there's symbolism there, somewhere.įunnily enough, Karloff shows up again here, playing a sinister antiquarian in this (uncredited) adaptation of HP's The Dreams in the Witch House, which relocates the action from New England to Old and throws in Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele for good measure.

It's most notable, in fact, for being Boris Karloff's last American horror movie: the king of old-skool horror meeting the writer who established a new style of terror. No, that wasn't Lovecraft's original title: he called his story of a meteor that falls from the heavens and brings madness in its wake The Colour Out of Space-and yes, he did use the proper spelling of “colour”: HP was a New England man, from Providence, Rhode Island, and had no truck with modern American orthography.Īnyway, Die Monster Die takes The Colour Out of Space and tries to turn it into something a straightforward science fiction film without much success. It was marketed as another Edgar Allen Poe adaption-director Roger Corman was having great success with The Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death – but it's obviously a very different beast, darker and less tractable: they might have removed his name but the spirit of Lovecraft was no so easily exorcised. It's taken from a novella called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, about an 18th-century warlock ( Vincent Price) whose spirit possesses the body of his unfortunate descendant (Price again) to continue his unholy work. A troubled man (both parents had serious psychiatric problems), Lovecraft published stories in pulp magazines that envisaged the world as a plaything for malign extraterrestrial gods, cramming his tales with words like “eldritch” and “ichor”. It is Lovecraft that is our subject today, or at least those films that attempt to translate his uncanny visions on screen. Directed by cult auteur Richard Stanley (his first feature for 27 years!), it's adapted from a short story by HP Lovecraft and promises to give full-throated expression to an author who isn't always well represented by cinema. So obviously you'll want to book tickets for The Colour out of Space, out soon.īut Cage-going-bonkers isn't the only reason to watch the film. To celebrate the upcoming release of Colour out of Space, we take a look at some of the best HP Lovecraft-inspired films ever madeĪ new Nicolas Cage film is always welcome, especially when he plays someone going utterly bonkers.

The best of hp lovecraft