Dagon (2001)

If we’re talking about Lovecraft adaptations, we’re eventually going to circle back to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who were the first ones to really make effective cinematic use of ol’ Howard’s stories in Re-Animator and From Beyond, capturing the eldritch universe while infusing it with horror-comedy sensibilities and carnal undertones—they get the original work, and they also make it their own, what a novel concept! The two of them would periodically venture back into Lovecraftian territory in the nineties, and at the turn of the millennium produced an adaption of one the major works in the Cthulhu Mythos, 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (while borrowing the name from the related short story “Dagon.”) As a story of unspeakable Elder Gods and the mutating effect they have on humans that come into contact with them, it contains many of the recurring motifs of the Mythos (including some of the Really Questionable ones that we’ll get into), and like the previous adaptations directed by Gordon and written by frequent collaborator Dennis Paoli, those themes are filtered their own parallel preoccupations.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Although well-known in horror circles since their original publication, it took a long time for anyone to even take a crack at putting H.P. Lovecraft’s distinctly bizarre terrors on screen, and when they did, it was often subsumed by the aesthetics of more established horror—Roger Corman’s adaptation of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, The Haunted Palace, even slapped Edgar Allan Poe’s oh-so-marketable name on the poster! Daniel Haller started out as the art director on Corman’s Poe series for AIP, and then went on to direct previous site subject Die, Monster, Die!, an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that hues closely to the Gothic haunted house sensibilities of the Poe films. A few years later, Haller returned for another whack at a Lovecraft adaptation, one based on his 1928 novella “The Dunwich Horror”, and this time there may have been a more concerted effort to capture the particular supernatural atmosphere of a Lovecraft story, not simply plastering his ideas on top of typical witchcraft shenanigans and pagan robes—this is one of the first times the word “Necronomicon” was spoken in a movie (the actual first time was in…The Haunted Palace.) Even so, there’s a feeling in Haller’s Dunwich Horror of being something trapped between several competing styles—Lovecraft, some fleeting remnants of Corman’s Poe films, and a streak of late sixties psychedelia—producing a shambling, patchwork abomination not unlike the ones you find in The Dunwich Horror.

Hellraiser (1987)

Maybe not surprisingly, I often determine Creature Classics subjects by asking the question “How often does this get ripped off?” Sometimes it’s not even in terms of ideas, but visuals—and you know you’ve struck some kind of nerve if disparate bits of culture liberally borrow your visual style for years afterwards. I think that’s more of the case with the original 1987 Hellraiser: not many people are doing their own take on the movie’s sadomasochistic themes, but they sure love all those chains and the stylishly leather-clad & mutilated demons that serve as the movie’s monster mascots (yes, even kids cartoons have taken a cue from them.) But, really, the visuals of those monster mascots in their first appearance—let’s just ignore the rest of the disjointed franchise, it’ll save us all a lot of time and a lot of headaches—are tied directly into that theme, creating a sui generis horror aesthetic based in the discomforting interweaving of extreme physical sensations, blending sex and pain in a way few other horror movies do, even when they are otherwise filled with both.