Meanwhile, The Colour Out of Space is one of Lovecraft’s most adapted works, if not the most adapted. But Re-Animator is a loose adaptation at best, and Carpenter’s film is an homage to the author’s work not actually based on any of his writing. The two best Lovecraft films are arguably Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. But Lovecraft is comparatively untouched, despite the fact that he has been dead approximately forever and most of his work is in the public domain (meaning anyone is free to adapt it). Hollywood has been mining King’s work for decades, and has started looting his literary treasury with increased fervor thanks in part to the streaming wars (virtually everything he’s ever written is being developed as a series or film right now, to the point where Hulu is probably hours away from buying the rights to his Buffalo Wild Wings receipts).

So how come so few of his stories have been directly translated into films? Burroughs, and Psychoauthor Robert Bloch. His work influenced other major writers like Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Alan Moore, William S. The ultimate gauge of whether or not something is in the mainstream in 2020. IT’s Pennywise the Clown is essentially a Great Old One from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, two words that Google Docs did not underline as being misspelled. Stephen King constantly references Lovecraftian names and places in his novels, and some of his most popular ideas are heavily inspired by the author’s work. Lovecraft has had a major influence on modern horror fiction for the past 100 years.

Lovecraft the color out of space