Producers want to bring the H.P. Lovecraft universe to the big screen
By Corey Smith
Cinema is all about the shared universes lately, whether it’s the MCU, the Star Wars movies or the brave attempts by Warner Bros to tie together their DC Comics movies. And according to ComingSoon.net, the next big shared universe may be based on the work of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, and we might have Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood, of all people, to thank for it.
Cage stars in the upcoming adaptation of Lovecraft’s Color out of Space, and while the film might not hit theaters until January, critics have sung its praises at advance screenings. The resulting buzz has producers Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah hoping Color out of Space might the first of an attempt to “build out a Lovecraft universe.” Yes. Please.
Wood and Noah said they’re in the early stages of adapting another Lovecraft piece, The Dunwich Horror, with Color director Richard Stanley already attached. They hope that there’s “enough of an appetite for these things, and we can keep them going and make at least three of them,” adding that Lovecraft is “such an important voice in horror.”
That part is true enough; Lovecraft basically created his own genre of horror, defined by a deep-seated dread of things beyond human imagining. While Lovecraft has influenced too many storytellers to count, his own work has never gotten a hugely popular onscreen adaptation. Noah is hoping The Color out of Space may change that, and he thinks Stanley was the key.
"We had been hellbent on finding the Lovecraft adaptation that truly captured cosmic dread without the camp. When we encountered Richard Stanley’s script, I remember texting Elijah after I read the first page and said, ‘This is it. We found it.’ When you see this film, you’ll see that there are all kinds of little references that are allusions to other Lovecraft stories."
Even with a director on board that understands Lovecraft’s work, a universe based on his library faces some challenges. First, as Noah implied, Lovecraft’s stories occasionally reference each other obliquely, but that’s about it. There are very few shared characters or interactions. Lovecraft’s work kind of recalls J.J. Abrams Cloverfield trilogy, where the events of one film might affect the other, but they don’t share characters or tell one linear story.
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Likewise, many of Lovecraft’s stories have been deemed unfilmable, with even Academy Award-winning directors like Guillermo del Toro running into problems trying to adapt his work. Del Toro has been trying to adapt Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness since 2006 to no avail. And of course, anyone bringing Lovecraft’s work to the big screen would need to filter out the author’s infamous racism.
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Still, if those problems can be overcome, few blend horror and science fiction like Lovecraft, and those that do were probably drawing on Lovecraft to one extent or another. Maybe we’re in for a decade of Lovecraft films, hopefully all of which star Nicolas Cage.
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