Why is it so hard to make good adaptations of his work?

Why is it so hard to make good adaptations of his work?

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Idk, why don't you ask /lit/? Maybe it's because his atmosphere works better as something described than as shown? I'm just guessing, I don't actually know

He was a racist. Who cares?

It's not, I made a bunch of great adaptations of his work but I just keep them to myself

It was a different time you Gen X dork

because the source material isnt good.

literally our guy.

You son of a bitch

One of the simplest reasons is that the descriptions that unsettle the most from his works rely on "describing the indescribable". That is to say he focuses on things that are described as foreign, outside of what ought to be possible, unimaginable and "wrong" geometries, colours that aren't, paintings that curdle the blood with their combination of realism and sinister supernatural imagery that doesn't even seem as though it should be possible to put on a page. These descriptions, particularly after building suspense, raising stakes and invoking a sense of solitude and urgency, help to make the reader feel as though he is insignificant, and if not stupid then simple. They are one of the elements of Lovecraft's work that make his writing stand the test of time.
The issue with any adaptation is that it would be nearly impossible to translate these detailless descriptions onscreen without disappointing, because you can't depict the visually unimaginable in a visual medium.

Because he told instead of showing. Literally the worst writer of all time. Should have started a cult instead of seeking publication. If you only write dumb trash appealing to the awe emotion, you belong in spiritualism not literature. Religious belief also encourages tribalism, which explains why he was racist against even 90% of whites. Just a garbage person in general, no wonder only horror fans like him.

Was writing a good post part of your plan?

it's a copy paste job.

It clearly wasn't part of yours.

Yeah you can, just do that lenticular flashing shit, where the eye perceives an image as two things at once.

It isn't.

Just not films.

>One of the simplest reasons is that the descriptions that unsettle the most from his works rely on "describing the indescribable".

This. What the fuck are you supposed to do there?

get better in making kino.
this

Text-only writing is the one medium where telling instead of showing works because it's all text anyway, there's only so many ways you can describe a situaiton.

Because a lot of his best work is filled with dense unneccessary detail and prose that just serve to give you a feeling that the story being told isn't just a work of fiction.

The only way this could translate is if the adaption was found footage which is already gimicky and wouldn't fit in with his stories set in the early 20h century.

Dont show it onscreen, just make allusions to what it looks like with footprints, shadow or silhouette

The second you give the indescribeable an image or a face or even just an idea of what it looks like to the audience, it has already failed to be Lovecraftian.

See this guy at least gets it.

I'm flattered, but it's an original, and the first time it's been posted.
If you believe that, you have a poor imagination or you've never read Lovecraft, though I expect both are true.

Funny enough I honestly think this is where video games, if they don't get too caught up in horror tropes, can actually be a perfect medium. You can actually get away with impossible geometry and through experience create insanity. Silent Hill has moments that I think capture this magic.

This fucking game....

THIS fucking game.

Worth owning a PS4 all on its own 2be on-est M. Night Famalams

>Funny enough I honestly think this is where video games, if they don't get too caught up in horror tropes, can actually be a perfect medium.

MAJESTIC

The only way Lovecraft would be accurate in film is if the audience couldn't look at what's being shown on-screen without literally going mad.

Which makes you wonder how the film survived the editing process.

Sorry Sony shill but I'm waiting until Kingdom Hearts 3 releases to buy my PS4

Fuck off with your pleb advertising

i have read that review 2-3 time before on Sup Forums.

Not all Lovecraft gods make you go crazy. One of them gives you immortality if you have sex with a fishman.

>It was edited by blind and deaf man who could not feel.
>He later died moments after the film had been cut and released.

Plenty of his works are communicable to the screen. People who comment otherwise simply haven't read enough of his work.

The Shadow over Innsmouth would make a pretty straightforward thriller until the final sequence where the Deep Ones start hunting for the narrator. Bookend it with a prologue of a crew handing over captured people for gold and the narrator figuring out his lineage.

The Dunwich Horror works in more of an abstract way, it would have to be from Wilbur Whately's perspective for at least a third of the film and then have the second act follow the researchers at Miscatonic puzzling out what he was up to.

Also, the colour out of space is suited for a short, low budget format.b

The Call of Cthulhu and At The Mountains of Madness would simply require tremendous budget for shit like the shoggoths and pretty much any reference to the Old Ones possible.


Anyway, I'm wasting my time because you pretentious fucking slugs don't actually know what the fuck you're talking about.

>Cant think of a way to make it work
>But I'm the unimaginative one
Whatever senpai. Read most of his stuff FTR

>my dick when you see The One Reborn scene

Why are all the worms hanging out on the cement post?

>Because he told instead of showing.

You're right. He was, ultimately, an amateur with little understanding of literature and no formal training. It shows, but a lot of his work still manages to be captivating regardless.

>Literally the worst writer of all time.
>Literally

Come now.

>Religious belief also encourages tribalism, which explains why he was racist against even 90% of whites.

He was racist as a very young man, but I'm not sure why people seen to think he held onto those beliefs throughout his life. Most of his friends were not racist and he respected their opinions well enough to hear them out and come around. Eventually marrying a Jewish woman.

I'm just mad I can't play PT, I really liked the impossible looping hallway idea.

>Anyway, I'm wasting my time because you pretentious fucking slugs don't actually know what the fuck you're talking about.
wow rude

>Which makes you wonder how the film survived the editing process.

They got a guy who was already crazy to do the editing, so what's the worst that could happen? He goes MORE crazy?

his work already sucks

Plus most of his racism came from never going out and seeing the world, and basically everything on just how he "knew" the world was while living at home. He mellowed out considerably after travelling, then he dies.

What if David Lynch were to write and direct a Lovecraft short story?

The studio would make it a bitch for him every step of the way.

Post your three favorite authors or fuck off

>Religious belief also encourages tribalism, which explains why he was racist against even 90% of whites.
Entirely justified, he hated Italians and Irish people from his experiences in New York, which is fair because Micks and Wogs are the trash of the white race even when they aren't congregated in 1920s NYC. I'm all for shitting on archaic beliefs, but cut the man some slack.

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

Dante, Poe and Homer

CYCLOPEAN CYCLOPEAN CYCLOPEAN CYCLOPEAN

they are in a flooded field and are trying not to drown

Why bother? He's going to shit on any authors that aren't his top 3 anyways.

Because adapting shit results in shit

He also wasn't religious himself, he was pretty much an agnostic. He wrote letters saying that he thought organized religion was for sheep.

That depends entirely on what works you're looking at.

The Terrible Old Man is basically a movie now.
The Picture In The House is certainly doable and is a recurring theme in a lot of modern horror flicks.
The Re Animator is a cult classic.

That said most of what translates are themes rather than narratives and that's mainly because his narratives are largely inside of the protag's head and psychological state rather than the actual events going on. That's just not going to cut it in film.

A Cthulu epic is possible but it would most likely utterly fail to actually grasp what makes it enjoyable and instead just go for the big visuals and excitement that sells in Hollywood.

FURTIVE FURTIVE FURTIVE FURTIVE FURTIVE

Wrong medium for it.

Bloodborne is a brilliant adaptation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

> le "you can't adapt" Lovecraft
> le "Lovecraft was divine"
> le "cosmic horror"

Fuck off with these pathetic memes. 70% of Lovecraft is pseudo-intellectual garbage. The other 30% is good-to-great, and proper authors could easily put it on screen, just give ti someone like Chase or Weiner (for TV), or Lynch or Herzog (for movies).

>pseudo-intellectual
But it's pulp horror, not pseudo-intellectual anything.

>A Cthulu epic is possible
Sure, but I don't know why you'd want to. For being the elder god that even normies beat off to, hes the least interesting element of the whole mythos.

Invasion S1
True Detective S1
Steins Gate

The developing a world real enough and then introducing the uncanny rather than outright horror.

Any time I see a thread with only one tripfriend contributing a sole post under the trip and then an user making constant contributions in the same style, I think of it as a dog pissing on a tree for archival purposes.

Personally I'd rather do The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Nameless City but when it comes to Lovecraft, Cthulu is simply what would be done. It has the name recognition even if it is with people who generally haven't read a single one of his works.

Lovecraft only works within its medium.

Same goes for 2001 and MGS2 within their respective mediums.

>that seamless integration of Classical Gothic horror into body horror into Cosmic horror with its own original story
>that 11/10 soundtrack
>that solid fast-paced gameplay

One of the only reasons I bummed my friend's PS4.

One of the few 10/10s in recent memory.

>or even just an idea of what it looks like to the audience
Except Lovecraft himself always did that? He might call them out-of this world, but then he would go ahead and give us some sort of idea anyway - if i remember correctly, the shambler had tentacles.

he had very weird racial views actually
he talked shit of mestizos, portuguese, italians and irish but spoke highly of spaniards (in cold air I think) and purebred aztecs

Because cosmic horror is garbage outside of literature, and MAYBE vidya games. And that's a big maybe.

You're right, that other guy is a retard.

Dagon, The Thing and (arguably) OG Alien were pretty good m8

I said "maybe". It can be done well. It can also be a blunder of the century.

Because it only translates in non-visual media.

The theme of insignificance and utter uncomprehensible horrors can NOT be created in visual media

>check into your theory
>look at my okcupid profile
>0 (zero) looks, messages, or emails from okcupid telling me to keep trying

stfu, I just saw it.

Bloodborne was shit

...

Shut up Dennis, also Allways Sunny Bloodborne crossover when?

when one decides to be good

No because most people who like lovecraft cannot get his work, they remain meme level fans.

You have to be an occultist yourself to make a good lovecraft movie.

Anyone who says something like "you can't capture the indescribable horror of his stories on screen" needs to grow themselves an imagination and watch a horror film where they don't show the monster(s) clearly. Try describing some of the things in Jacob's Ladder, for instance. Any immediate description isn't going to capture what exactly those things are or even what they look like.

The biggest reasons, I think, that Lovecraft's work has never made a good 1 to 1 adaptation on the screen are;

-By this point in time, most of his best stories are cliché and over-done, having been pulled from for so many other movies. The Thing and Alien are amazing classics that pull from At The Mountains of Madness, and anyone not familiar with Lovecraft already will think a film of it is old hat.

-Structurally, some of them are all over the place. The closest to a 1-to-1 Dracula we got was the Coppola film, and even that added a whole backstory to Dracula that wasn't there. Now imagine doing Call of C'thulu.

-Even at their best, Lovecraft's stories are often a lot more like a surreal adventure, rather than a slow building dread fest.


Still, I think a good version of The Dunwich Horror is easily dooable, as long as you disregard the structure of the book.

...

here anons
youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg
always got this in the back of my head every time a lovecraft thread comes up

Because he was an avid racist and all the good directors are cucks who don't want to be associated with him.

Cuz you need the right medium for it.
What's better than actually playing through it?

You Sup Forums-tards needs to fuck off with this overrated crap everytime someone mentions Lovecraft.

Bloodborne is not an adaptation of anything created by Lovecraft. It's just inspired by it. It adapts absolutely nothing.

What about the fishing hamlet and the fucking fish people?

He's right, it's just inspiration. It's damn fine inspiration though, and Bloodborne has great Lovecraftian influences.

lmao who's this ugly fag?

Inspiration. The Fishing Hamlet is not anything taken out of a Lovecraft work word for word.

The game uses nothing that is in Lovecraft, it just uses the tone of his works to build a tone for the game. It isn't an adaptation at all.

I wasnt thinking clearly about the differences between an adaptation and inspiration

Okay then what are you clearly thinking about?
People are throwing out their thoughts.

I'd like to see an adaptation of The Rats in the Walls.

Both because it's a great story and also because it'll be funny as shit to hear someone calling their cat Nigger-Man on film.

You could argue the shoggoth in Nightmare of Mensis is more adaptation than inspiration. I mean it's clearly a shoggoth. Looking at it even from crazy far away fills your sanity meter insanely quick. Only when you approach it in the dark can you actually handle it, and you can't see the full thing at that point. That's probably as close as it gets.

>As instantiated in Lovecraft’s stories, the pernicious something that makes a nightmare of our world is individuated into linguistically teratological entities from beyond or outside of our universe. Like ghosts or the undead, their very existence spooks us as a violation of what should and should not be, suggesting unknown modes of being and uncanny creations which epitomize supernatural horror.

kinda hard to translate to the screen

seeing it rather than imagining it kinda defeats the point

Superior Lovecraft Inspired video game coming through!
youtube.com/watch?v=qE-q48pmap8
youtube.com/watch?v=H07M3xlax2c
also holy shit Porkins from Star Wars who voices this character was a criminally underrated actor RIP.

Lovecraft himself:

>But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

Wow, does your mommy know you're shitposting on the internet GloomerGrapist?

As time passed and Lovecraft improved, he began to describe his monsters in detail without sacrificing their cosmic and philosophical significance.

What does that tell you?

Fuck everything that's coming out. I just want BB2. Sony pls.

It wouldn't be as good.

Just play this or Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. God damn that segment where the Innismouth residents are chasing you through the Inn and you have to run to adjacent rooms bolting locks and pushing dressers across the doors to slow them down and then across rooftops into other buildings to get away from them is one of the most intense experiences I've had in a game.

My favourite! Granted, I haven´t read Lovecrafts more famous works. I´ve got a short-story collection. I would like to see a movie about "The Reanimator" or the story about the lightning monster. Freaked the shit out of me when I read it.

A few more practical reasons in addition to the obvious:
>Lovecraft has zero interesting human characters, being that his stories are preoccupied with the mysterious phenomenon in question. This is fine for a short story, but would not work as well in a movie.
>almost all of his tales are short stories, which would be stretched horribly thin if adapted into a movie. Weaving multiple stories together would be very difficult, so the only option left is to do a horror anthology.

Re-Animator is a movie.