“All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.”
-H.P. Lovecraft
The genre of horror has never been so succinctly summarized. In American horror, Lovecraft is rivaled only by Poe, and horror storytellers have spent much of the 70 years trying to live up to the legend.
For Stephen King, The Mist’s nods to Lovecraft are pretty subtle compared to a straight-up homage like Crouch End, but they’re still present. Lovecraft popularized the idea of monsters entering the world through a dimensional rift, and the large bug/mollusk monsters of The Mist, with their clusters of tentacles, are particularly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s monsters. Whereas the creatures of 19th century gothic horror were often just one step removed from folklore or the natural world, Lovecraft’s stories in the early 20th century featured grotesque, alien things that defied conventional understanding of physical utility and sometimes didn’t even conform to this dimension’s rules of geometry and physics.
Guillermo del Toro, who has had his fair share of Lovecraftian tributes, did a good job of realizing those influences in Hellboy. Both the Cthulhu-like tentacle creature and the hulking Sammael monsters, with their insect-canine-mollusk features, are clear homages. He is releasing the Hellboy sequel this summer and has some people pretty excited about The Hobbit because of the same judicious use of effects that worked so well in Hellboy.
Before The Hobbit is finished, he plans to go a step beyond homage with Lovecraft and make At the Mountains of Madness, based on one of Lovecraft’s stranger stories. He has his work cut out for him; the material is challenging and should make for a difficult film. The book was incredibly novel at the time of its release, but has influenced so many films since (John Carpenter’s The Thing, among others) that it will take additional effort to translate its ingenuity to modern audiences. His comments thus far seem encouraging; at the very least he’s resisting the urge to tamper with the ending, one of many mistakes in The Mist.
The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola 