The Best of “Lovecraftian” Cinema
A friend saw Stuart Gordon's Dagon, and inspired me to try to put together a list of the Top As-Many-As-I-Can-Think-Of of worthwhile H.P. Lovecraft-inspired films. Let's see how we do...
  • The Resurrected--Dan O'Bannon brings us a version of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and a pretty good one, too. Sticking close to the original story, and having more than its share of scary moments, this is one of my favorites in this minuscule corner of a sub-genre.
  • Cast a Deadly Spell--I'm not sure if this really qualifies, but Fred Ward plays private detective "Harry" Lovecraft, chasing down unspeakable evil in a post-World War II version of Los Angeles where magick is commonplace. A good story, some decent effects and several good laughs.
  • Re-Animator--Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna really raised the bar for H.P. Lovecraft adaptations with this updated version of the classic HPL novella Herbert West, Reanimator. Jeffrey Combs is perfect as the icy West, there are plenty of gross-out effects (which Lovecraft, no doubt, would have despised, gentle soul that he was), and several comedic moments, as well.
  • In the Mouth of Madness--John Carpenter's hommage to Lovecraft, features Sam Neil as an insurance investigator attempting to track down a missing author of Lovecraftian horror, only to find himself living his quarry's latest bestseller...
  • From Beyond--another Yuzna/Gordon production, this is an "amplified" version of the Lovecraft short story, including the addition of Barbara Crampton in S&M fetish rig, among other things.
  • ...and, gosh. That's pretty much it.

    The Dishonorable Mentions include (feature!) The Dunwich Horror (casting Dean Stockton as Wilbur Whateley is as chowder-headed as casting David Soul as Humphrey Bogart in a remake of Casablanca...wait, they did that, too...), Die, Monster, Die! a lackluster version of The Colour Out of Space with an aging Boris Karloff, and The Curse, ditto, but without even the benefit of Karloff. The Unnameable is fair, as is Necronomicon, but no better than that. The Lurking Fear is terrible, and not in a good way, and Bleeders, an uncredited remake of the same story is worse.

    As far as Dagon goes, I saw it a while back, and I was mostly disappointed, because the good moments were really good, but there weren't enough of them. The producer's apparent efforts to save money by filming in Spain and redubbing as little of the dialogue as possible into English didn't help. Loved some of the special effects, though.

    Some other films have a sort of vague, Lovecraftian "feel" to them, while not being particularly based in anything actually written by Lovecraft: films like Deep Rising, The Faculty, John Carpenter's version of The Thing, Alien and even The Blair Witch Project come to mind.

    There's something about Lovecraft which evidently doesn't transition well to film. And why hasn't anyone made a film out of one of the best Lovecraftian novels of the last twenty years, T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies...?

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