Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft!

Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft!  Lovecraft is an icon in horror faction published mainly in pulp magazines.  He followed in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe, but did not achieve Poe’s recognition.  Lovecraft was known for crafting the Cthulhu Mythos which was featured in his story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928).  It was made into a film by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society  in 2005.  The Haunted Palace (1963) starring Vincent Price used elements of Poe, but based it’s plot on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”  Lovecraft’s stories are guilty of overt racism and misogyny in a few stories, but his horror is unparalleled.  His story, “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) was made into a horror film with the same title in 1970.  Rod Serling’s television show, Night Gallery adapted “Cool Air” (1971) and “Pickman’s Model” (1971).  There was the horror movie Re-Animator (1985) based on the Lovecraft story, Herbert West - Reanimator (1922), it led to two sequels.  If you need a good book to get started I recommend The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi (1997). 

                                            H.P. Lovecraft figure, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters exhibit, LACMA, 2016, photo by the author. 

In 2001, Stuart Gordon directed Dagon which is based on Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), one of my favorites of his stories.  The film lapses into horror movie cliches, but is the movie that I think most captures the atmosphere of Lovecraft’s work.  One of his most brilliant works was the novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1931) which Guillermo del Toro has attempted to make into a film.  If you are interested in Lovecraft films check out The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft (2006) by Andrew Migliore and John Strysik. H.P. Lovecraft has influenced role-playing games with the Call of Cthulhu game.  Spinning out of the Arkham Horror game is The Dark Waters Trilogy with the first book Ghouls of the Miskatonic (2011) by Graham MacNeill.  In comic books, I found the best vision was by Esteban Maroto who collected his work in Lovecraft: The Myth of Cthulhu. Alan Moore wrote the limited series Providence (2015-2017) for Avatar Press which was an adult treatment of Lovecraft’s stores.  Matt Ruff wrote the novel, Lovecraft Country (2016) which was turned into an HBO series in 2020.  I always give the warning to be cautious reading Lovecraft, his dark world view can start to affect you, but his world building in horror fiction is incredible. Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft! 

#HPLovecraft, #TheCallOfCthulhu, #AtTheMountainsOfMadness, #LovecraftCountry