The 22 Best Lovecraftian Movies Of All Time

Lovecraftian horror evokes the fear of what we don't understand. Cosmic horror is built on ideas from beyond space and science that push us beyond our limits. Sometimes, though, it comes closer to home, and what we once thought we knew of our natural world is revealed as lies. Sometimes the horror comes from the mistrust of others around us, and here H.P Lovecraft's biggest flaw is revealed. There's a virulent strain of racism in many of Lovecraft's stories that can't be ignored.

The best love letters to the genre Lovecraft helped to create often turn these flaws upside down. The fear of the Other remains, but masters like Guillermo Del Toro and John Carpenter move it away from racist tropes and cultural stereotypes. It's common today to use cosmic horror to comment on capitalist structures or examine ourselves. The gravest horror is inside all of us, suggests these stories. The universe itself is aware, and it hates us for existing. These excellent movies explore what it's like to try to survive under that unbearable strain.

Richard Stanley understood two things when he set out to adapt "The Colour Out of Space," Lovecraft's story of space rocks bringing madness to the bucolic New England countryside: One, that everything would hinge on how the Color was portrayed, and two, everyone in the cast had to be ready to get weird as hell. Stanley utilizes a neon-purple palette that evokes an unearthly beauty, a gleam that seems to pulsate through our screens during the back half of the movie. And then he hired Nicholas Cage to portray the patriarch of the doomed Gardner family. Yeah, that'll do it.

It's a bonus that "The Color Out of Space" takes a swipe at Lovecraft's racism with the addition of a hydrologist as the "one sane man." Ward Phillips (whose name is a nod to Howard Phillips Lovecraft) is a young Black man who guides us along as he explores what's going wrong on the Gardner property and how it could impact the regional water reservoir. The horror is a slow burn, but once things get out of hand, wow! Some scenes are gonna stick with you. I still think about those alpacas.

Reclusive novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) isn't the villain of John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness." He's an eccentric who lets himself become enslaved to the creatures that his words bring to life. He's reduced to a character in his own world. The real villains are lurking in the empty spaces between the words on the page, ungodly horrors on the verge of invading reality (or whatever "reality" is in this metafictional horror flick).

Sam Neill is our protagonist, an insurance investigator who makes sure scams don't succeed. An unlikely series of events puts him on the tail of the vanished Sutter Cane on behalf of the author's publisher. But that's what Cane's story demands. Sam's search for Cane takes him to Hobbs End, the supposedly fictional setting of Canes stories. It's like Stephen King's Derry or Lovecraft's Arkham. Like those towns, Hobbs End takes a turn for the terrible when night falls.

"Underwater" is not blockbuster quality, but there's something to this underrated slice of deep-sea horror that keeps me coming back. Kristen Stewart is part of an unusually good cast. We get to know the characters through their behaviors and not an overwrought backstory. Glimpsed between moments of their fast-paced attempts to survive disaster are tantalizing hints of something darker than greed fueling these failing deep-sea drilling stations.

The movie leaves it open as to why Tian industries opted to paint its suit bays with bleak but beautiful murals depicting possible lifeforms under the sea. There's an untold story about an abandoned drilling station and why Vincent Cassel's captain is lying about both that facility and his daughter's fate. My theory is that Tian knew exactly what it was doing when it delved into the lair of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's monstrous sleeper. Hopefully, director William Eubank will someday return to the secretive goals of Tian Industries.

Leave it to Guillermo Del Toro to make Lovecraftian horror into something heartwarming. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) himself is a nice kid with a nice dad, and he grows up into a hero who likes cats and pancakes. Although Hellboy's red cloven-hoofed appearance is in line with Christian ideas about devils, it's his trove of enemies that go all over the horror map, and the original film pushes straight into eldritch territory with campy glee.

The lumbering beast Sammael is the first Lovecraftian critter to appear in "Hellboy," a sickly green monster with tentacles streaming from its face. But behind the less upsetting villains, from Rasputin to the demi-immortal Nazi Kroenen, is the Ogdru Jahad. Leashed to hell until Anung un Rama — Hellboy's slumbering potential — rises to release them, these seven horrors of Chaos are barely glimpsed. What we do see is awful enough, making the behemoth that claims Rasputin's form a relief by comparison.

If you strip away Lovecraft's purple prose, you'll find a sleeker nightmare underneath. Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse" operates under a similar principle. Nearly the entire film takes place on the remote lighthouse island. With fleeting exceptions, the plot is in the hands of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Even the camera's eye is stripped to basics. The film is shot in black and white with a tight aspect ratio that makes the audience feel like they're crammed into the lighthouse's interior with its two flailing caretakers.

There are no answers but plenty of questions strewn throughout "The Lighthouse." What is Winslow's (Pattinson) actual identity? Is Thomas Wake (Dafoe) mad, or is he a manic sea god? Are the seabirds the ghosts of the dead, or is Winslow just tormenting himself? Why does Wake fart so much? Is it the lobster he keeps cooking? And most importantly, what in the hell is going on with the lighthouse's lantern? Your guess is as good as anyone's but Eggers', and he's never going to say. It's more fun that way.

Stephen King explains the genesis of "The Mist" in his notes in his short story collection "Skeleton Crew." It's a cautionary tale about what happens when an author with a temporary case of writer's block gets bored in a grocery store. Look around you next time you're in the slow lane waiting to buy a rotisserie chicken. Someone is definitely picturing how all of you are going to die.

Frank Darabont's adaptation of "The Mist" is that fantasy but with some bite. After the credits roll, our families are fine and there are no squamous, multi-limbed abominations lurking outside our doors. "The Mist" is a stripped-down nightmare. Ordinary people have no hope against the terrible things that have lurched through this dimensional fog. King's novella tries to claw for some, grasping onto human temerity. Darabont takes the Lovecraft option, leaving the characters with no hope at all ... but not in the way we expected. "The Mist" is bleak, upsetting, and spectacular.

Quintessentially cosmic, Ridley Scott's "Alien" is more than an obscenely cool riff on haunted houses in space. It takes on the flaws endemic to human nature, and the xenomorph isn't the only alien on board. The script flips Lovecraft's fear of the Other around to create another kind of faceless entity to frighten us — a corporation that cares so little for the humans under its watch that they're treated as merely disposable tools. To that end, there is a catspaw on board the Nostromo, an android that seems human and humane until its real loyalties are revealed.

"Aliens" may put a face to some of Weyland-Yutani's creatures, but it doesn't lessen their impact in the original film. If anything, it makes it worse. How can anyone look at their own kind struggling to survive and see only profit margins? It makes Ash (Ian Holm) seem almost sympathetic in hindsight. After all, humans made him. The darkest parts of "Alien" are the parts inside of us.

The neo-noir aesthetic of Alex Proyas' "Dark City" is used to perfect effect. Nothing about the city feels quite real, and we feel like the movie heightens our senses as we study its smoky lounges and bloody crime scenes. It's a mixture of hyper detail and vague intimation as Rufus Sewell's Johnn Murdoch discovers the city's terrible secret: A race of sociopathic aliens, who can be best described as necrotic parasites, have thousands of humans trapped in an experimental web. Our days are locked in whimsical cycles for the Strangers to study.

The reality behind what the characters of "Dark City" can perceive is beyond anything their time-twisted minds can usually comprehend. Murdoch does begin to pierce through the illusions, and by the end of the film, his new capabilities make him seem less human, too. In this film, there are lessons about what our sanity can take and how easy it is to change us.

Clive Barker's horrors come from different roots than Lovecraft's eldritch nightmares, but the results still focus sharply on the idea of the taboo. "Hellraiser" is sexually charged, turning its humanoid abominations and their quest for the ultimate sensual experience into a satire of religion. It's important to note that the story and film were born of an era when society largely treated our LGTBTQ+ friends and family as the Other, with all the bigotry that entails. It's also important that we realize that we understand the Cenobites as little as we do ourselves.

There are also ghosts in "Hellraiser," and something awful that surges out from between the walls of reality when the film's iconic puzzle box is opened. Altogether, "Hellraiser" is a film about the secrets we hide from each other, about who we are, about what we want, and about what we're willing to do to satisfy our darkest desires. Richly emotional, "Hellraiser" is the erotic counterpart to the ascetic world Lovecraft's personal fears hide inside.

Despite his obsessions that were often centered on our fragile ideas of reality,  metafiction wasn't H.P. Lovecraft's forte. His discussions were straightforward and focused on the horrors beyond, not what they might reflect about himself or the reader. Yet, he might've gotten a kick out of "The Cabin in the Woods," a movie so proudly meta and opinionated that, if you've somehow gotten this far in life without seeing it, you should stop reading right now and go watch it.

"The Cabin in the Woods" has hundreds of monsters on display for the audience to enjoy, and that's the brick joke waiting at the end of the story. The tropes and trappings of horror are a ritual to please unknowable ancient gods — blood sacrifices that keep this doomed world spinning. The final shot of a giant human hand underlines who the ancient ones have been all along: horror movie fans looking for the best deaths to groan delightedly at, and if we're not happy, Blumhouse and company don't get another annual horror franchise.

John Carpenter's horror classic "The Thing" is based on the novella "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell. A classic sci-fi horror author, Campbell had some of the same issues as Lovecraft, namely a narrow view of science and authority. To be frank, he favored racist authoritarianism. It's that far-right paranoia that fuels the original novella, a taut story about scientists racing to survive an otherworldly being that can imitate and destroy them. It's a marvelous story, but it's implacably colored by Campbell's politics.

Carpenter has never shown interest in uplifting racism, favoring diverse casts and a seeker's view on the world of horror. "The Thing" throws all scientific elitism out the window along with any intimations of classism, too. The men of the Antarctic station come from every walk of life, and they need all their wits to survive even a few hours with something beyond their understanding. The result is one of the best horror films ever, a grimacing, gory delight that turns our fear of each other into something that seems perfectly rational.