The 10+7 Best Horror Movies Adapted from or Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Works
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- DirectorStuart GordonStarsEzra GoddenFrancisco RabalRaquel MeroñoA boating accident runs a young man and woman ashore in a decrepit Spanish fishing town which they discover is in the grips of an ancient sea god and its monstrous half human offspring.Of all director Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft films, Dagon feels the most genuinely Lovecraftian. It may not be an exploitation classic in the same league as Re-Animator and From Beyond, but it captures the essence of Lovecraft almost perfectly. Gordon absolutely nails the typical Lovecraft imagery with brilliantly realised mutated fish men.
The CGI may be a bit shoddy but the gills, tentacles and other sea creature practical effects simply can’t be faulted. It is in this way that Dagon feels very true to Lovecraft’s original vision of half-fish creatures in The Shadow over Insmouth. The writer’s descriptions of “shiny and slippery” creatures with “the heads of fish”, “palpitating gills” and “webbed paws” are lovingly, faithfully recreated in all their glory with some of the best creature designs to grace a Lovecraft adaptation.
As with Re-Animator, Dagon also draws on the more exploitative aspects of its source material; namely the breeding of human females with the Deep Ones, a concept obviously relished by Gordon as he lingers over images of naked nubile flesh meeting slimy tentacles.
While the film’s exploitation tendencies certainly make for an entertaining B-Movie experience, they do somewhat jar with Lovecraft’s more subtle approach, detracting from the uneasy tension at the heart of the original story. The film also suffers from the aforementioned unconvincing CGI and the two leads, poor substitutes for the ideal pairing of Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton in Gordon’s earlier films. - DirectorRoger CormanStarsVincent PriceDebra PagetLon Chaney Jr.Charles Dexter Ward arrives at a small village to visit the house he inherited from his ancestor who died there 100 years ago.Ostensibly part of the AIP/Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe cycle, The Haunted Palace is, in actual fact, a (fairly faithful) adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The title was changed when AIP realised Poe material was a more lucrative prospect than Lovecraft, leading to the film becoming one of the lesser-known Lovecraft adaptations.
While at first glance the film feels very much like Corman’s other Poe films – replete with quotes from Poe’s poem, Vincent Price’s brooding histrionics, crumbling decadent mansions, cobwebs, torture chambers and other Gothic paraphernalia – The Haunted Palace, when examined a little closer, is undeniably Lovecraftian.
The coastal New England village housing a dark secret, the villagers mutated by an unknown entity, the inclusion of the Necronomicon, and the barely glimpsed horror lurking in Ward’s dungeon are elements much more at home in a Lovecraft tale.
Although marred slightly by its confused cocktail of Poe aesthetics and Lovecraft story elements, The Haunted Palace is still a solid adaptation which manages to capture at least some of the indescribable terror that permeates much of the author’s work. This can be attributed mainly to Charles Beaumont’s typically excellent screenplay which distils Lovecraft’s lofty ideas into an easily digestible horror movie.
Taking over from Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson who penned Corman’s previous Poe films, Beaumont, another Twilight Zone luminary, here proves himself to be a more than worthy successor. Corman does an equally commendable job directing Beaumont’s adaptation with his assured yet experimental direction, injecting a few good scares into the mix along the way. - DirectorStuart GordonStarsJeffrey CombsBarbara CramptonJonathan FullerA man travels to Italy with his family to live in the castle they have recently inherited. But he soon begins to suspect that they are not the only occupants.Stuart Gordon’s third foray into the weird world of Lovecraft is a very different affair to his previous outings. Expanding upon the central image in Lovecraft’s The Outsider of the protagonist who discovers he is the monster when he reaches out and touches his own reflection, Castle Freak is most certainly Gordon’s loosest adaptation.
In fact, unlike the earlier Re-Animator and From Beyond, Castle Freak doesn’t even advertise the fact that it’s based on a Lovecraft story with its brand new title and storyline. It’s as if Gordon couldn’t decide whether he wanted to do another Lovecraft adaptation or develop an original idea, so he ends up doing both.
Another very noticeable difference is that this time around the campy tone and slaptstick humour of Gordon’s previous Lovecraft films is eschewed in favour of a grim, unrelentingly nasty atmosphere. It is in this way that the film actually feels closer to Lovecraft’s style, the uncomfortable, sombre mood in keeping with the writer’s penchant for morbid descents into inescapable horrors.
The film also shares Lovecraft’s preoccupation with tortured souls, each of its characters going through their own personal hell. There’s the alcoholic father haunted by the night he crashed his car, causing the death of his youngest child and blinding his daughter; the mother who can’t forgive her husband and smothers her daughter with her over-protective love; the blind daughter plunged into eternal darkness and caught in the middle of never ending arguments between her mother and father; and, most tortured of all, the titular Castle Freak who has been locked in a small room all his life, beaten daily, and turned into a subhuman thing.
With its dark themes and twisted imagery, Castle Freak makes for grim viewing, but at least it captures that all too elusive bleakness absent from most of Lovecraft-based cinema. - DirectorSam RaimiStarsBruce CampbellEllen SandweissRichard DeManincorFive friends travel to a cabin in the woods, where they unknowingly release flesh-possessing demons.Sam Raimi’s video nasty crowd pleaser may not be the first film you think of when somebody mentions Lovecraft and cinema in the same breath, but it nevertheless remains an extremely important artefact in the history of Lovecraft-based cinema. The Evil Dead is perhaps the first film to infuse the more contemporary, visceral horror experience with the otherworldly, almost ancient quality of Lovecraft’s writing.
Obviously there’s the nod to the Necronomicon, but the relationship runs a lot deeper than a mere reference to a fictional book. In fact, the whole cabin in the woods subgenre to which The Evil Dead belongs arguably stemmed from the imagination of Lovecraft in the first place. His The Picture in the House is remarkably prescient, pre-empting the aforementioned cabin in the woods films and the backwoods slashers which rose to prominence in the late 1970s.
Bar sub-par acting and annoying promiscuous teens, The Picture in the House has it all; an old shack in the dark woods, odd macabre furnishings, dead bodies, and cannibalistic rednecks. More akin to the tales encompassing the Cthulhu Mythos is The Evil Dead’s concept of ancient evil summoned to reclaim what was once its domain. It is a concept Lovecraft returns to over and over, and Raimi’s handling of it feels very true to the source material.
A prime example of this is the force in the woods, a presence felt but – as is the case with Lovecraft – never seen. Its horror is indescribable and, therefore, best left to the viewer to imagine. The ordeal of facing this unrelenting, unspeakable horror also carries a price. Like Lovecraft’s characters, the characters in The Evil Dead are driven to hysterical madness as what they have witnessed no mortal human is supposed to see.
The Evil Dead, however, takes this a step further than Lovecraft’s writing ever could by putting the viewer through the same ordeal, attempting to drive them to hysteria along with the characters on screen. - DirectorStuart GordonStarsJeffrey CombsBarbara CramptonTed SorelA group of scientists have developed the Resonator, a machine which allows whoever is within range to see beyond normal perceptible reality. But when the experiment succeeds, they are immediately attacked by terrible life forms.Marking the return of the Re-Animator dream team of director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and stars Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs, From Beyond offers up another hysterically gooey exploitation take on Lovecraftian lunacy. Proving that Re-Animator was no one hit wonder, the over-the-top hysteria of Lovecraft’s more outrageous tales is perfectly encapsulated in the trappings of an effects-heavy ‘80s B-Movie.
Indeed, the creature effects – among the best the ‘80s have to offer – are perhaps the closest anyone has come to bringing Lovecraft’s indescribable forms to life. The film is packed full of otherworldly creatures that look like they’ve come straight from another dimension. There are huge slimy creatures with toothy maws, vicious flying eels, distending pineal glands, and the repulsive Dr. Edward Pretorious, a viscous slab of shape shifting gloop.
Also like all good Lovecraft tales, From Beyond explores how seeing these creatures from another world can drive a sane man to insanity. Of course, this being the ‘80s, the characters don’t just succumb to something as quaint as simple madness, their transformation is suitably exaggerated, in keeping with the film’s exploitation leanings.
Combs mutates into a bald, brain-eating zombie with a squirming pineal gland protruding from his forehead while Crampton turns from professional doctor to crazed sex maniac and, at the film’s close, a screaming, gibbering wreck. Add to this a suitably otherworldly psychedelic purple and pink lighting scheme and genre favourite Ken Foree, and you have the recipe for a wild ride into Lovecraft’s beyond. - DirectorJohn CarpenterStarsKurt RussellWilford BrimleyKeith DavidA research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.Even though it’s based on John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? and the original The Thing from Another World, John Carpenter’s The Thing actually takes a lot of inspiration from Lovecraft. Firstly, there’s the concept itself which shares much in common with Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Both centre around the unearthing of ancient, malevolent alien species from underneath the Antarctic ice and the ensuing confrontations.
There’s also that unmistakably Lovecraftian sense of impending doom, that mankind’s very existence hangs in the balance. Part of Carpenter’s unofficial Apocalypse Trilogy along with Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, all three films draw heavily on Lovecraft in their musings on the extinction of the human race. The threat in The Thing comes from the creature’s ability to assimilate other organisms, and the possibility that it could wipe out the human race if it reached a densely populated area.
Juxtaposing this apocalyptic tone is a more insular, claustrophobic tension as the small research team falls apart and nobody knows who to trust anymore. Paranoia is another theme readily explored in Lovecraft’s fiction as seemingly innocuous characters turn out to be allies of an evil entity.
Perhaps closest to The Thing is Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness where the narrator’s friend is turned on to the aliens’ side. The image of the Thing itself, an amorphous, shape shifting creature whose true form can never be pinned down, is also very Lovecraftian. Further solidifying its inextricable link with Lovecraft is the ambiguous, uncertain ending which suggests that the monster may have gotten to one of them, but never explicitly tells you for certain. - DirectorJohn CarpenterStarsSam NeillJürgen ProchnowJulie CarmenAn insurance investigator begins discovering that the impact a horror writer's books have on his fans is more than inspirational.One of the most underrated horror films of the 1990s, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is a true Lovecraftian nightmare. It is one of the few films that almost manages to bring to the screen the intangible, indescribable horrors of a H. P. Lovecraft tale. Indeed, the very fabric of the film seems to be permeated by an apocalyptic atmosphere of impending doom, as if the Great Old Ones themselves are using Carpenter as a conduit to take corporeal form.
Like a typical Lovecraft tale, Carpenter’s film centres around a narrator recounting the unspeakable terrors that have driven him to madness. What begins as frightening dreams and strange occurrences turns into an inescapable nightmare where the simple act of reading a book can bring about the end of the world.
Lovecraftian imagery abounds in the form of a quiet New England town where monstrous cults hide, gateways that lead to other dimensional planes appear, and slimy demons secretively plot their return and subsequent reign over mankind. Adding an extra layer of weirdness, Carpenter blurs dreams and reality, fact and fiction, film and reality to shocking effect.
Taking the form of a postmodern comment on the power of horror authors like Lovecraft and Stephen King, and directors like Carpenter himself, the film ends with the narrator sat in a cinema watching the film In the Mouth of Madness as reality collapses, the world as we know it ends, and the reign of the Great Old Ones begins. - DirectorStuart GordonStarsJeffrey CombsBruce AbbottBarbara CramptonAfter an odd new medical student arrives on campus, a dedicated local and his girlfriend become involved in bizarre experiments centering around the re-animation of dead tissue.Hebert West: Re-Animator is perhaps the most atypical of Lovecraft’s tales. Taking the form of a straightforward penny dreadful/mad scientist story, it unsurprisingly feels out of place when stacked against the more otherworldly horrors that form the majority of Lovecraft’s work. However, it is precisely because of the story’s uncharacteristic nature that the film adaptation works so well.
Freed from the constraints of trying to visualise ethereal, indescribable horrors, director Stuart Gordon gravitates towards the tale’s more exaggeratedly horrific elements. Taking the idea of bringing corpses back from the dead and running with it, essentially turning the story into a splatter heavy zombie movie, Gordon’s take on Lovecraft is startlingly unlike any of the adaptations which came before it.
Wholeheartedly embracing the era’s penchant for excess, Re-Animator is much more in debt to the over-the-top ‘80s comedy horror of The Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead than it is to Lovecraft. However, Re-Animator is not content to simply follow in these films’ footsteps. On the contrary, the film takes everything a step further as depraved sex and violence are taken to such extremes that they become hysterically funny.
Unfolding like an ultra-gory farce, much of the humour comes from West’s brilliant if misguided attempts to bring back the dead which always go awry – with increasingly messy and hilarious results. This is all topped off nicely by Jeffrey Combs’s excellent performance as the intensely arrogant West who, despite his intelligence and determination, is doomed to frustrating failure as the re-animated always return in a particularly bad mood.
Even though Re-Animator is not a typical Lovecraft tale and therefore not a typical Lovecraft adaptation, there are still definite traces of Lovecraftian horror littered throughout the film. There’s West’s all-encompassing obsessive madness, the Arkham setting, the headless Doctor Hill’s insides attacking like tentacles, and the morbid sense of humour shared by both the film and the source material. - DirectorRidley ScottStarsSigourney WeaverTom SkerrittJohn HurtThe crew of a commercial spacecraft encounters a deadly lifeform after investigating a mysterious transmission of unknown origin.On the surface Alien may seem like a straightforward exercise in sci-fi suspense along the lines of The Thing from Another World, but beneath the body count veneer there lies the traces of a grand mythology only hinted at but unmistakably there. It is this hinting towards a mythology that’s too vast to explore in a single story that aligns the film with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos; a fictional universe tantalisingly detailed, but never fully explained, across nearly the whole of Lovecraft’s oeuvre.
In Alien the mythology in question concerns the ancient vessel and its pilot, the so-called Space Jockey. Like with Lovecraft’s mythos, there is a great ambiguity surrounding this aspect of the film. It teases the viewer just as Lovecraft teases his readers, raising questions but refusing to provide answers.
The scene may only exist to get the alien on board the ship, but its power to spark the audience’s collective imagination is undeniable. Its power can be attested to by the fact that Ridley Scott returned to explore the Space Jockey’s origins in the intriguing, if overblown and not entirely necessary, Prometheus over thirty years later.
It’s also the scene where Lovecraft’s influence is most obvious, bringing to mind stories such as At the Mountains of Madness where explorers discover the seemingly deserted remains of lost alien civilisations. Its association with Lovecraft is bolstered further by surreal artist H. R. Giger’s otherworldly designs which strongly evoke Lovecraft’s descriptions with their utter strangeness, lack of any Earthly reference point, and their indefinable juxtaposition of awe and terror. - DirectorAndrew LemanStarsMatt FoyerJohn BolenRalph LucasWhile sorting the affairs of his late Uncle, a man accidentally stumbles across a series of dark secrets connected to an ancient horror waiting to be freed.The Call of Cthulhu is an incredibly strange film, which is always a good thing when it comes to adapting Lovecraft. A modern adaptation done in the style of a 1920s silent film, The Call of Cthulhu is quite possibly the most faithful adaptation of a Lovecraft story ever. Unlike other Lovecraft-based films it actually does justice to the source material, its succinct forty-odd minute runtime allowing no room for excessive padding.
The silent movie format also aids the storytelling as it allows for a smoother, purer transition from page to screen. That is, stripped of the distractions of modern movie making – sound, colour and special effects – the film is allowed to focus on what is most important; the story.
Told through images, actors’ expressions and intertitles, The Call of Cthulhu is an almost perfect encapsulation of the original story. The inherent otherworldly strangeness of the silent movie format also melds perfectly with the story’s own offbeat quality. This eerie sense of unease is further perpetuated by the peculiar angles and alien designs of the German Expressionist sets.
There’s also an impressively realised stop-motion Cthulhu whose unnatural jerky movements only work to further the film’s dreamlike quality. It may not technically be the best film on this list, but The Call of Cthulhu is certainly the most unequivocally Lovecraftian film to date, and for that reason alone it deserves the top spot. - DirectorSean BranneyStarsStephen BlackehartAutumn WendelP.J. KingBased on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name, a folklorist investigates reports of unusual creatures in Vermont only to uncover more than he bargained for
- DirectorHuân VuStarsPaul DorschJürgen HeimüllerIngo HeiseA boy, looking for his missing father, travels to Germany and uncovers a haunting legacy that a meteorite left behind in the area. Based on H.P. Lovecraft's short novel "The Color Out of Space."
- DirectorDaniel HallerStarsSandra DeeDean StockwellEd BegleyWilbur Whateley travels to the Arkham Miskatonic University to borrow the legendary Necronomicon. But, little does anyone know, Whateley isn't quite human...
- DirectorDan O'BannonStarsJohn TerryJane SibbettChris SarandonCharles Dexter Ward's wife enlists the help of a private detective to find out what her husband is up to in a remote cabin owned by his family for centuries.
- DirectorMariano BainoStarsLouise SalterVenera SimmonsMariya KapnistA girl travels to an island, after the death of her father, to find out why the father funded a monestary on the island.
- DirectorRoger CormanStarsRay MillandDiana Van der VlisHarold J. StoneA Roger Corman tale of Dr. James Xavier's devastating experiments on himself and the unforeseen.
- DirectorChristophe GansShûsuke KanekoBrian YuznaStarsJeffrey CombsTony AzitoJuan FernándezLovecraft visualizes 3 stories in Necronomicon: The Drowned, The Cold and Whispers, about bringing a dead wife and child back to life, extending life and aliens.
- DirectorAlbert PyunStarsMorgan WeisserCrystal Laws GreenJenny Dare PaulinCharlie Baxter, a struggling screenwriter, is searching for accommodation in a rundown mansion somewhere in the isolated mountains above Malibu. An expressionless and creatively bankrupt young man who rewrites exploitation sci-fi / horror scripts for a living, he takes a room in the mansion and learns of the mysterious doctor residing in the room above his own who dabbles in strange experiments. As he learns more about the circumstances of the doctor and the history of his landlady, her autistic daughter and the strange lodger across the hall, Baxter is inspired to write his long blocked "great American Screenplay". Working furiously, Baxter suffers a heart attack, and staggers up to see the doctor for treatment. He passes out immediately, but awakens a cured man. But at a terrible price. The Doctor, a strangely preserved woman named Shockner, persuades Baxter to stay until he recovers fully, and informs her "patient" of the medical condition that has forced her into a hermit's existence. Twenty years ago Shockner suffered a fatal disease. Her solution found in the occult and dark arts, preserved her life but at the cost. Slowly Baxter is drawn into a nightmarish world of insane experiments and murder. He knows something must be done to stop the evil that resides in the room at the top of the stairs.
- DirectorBarrett J. LeighThom MaurerStarsGeorge PeroulasFountain YountGregory FawcettA man is held in an asylum for murdering his family. A young intern at the asylum suspects an even darker force connected to the man.
- DirectorAndrew LemanStarsDarryl TylerSean BranneyWilliam Mark HulingsBased on the short story 'The Testimony of Randolph Carter' By H.P. Lovecraft. This faithful adaptation of "The Statement of Randolph Carter" tells the strange story of the demise of occultist Harley Warren.
- DirectorUlli LommelStarsVictoria UllmannChristian BehmGerard GriesbaumA being known as "The Puppetmaster" holds victims captive in a tomb and tortures them.
- DirectorJean-Paul OuelletteStarsCharles KlausmeyerMark Kinsey StephensonAlexandra DurrellCollege students check out a haunted house where in the 1800's an ugly monster called "the Unnamable" was trapped in a vault.
- DirectorMark Philip LichtensteinStarsPippa Bennett-WarnerRichard David-CaineJoseph ElliottWhen a rich patron visits the studio of the depraved artist Pickman, he is horrified to discover the sinister source of her inspiration. Adapted from the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same title.
- DirectorRichard StanleyStarsNicolas CageJoely RichardsonMadeleine ArthurA secluded farm is struck by a strange meteorite which has apocalyptic consequences for the family living there and possibly the world.
- DirectorWilliam EubankStarsKristen StewartVincent CasselMamoudou AthieA crew of oceanic researchers working for a deep sea drilling company try to get to safety after a mysterious earthquake devastates their deepwater research and drilling facility located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
- DirectorJohannes GrenzfurthnerStarsEthan HaslamJohannes GrenzfurthnerJason Scott SadofskyConducting a series of experiments in his makeshift home-lab, a skeptic IT worker tries to cure his harrowing hearing impairment.
- DirectorJaume BalagueróStarsEster ExpósitoInés FernándezÁngela CremonteHorror invades the concrete corridors of a cursed apartment complex on the outskirts of Madrid.
- DirectorRebekah McKendryStarsRyan KwantenJ.K. SimmonsSylvia Grace CrimAfter a breakup, Wes ends up at a remote rest stop. He finds himself locked inside the bathroom with a mysterious figure speaking from an adjacent stall. Soon Wes realizes he is involved in a situation more terrible than he could imagine.