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?
My guess is that it’s hard to separate his setting, and the aura of fear of the vast unknown, from his xenophobia. There’ll always be trace elements of his mindset there, or weird dead spots where the interpretation avoids something everyone knows is there, unless one specifically acknowledges and challenges his racism in a modern interpretation like Lovecraft Country (which is more a deconstruction than the original material). Something like The Call Of Cthulhu or The Shadow Over Innsmouth can too easily feed into metaphors about malevolent foreigners.
I think it’s extremely easy to separate his literature from his xenophobia. I’ve read a list of of parallels from the shadow over Innsmouth and to be honest they feel really forced
i think it depends what we mean by this.
i agree with OP that Lovecraft’s xenophobia is intrinsic to what he has created, and why he did so. but i don’t think that in itself is a bad thing. reading his work doesn’t make ppl xenophobic. nor is his work, nor adaptations, become beholden to becoming some kind of “treatise against foreigners.”
he experienced a deepset fear, and expressed and explored that fear. art can help make us reflective, and that’s a boon.
This.