ABSTRACT
Film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories, beginning in the 1960s, have been generally disappointing, chiefly due to budgetary constraints and the impoverished imaginations of screenwriters and directors. A new direction was taken in 1984 with H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-animator, directed by Stuart Gordon, a rollicking and half-parodic adaptation of “Herbert West-Reanimator” (1921-22), in which an unscrupulous scientist seeks to revive the dead. Few films, however, have attempted to depict the cosmic entities of Lovecraft’s Mythos, although such films as Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), while not being explicit adaptations of Lovecraft, nonetheless feature monsters that are strongly Lovecraftian in appearance and behavior. Lovecraft has also been adapted for a popular role-playing game (Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaosium), and his influence on video games, rock music, and other media has also been detected. In general, depictions of his monsters in these media focus relentlessly on tentacles and other superficial elements, but even so they suggest the degree to which Lovecraft’s work departed from the stock monsters of previous horror literature and opened up new imaginative vistas that a wide variety of artists have exploited.
