18 Great Lovecraftian Scary Movies You Can Watch Right Now:
His new movie, Color Out of Space, was the latest and one of the best movies based on H.P. Lovecraft’s writing. Lovecraft, the mystery author whose harsh, cosmic horror is less interested in who did it and more in exploring the fear of what we can’t know.
His unique mix of religion fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, along with his strong sense of the incredibly scary, creates a timeless mixture that gives people nightmares. His name lives on in history because many white men have been like him: a horrible racist punk who filled a lot of his work with the poison of his prejudice.
Lovecraft’s horror stories are known for having magic, monsters, and giants from other worlds. Some people refer to them as “eldritch horror,” “cosmic doom horror,” or “science fiction.”
The Haunted Palace:
It was one of the first movies to adapt a Lovecraft story, and “The Haunted Palace” is one of Roger Corman’s most famous B-movie works.
The movie is based on Lovecraft’s short story “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” and is named after a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Given how much Lovecraft looked to Poe for ideas, the movie uses lines from the poem as a frame.
Vincent Price portrays Dexter Ward, who receives a house overlooking the Massachusetts town of Arkham. When he gets there alongside his wife Anne, he finds that the town is full of horribly misshapen people and that his grandfather, Joseph Curwen, used black magic to call the Elder Gods.
The price is, as expected, great, and the lavish sets and costumes make this one of the few Corman movies that has the cash to match the director’s big goals.
The Void:
This Canadian movie from 2016 was directed and written by Steven Kostanski as well as Jeremy Gillespie. The film tells a terrifying Lovecraftian tale of mysterious occurrences linked to a group of enigmatic masked figures and an unimaginable cosmic horror.
Even though it’s not based on any of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, Cthulhu Mythos has a significant impact on his books. Lovecraft created the Cthulhu Mythos, which has had a big impact on his books. We meet Deputy Sheriff Daniel Carter at the beginning of the movie. He is carrying a badly hurt man along the road to an old, run-down hospital.
He walks into the hospital and finds chaos. Daniel passes out, and while he’s asleep, he has a strange vision. When he wakes up, he goes to his police car, but a robed cultist attacks him before he can get far.
As Daniel runs back to the hospital for safety, he sees that the followers have circled the building and the dead people inside have turned into a tentacled creature. He also learns that the vision he had has something to do with all of this crazy stuff.
Many of the characters presented in the movie are killed off in a terrifying series of events. The head of the group opens a door to the void and tells Daniel that he may reconnect with his ex-wife again.
Daniel as well as his spouse are seen clasping hands in another world while a black tower floats in the sky. This is despite the fact that Daniel tackled the boss and fell into the void with him.
Alien:
Although not a direct copy, Ridley Scott’s important sci-fi horror movie has a lot of Lovecraft in it, especially in the way Swiss artist H.R. I. Giger, who made the Creature, the Space Jockey, and the Derelict look the way they do,.
Scott hired Giger after reading about his work in his art book, Necronomicon. The book’s name originates from the famous fictional tome that served as a narrative tool in numerous Lovecraft stories.
The crew of the Nostromo is confronted by an alien being that has been woken up from a deep sleep and is now releasing uncontrollable horror upon them. Alien is one of the most famous horror movies of all time. It was the first movie in a series that has since grown and over-explained the world. Scott’s first post is still scary because the thing isn’t bad; it’s just crazy.
Re-Animator:
You know, even H.P. Lovecraft saw the cheap thrills of horror as a way to make money. The short stories in his “Herbert West: Reanimator” series were written just for you, and it shows.
Each book is crazier than the last, and the cliffhangers are so weak that the famous Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi was the first person to say that Dr. West’s stories aren’t very good. Because it’s so bad, though, the classic horror movie “Re-Animator” from 1985 can go off the rails as well as hit you with a wave of inappropriate blood and sexual scenes.
In Stuart Gordon’s strange movie, Dr. West is a student at Miskatonic University who is crazy about life’s secrets and likes to mess around with the dead. The owner of West is also a student. West’s first experiment on screen brings the cat that lives with his owner back to life.
That’s the last moment in this movie, which seems kind of normal. The movie is like a circus of geeks, with some disgusting scenes on a Troma-level, and there is an ugly scene of an attempted sexual attack near the end.
Overall, West’s cold attitude, the silly comedy, and the screams of horror as everyone gets it wrong make this one of the best and funniest Lovecraft movies ever.
The Dunwich Horror:
The Dunwich Horror is based on Lovecraft’s short story of the same name. It is directed by Daniel Haller and stars Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner, Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley, and Ed Begley as Dr. Henry Armitage.
The story is about witchcraft and necromancy. There is a young man with a mesmerizing gaze, his “almost human” twin who goes on a killing spree, a student he kidnaps and gets pregnant, his mother locked up in a hospital, and a rite to bring back The Old Ones using the Necronomicon: Book of the Dead.
Annihilation:
Annihilation is based on a book by Jeff VanderMeer, but it mixes the ideas from that book with those from H.P. Lovecraft. The Color Out of Space is a short story by Lovecraft. Even though it’s a known fact that Alex Garland played a big role in bringing Dredd to theaters, his second official directorial effort is heavy and emotional.
Identity, change, and affection are some of the main ideas that run through this confusing sci-fi movie. The diverse cast of female leads all experience unique emotions and pain. Lena, played by Natalie Portman, embarks on a search into The Shimmer, a growing area with unknown origins.
Kane, Lena’s husband, came back as the only person who has ever crossed the boiling rainbow wall, yet he has no memory of what happened after the shimmer. That might not seem very Lovecraftian, but the images, scares, and ending should please and frighten fans of both science fiction and movies.
Event Horizon:
Even though “Event Horizon” didn’t do well at the box office within 1997, DVD sales helped keep it living as a major horror classic that had an impact on things like the “Dead Space” video game series.
A group of scientists is sent to Planet Neptune in 2047 to help people. What begins as a pretty standard “Alien” riff quickly turns into a Lovecraftian nightmare when it turns out that the alien force that attacks the ship isn’t really an alien but an evil force out to destroy the crew.
The acting is great, with Laurence Fishburne as well as Sam Neill standing out, and the special effects make the images look like real nightmares. It’s the best movie Paul W. S. Anderson has ever made, which isn’t saying much given how good the “Resident Evil” movies are in general. Even so, the movie is still worth seeing on its own.
Underwater:
It’s one of the more recent Lovecraftian movies that people have seen. It was directed by William Eubank as well as written by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad.
The movie shows a group of oceanographers working deep within the Mariana Trench. It looks at Lovecraftian ideas like being afraid of the unknown and dark water. Again, this movie isn’t based on a specific Lovecraft book, but it does have clear Cthulhu inspirations.
A project on the Keppler 822 Station is to drill seven miles into the Mariana Trench to find materials. The group is part of this project.
Norah Price, a mechanical engineer on the team, was the only one awake when the station had a major breach. Norah Price, a mechanical engineer on the team, was the only one awake when the station had a major breach. She and Rodrigo managed to escape before the area could be sealed off.
The escape pods have already launched, so they are unable to escape any longer. Later, they come across a warning call from the deep. Upon investigation, they discover that it has been torn open, revealing hatchlings of previously unseen aggressive species inside.
When a few of the survivors are able to get away, more animals come after them, and then an even bigger monster comes out of the ground.
One of the greatest Lovecraftian films of all time, Underwater, features a Cthulhu-like creature that only appears for a moment. The movie is about the fear of the unknown in the deep and the terrible things that can happen when you see a cosmic horror.
The Thing:
John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of the Cold War classic The Thing from Another World was also influenced by Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, in which a group of scientists go on an expedition to Antarctica and find a secret so scary that it makes them question everything they thought they knew about the world.
In Carpenter’s movie, when they look into the wreck of a Norwegian research base, they find a strange creature that can blend in with any living thing and take its form.
Rob Bottin, the famous special effects artist, creates effects that make the audience feel the same horrible fear of seeing monsters that defy natural laws and should not exist in the real world. We cannot determine the identity or intentions of the ever-changing and adaptable creature. We can’t know what it is or what it wants.
The Color Out Of Space:
When Richard Stanley decided to adapt Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space,” he knew two things: first, that how the color was portrayed would be very important; and second, that everyone within the cast had to be ready for things to get way out of hand.
Stanley uses bright purples that make us think of a strange beauty. During the second half of the movie, these colors seem to pulse through our screens.
Then, he hired Nicholas Cage to portray the father of the Gardner family, who was destined for failure. One good thing about “The Color Out of Space” is that it pokes fun at Lovecraft’s racism by having a hydrologist as the “one sane man.”
Ward Phillips, a young black man, leads us as he looks into what’s wrong on the Gardner property and how it might affect the regional water reservoir. It’s scary at first, but wow, when things get out of hand! You’ll remember some scenes.
Necronomicon:
Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans, and Shusuke Kaneko directed Necronomicon, a French-American short film. It won the award for Best Special Effects at the 1994 Fantafestival and is known for its artistic makeup and mechanical effects.
Lovecraft’s stories “The Rats in the Walls,” “Cool Air,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” influenced it. The story is divided into four parts. The Library is the main story, and Jeffrey Combs, who can do a lot of different things, plays the author, who goes to a convent to borrow a copy of the Necronomicon.
Bruce Payne plays Edward De Lapoer in The Drowned. He is a sad father and widower who loses faith in God and employs the Book of the Dead to bring his family back to life.
In The Cold, writer Dale Porkel looks into a string of strange killings in Boston. Lastly, Whispers follows Paul and Sarah, two police officers in Philadelphia on the hunt for a suspect known as “The Butcher.”
A Cure For Wellness:
For ten years, Gore Verbinski made great films. Now, he’s back with one of the most controversial and shocking horror movies of all time. It’s deliciously evil that A Cure for Wellness exists. Each frame of this slow-burn appears meticulously crafted with great care, showcasing a soft green color scheme.
The creepy set and setting add to the beauty as well as horror of the pictures taken by Bojan Bazelli, who worked with Verbinski on both “The Ring” and “The Lone Ranger.”
A young business executive crawls through a plot to find his CEO among a group of patients at a treatment center that resembles a vacation, revealing a magical story shrouded in mystery.
It’s a mix of neo-noir and The Shining, complemented by just the right amount of Lovecraftian fiction. Gore Verbinski’s direction adds an extra layer of terror when it wants to be.
The Evil Dead:
Sam Raimi wrote the story for the first “Evil Dead” titled “Book of the Dead,” inspired by the made-up magic book that appears in many of Lovecraft’s short stories.
The final movie featured the Book of the Dead, originally known as the Necronomicon but later changed to the Naturom Demonto. The Book of the Dead summons Deadites and demons to attack Ash Williams and his friends while they are trapped in a Tennessee house.
The low-budget cult movie that came out of it is a mix of Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown and a more traditional zombie movie. Ash must battle his friends as they become possessed by incomprehensible ghosts.
While Raimi’s “Evil Dead II” is generally better than the first movie, it is much less in the cosmic horror tradition because it is more comedic. Later movies either stopped being scary or changed the style of the franchise to be much more generic. Only “Evil Dead,” with its overtly evil tone and truly scary demons from another world, was truly scary.
Castle Freak:
Stuart Gordon, as well as Dennis Paoli, directed and wrote this Lovecraft-themed movie in 1995. The story is even credited to H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is one of the authors. For the second time, we see a family move to Italy to live within an old castle thanks to a bizarre gift.
Some parts of Castle Freak are based on two Lovecraft books, The Outsider and The Dunwich Horror. John Reilly goes to Italy alongside his wife Susan as well as their blind thirteen-year-old daughter Rebecca.
But even though the family received a castle from the 1200s, they are trying to forget about their past and the car accident that killed their five-year-old son and left their daughter blind.
The family doesn’t know this, but there are other people living in the house. John must uncover the secrets of his troubled past and its connection to inheriting the castle, while navigating the presence of unseen inhabitants to ensure his survival.
The 2020 remake of the movie was not nearly as popular as the 1995 version, which is still considered one of the greatest Lovecraftian movies ever made.
In The Mouth Of Madness:
John Carpenter’s work, especially his “Apocalypse trilogy”, is full of Lovecraftian ideas. But what could be more fitting than the notion of a horror author whose last book can destroy anyone who reads it and maybe even let out something even scarier?
Sam Neill, playing a private detective, is tasked with locating the missing author Sutter Crane and delivering his latest manuscript, titled “In the Mouth of Madness,” to his publishers.
According to legend, reading this fictional book is believed to drive individuals to madness, self-destruction, or suicide, much like the Necronomicon. The movie got mixed reviews when it first came out, but it now has a cult following.
Prometheus:
Ridley Scott’s pretty successful return to the world he made with “Alien” in 2012’s “Prometheus” ruined Guillermo Del Toro’s plans to film “At the Mountains of Madness.”
I’m still mad about it. We really need to see the huge penguins that have changed. Putting that aside, “Prometheus” performs its best when it looks at the links between humans and their strangely distant humanoid ancestors.
The main ideas of “Prometheus” are a lot like those in Lovecraft’s story. A trip to a faraway land quickly goes wrong, and our science knowledge isn’t even close to being enough to fix things. The new take on H.R. We don’t know what’s going on inside the Cyclopean hugeness of the Engineer ship because of Giger’s muscular, organic style.
Just minutes before Weyland learns that death cannot be stopped, the baby of Elizabeth Shaw begins a new life. The tone of Scott is similar to the unknown horror of “Alien.” The rest of the story may not work for you.
The Resurrected:
The Resurrected by Dan O’Bannon is based on the story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and stars John Terry, Jane Sibbett, Chris Sarandon, and Robert Romanus. Additionally, the film has been marketed under the titles The Ancestor and Shatterbrain.
People think it’s one of the greatest horror films from the 1990s because of how well the main actors played their parts, how creepy New England felt, and how faithfully, if slightly updated, the movie adapted a famous book.
The story is about brutal deaths that no one can explain and a mean-spirited chemistry engineer who brings his dead relative back to life.
Daniel Isn’t Real:
Even though putting Daniel Isn’t Real on this list seems like too much, it really does deserve it. This unsettling and private picture should no longer be kept a secret. Miles Robbins gives a strong performance as Luke, a sad college photographer, and Patrick Schwarzenegger gives a confident and charming performance as Daniel.
From the moment they meet again, the pair carries the spirit of this image. Supporting actors Sasha Lane and Chukwudi Iwuji are among the small but strong group of people who work on this love project from Adam Egypt Mortimer.
Expert lighting makes the visual experience better, and the man only known as Clark’s moving synth score makes it even better. People who like the movies by Ari Aster or Justin Benson, as well as Aaron Moorhead, shouldn’t miss Daniel Isn’t Real.