If you watch modern genre cinema, H.P. Lovecraft is the most adapted author who has never had a hit movie. His fingerprints are everywhere. You see his tentacles in the MCU (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), his cosmic nihilism in prestige TV (True Detective), and his creature design in virtually every monster movie post-1980.
Yet, if you look for a “definitive” high-budget adaptation of a Lovecraft novel—a film that carries the weight and cultural footprint of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—you will find a void.
Why is the father of cosmic horror simultaneously the most influential and the most unfilmable author of the 20th century?
I feel that the Lovecraft is not the same than Lovecraft work. RPG, comics, and other stuff that get inspired by Lovecraft rarely depict the impossible to understand unknown. They are more related with an otherness threat. If if those are unbelievable, they are not unconcievable. Moreover, Lovecraft rarely depict antagonists.
I think that the mainstream adaptation of Lovecraft, adapt the mainstream Lovecraft culture.
I feel you; I miss the sens of deep otherness. I think it’s may be a subversion and make it a tolerant depiction.