits it. Castle Freak is dark and disturbing, but with heartfelt themes of love and redemption.
The Resurrected
From The Return of the Living Dead and Alien’s Dan O’Bannon comes an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Charles Dexter Ward (Chris Sarandon) has been behaving so strangely, holed up in his carriage house performing chemical experiments, that his wife hires a private investigator to uncover what he’s up to and why he abandoned her. The more they discover about Charles’s family history and his experiments, the more disturbing things get. The Resurrected is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, just set in a modern period. That means it can be a little slow to build, but it explodes in a delightful creature heavy final act.
Necronomicon
Jeffrey Combs, resembling Bruce Campbell with his prosthetic chin, plays H.P. Lovecraft in this anthology’s wraparound story that sees the prolific horror writer copying stories from the Necronomicon in the middle of an old library guarded by monks. He lets loose a trio of Lovecraftian tales of horror and gore, each progressively weirder than the preceding segment. The segments are based on “The Rats in the Walls,” “Cool Air,” and the novella The Whisperer in the Darkness. With Brian Yuzna as the producer and director for half of the film, expect things to get goopy and gory.
Annihilation
Annihilation might be based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, but there’s a whole lot of “The Colour Out of Space” in its DNA. It follows an expedition into a mysterious zone where the rules of nature no longer apply, told by the expedition’s sole survivor. That zone is dubbed “the Shimmer” for its iridescent color. As the group gets further into the site and encounters disturbing sights, they realize the Shimmer is changing flora and fauna. Its origins of the extraterrestrial variety crash-landed on Earth. Just like the Lovecraft story. Of course, the narrative diverges from there, but it’s still a tense slice of sci-fi cinema.
Banshee Chapter
After her friend’s sudden disappearance, journalist Anne Roland (Katia Winter) discovers the strange and horrifying links between her friend, a government conspiracy involving a research drug, and an eerie radio broadcast of otherworldly origin. Drawing inspiration from actual government hallucinogenic drug experiments and H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond,” Blair Erickson’s feature debut is as creepy as mysterious and engaging. Look for The Silence of the Lambs‘s Ted Levine to steal every scene he’s in, but more than that, be ready for some great scares. Where From Beyond went for practical effects-driven spectacle, Banshee Chapter opts for a quiet, menacing atmosphere. It’s effectively creepy.
Dark Waters
After her father’s death, Elizabeth travels to a remote island to discover why her father funded the convent there. She finds it inhabited exclusively by nuns who perform bizarre rituals in the catacombs underneath the convent. The nuns harbor many dark secrets, including something inhuman lurking below. Directed by Mariano Baino, Dark Waters favors mood and style over a fully coherent narrative, making it feel like an Italian horror by way of Lovecraft. It’s ambiguous, atmospheric, and gorgeous.
The Beyond
One of Lucio Fulci’s most beloved horror films, and the second entry in his unofficial “Gates of Hell” trilogy, The Beyond is also the director’s most influential. Set in Louisiana, a young woman inherits a hotel and discovers it was built over one of the gates to Hell. Bleak, surreal, and dreamlike in its storytelling, The Beyond toes the line between beauty and horror. Essentially, The Beyond is what happens when you cross Fulci with H.P. Lovecraft. The hotel is a gateway, essentially a portal to another world full of horrors. The Book of Eibon could easily be a stand-in for the Necronomicon. The foreboding tone of it all is Fulci channeling one of his favorite authors.
The Mist
Frank Darabont’s bleak 2007 horror film may have been an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, but both channeled Lovecraft for this gnarly tale. A severe storm seems to trigger a strange, thick mist that crosses over a lake and town and envelopes it. And that fog brings all sorts of bloodthirsty and deadly creatures, trapping survivors inside a supermarket to fight for their lives. The monsters themselves, especially the massive ones, feel right out of a Lovecraft story; but so do the characters. Faced with unknowable horrors lurking in the mist, some of the supermarket inhabitants turn to religious fanaticism. Some are driven insane. Many of them die in grotesque ways. Above all, The Mist offers a grim feeling of hopelessness.
In the Mouth of Madness
Do you read Sutter Cane? Of course you do. Written by Michael De Luca and directed by John Carpenter, this descent into madness isn’t directly lifted from any of Lovecraft’s works. Its influences are plain as day, though, with references and themes woven into every fiber of the film. Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator hired to look for a missing bestselling author whose books affect his fans in brutal ways. Of course, the further into the investigation John gets, the more surreal and dangerous things become. Hobb’s End is an insidious little town full of insanity, creatures, and death. In the Mouth of Madness closes out Carpenter’s apocalypse trilogy, each film equipped with a bit of Lovecraft.