The H.P. Lovecraft story you’d most wish a serious film maker would put on the screen (big or small)

My own pick would be The Thing On The Doorstep. There is lots of subdued, unspoken horror in this one, and it’s a tremendous study of men/women, mature/immature psychology – for once with HPL, there is a love story right at the center, even though of course it turns out twisted and perverted... The scene where the young friend of the narrator gets possessed with the telepathic mind of his wife in the car, where his body language and features suddenly adjust, before the eyes of the narrator, to the psychological transformation, is one of the most bone-chilling things I have ever read... (And the fact that this scene is happening right in the middle of a region of the State of Maine which I, as an occasional tourist, am familiar with makes it all the more fascinating to me.) The turn of events in the end is gory, but again in a subdued, semi-covert way, so I’d tolerate that, graphically. I dont like gore.

 

The Doom that Came to Sarnath.

A tale of genocide, and spectral revenge.
It’s also one of my very favorites.

 

I'm partial to the post-New York part of his output, but I will revisit some of the earlier tales some day, starting with that one.

 

The Lurking Fear would be a nifty short feature for cable tv. I don't think it would be as effective padded to feature (90-minute) length. Also I don't remember a "mythos" connection to complicate matters.

 

The Shadow Over Innsmouth - though it's almost a documentary account of the the strange practices of some towns on the northwest coast of England...

The Whisperer in Darkness

 

At The Mountains Of Madness.

 

That's the very first Lovecraft story I ever read, in a little horror anthology paperback in 1958 or 1959. It made me an HPL fan!

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264508/?ref_=nv_sr_1

It's terrible.

 

"Dreams in the Witch House." Would Brown Jenkins be CGI though? Puppet? Or would it remain hidden and just be suggested? That story totally freaked me out when I was a kid!

And yeah ... "The Thing on the Doorstep" would be great as well.

 

I didn't know there was any "backstory" to this weirdest of tales...

Yeah the Whisperer is certainly my second pick - in fact it's probably my own favorite HPL story if only for that darn "bootleg record" it features (incl. the reception of the letter describing/transcribing its content and the stupefied reaction of the recipient after the playback)! Not to mention the fantastic poetry of the hills of Vermont when the narrator finally gets to travel among these.

 

I was already well an adult when first discovering HPL, but this one really freaked me out too! It would certainly be easy for a film maker to go over the top with it though... It would be fun to mix CGI for the whole craziness with a puppet just for Brown Jenkins... Or wait a stop-go thing à la Zanti Misfits! Brrr...

 

That was done as an episode of the Showtime series Masters Of Horror. Available on this blu-ray:

Masters of Horror: Season One, Volume I Blu-ray

 

I just watched the trailer. Quite superficial and predictable, with little of the Lovecraft spirit. But Brown Jenkins is cool (subtle).

 

That may be. I like the episode, but I've never read the original story.

 

Pickman's Model. The first Lovecraft work I ever read, at the tender age of 11. Scared the s*** out of me.

I vaguely recall having seen an adaptation of the story as an episode on some TV series. It wasn't very good.

 

Transferring Lovecraft's stories to film would certainly be a challenge. The effectiveness of his storytelling is in how much is implied, and not spelled out explicitly. That's what gives it such a creepy, unsettling mood.

 

Highly recommended. Quite a trip!

 

At The Mountains of Madness. Part of its thunder was stolen by Prometheus and Del Toro had a great idea for his adaptation but Universal was convinced that an R rated movie wouldn’t make the money they needed. Of course, Prometheus proved otherwise.

 

Exactly! Hence my wording "serious film maker". Someone who'd understand that the scene where the family physician discovers the decomposed remains of Charles Dexter Ward in his library be best described from the perspective of the eavesdroppers in the house, like in the book - overhearing the semi-liquid noises of the remains being dragged on the floor, and witnessing outside the house the dense smoke of their burning in the fireplace by the doctor, etc.

 

If only...

 

"Whisperer" is fantastic! Probably the closest Lovecraft ever got to pure sci-fi. Don't get me wrong ... it has enough horror elements in it. Hell, it had DARKNESS in the title. And DARK it is!

Great thread, man! Lovecraft is the master. He and Poe ensured I experienced many sleepless, terrified nights when I was a kid. Yup ... Cthulhu was under my bed, Nyalathortep was in my closet, and the Goat With a Thousand Eyes was right outside my bedroom window! I loved it! Scared crapless, but loved it nonetheless.

 

I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"

Ha, ha!

Thanks for your kind word and participation! Seriously, I would have been very impressed by any of this at a young age! I was upset enough already by the best episodes from the Outer Limits' first season...

 

Yes very cinematic.

 

At the Mountains of Madness is a masterpiece! Lovecraft was at the top of his game here. One of his longest stories ... actually a novella. When it was serialized in Weird Tales (I'm pretty sure that was the magazine) at the time, the magazine received a lot of complaints about the story. The primary complaint was that nothing happened! It was basically just page after page, hundreds of words detailing what the protagonist was seeing in the cavern ... in great detail ... description after description of increasingly disturbing things. Many readers were all, "C'mon already ... where's the monster?"

Lovecraft certainly had his own style!

 

As an aside, you have read the S.T. Joshi-annotated editions of HPL, haven't you? These notes are a book onto themselves of amazing details behind the background of the stories vs. Lovecraft's biography... Joshi even sources and locates the crazy legend of the whippoorwills that fly around houses where somebody is about to die, in order to try and catch his soul when it leaves the house (The Dunwich Horror?)! HPL had learned about it from a girl he was travelling with (!) somewhere in New England.