Eldritch horror master H.P. Lovecraft has never fared particularly well in theaters, to the point that even the most successful of the numerous adaptations of his work—like Stuart Gordon’s wonderfully bonkers Re-Animator—pay only the merest lip service to his squamous and unsettling creations. It looks like that trend may be turning around, though—or possibly just roiling, levantine, in a darkness unknown to the minds of man—with the upcoming release of Nic Cage and Richard Stanley’s The Color Out Of Space. Our own Katie Rife enjoyed the film when she caught it at Fantastic Fest this year, praising its psychedelic imagery, and Cage’s always-abundant supply of photogenic madness. Now it’s sounding like Color Out Of Space won’t be the only one of Howard Phillips’ works to get the adaptation treatment.
This is per Coming Soon, which reports that, buoyed by critical reception to Color, producers SpectreVision—founded by actor Elijah Wood and Dan Noah—have announced their intent to continue on with other new versions of Lovecraft’s books. Specifically, Noah has stated that The Dunwich Horror (in which family, as it so often in Lovecraft’s works, is a Problem) is next on their production slate. (Dean Stockwell starred in the version produced by Roger Corman in 1970.) Stanley is thoroughly on board, as well; he’s previously expressed his desire to see the story’s Whately family on screen, “as a kind of proper backwoods degenerate, Great God Pan crossed with The Texas Chainsaw family.” Fun!
Noah also expressed his desire to see more faithful version of Lovecraft’s works—although presumably not too faithful, on account of all the racism—make their way to the screen. “Lovecraft is possibly the most adapted horror author ever,” he noted. “But there’s really never been a totally faithful adaptation of any of his works. I think there are a few that are sort of close. Stuart Gordon’s films are wonderful, but they are more Stuart Gordon than they are Lovecraft. We had been hellbent on finding the Lovecraft adaptation that truly captured cosmic dread without the camp.”
And while opening a path to a Lovecraft universe of any sort sounds like exactly the sort of poorly thought-out decision that gets people’s brains scooped out and put in space-jars in all of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, it’s not hard to be excited by the idea of more of this particular breed of “We are all ants” horror finally making its way to the screen.