Get Your Lovecraft On

I'm always thrilled when I hear a story about HP Lovecraft and/or his work coming to the big screen. Usually it is followed by disappointment as nothing happens (Del Toro...where the Hell is At the Mountains of Madness??). But this sounds like it has more legs.

Universal and Imagine Entertainment are gearing up for "The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft."

The studio has bought the film rights to Image Comics’ graphic novel, with the project a potential directing vehicle for Ron Howard. The book bows April 8.

U sparked to "Lovecraft" because its take on classic horror fits in well with the studio’s library of monster fare featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, the last of which is being brought back to the big screen later this year.

Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.

Sounds pretty good to me. And if Howard is actually involved, it would stand a great chance of actually being made.

As good as this is...why can't someone use Lovecraft's actual work in a major production? A straight translation from page to screen wouldn't work because Lovecraft's prose was rather excessive and, for all the dread he conjured, rather bereft of action. But the structure and ideas of these tales could be used to create something special on the screen.

As always, the biggest impediment to this new project, or any project related to Lovecraft, is the portrayal of the mind-destroying horrors that exist just beyond the edges of our sight. That existential dread Lovecraft portrayed in his books is almost impossible to show on screen. It's supposed to destroy your mind. And when it doesn't in the movie*, that robs the visuals of some of their impact. I think the best job ever done was when Guillermo Del Toro, in the first Hellboy, portrayed the Ogdru Jahad (the Lovecraft-inspired Gods of the Hellboy series) as these tentacled things encased in crystal. And when freed, you saw their tentacles writhing with those blood-red clouds. But you never saw them clearly. It was well done by Del Toro. He allowed the viewer's mind to fill in the blanks and that is the only way this kind of thing works.

All that said, I am definitely looking forward to this project making it to the theaters.

----------------------

* I'm not saying that, when we see the Gods at the end of a film like In the Mouth of Madness and we don't turn into raving lunatics, then the director screwed up. But the horror in Lovecraft's stories is experienced visually and felt mentally. And film is, obviously, a visual medium. So the two are intertwined. And even though we know it's a story we see on screen, we have also been told (through the story) that seeing these abominations will drive a man mad. It's a problem that every director involved in a Lovecraftian film will face.