For all of the contributions H.P. Lovecraft has made to the genres of both horror and science fiction it is worth noting that, as of the time of this being written, there are currently NO feature film adaptations of his various works. While it must be said that concepts such as twisted creatures living beneath the waves and the pursuit of morbid curiosities summoning untold horrors do appear in various mediums, there is no direct adaptation of any of his work faithful to the stories themselves. With the relatively large success of his literary work, why hasn’t anyone even tried to make a movie of some sort out of one of his actual stories?
For those who are not familiar, H.P. Lovecraft was an American horror author credited with the perpetuation of a subgenre of horror known as cosmic horror. This has less to do with definitively scary things such as monsters and supernatural forces and far more to do with what is unseen and unfathomable. Much of the horror from the stories, which are often fairly short, revolves around the notion of humans being weak and insignificant in comparison to some massive eldritch horror, some incomprehensibly powerful being that either wants to destroy humanity or is indifferent to it.
Therein lies the primary problem with adapting any of his works to film. Lovecraft’s work relies primarily on what is either unknown or incomprehensible. These ideas work great in books and short stories as they can be left ambiguous by the language on the page. The concepts in each of his stories can just be imagined by the reader and understood to be greater than what is seen or just understood to be unknowable. But that can’t be translated to film. After all, how does one depict the unknown?
Even the things that a physical description is given for, such as the ghoul in “Pickman’s Model” or the alien shoggoths from “At The Mountains of Madness,” are described in a way that doesn’t translate at all onto the screen. The aliens specifically are described as a “terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train- a shapeless congregation of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light…” How could someone, even with a massive CG budget, ever hope to faithfully recreate that? And the ghoul, while sounding far more simple to produce, would lose any and all fright factor it would have by being shown at all.
This leads one to ask the secondary question: is it even a bad thing that there are no film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work? My answer would be no. Not everything needs a movie to bring it into the public eye and Lovecraft’s stories, much like the formless cyclopean horrors from within them, do their best work in the shadows.
