If H.P. Lovecraft had taken his youthful crusade against astrology one step further, and monster-ified the Zodiac in his stories…

With the news that Amazon is to effectively become a movie studio and release 10 or more movies a year, here are the Lovecraft movies I’d like to see…

1. A faithful “The Shadow over Innsmouth” feature film done in 1940s film noir style and setting.

2. A beautiful closely-observed steampunk/psychedelic/bromance art-house film of “Hypnos”, with just voiceovers.

3. A big psychological thriller of “The Temple”. The movie The Boat, basically, but First World War and done as a horror/fantasy movie. Maybe intertwined with an ancient Greece flashback back-story about the beautiful boy (borrow from “Iranon” and “The Tree”?), for occasional respite from the grim submarine interior.

4. “The Rats in the Walls” filmed and monster-designed by del Toro, from storyboards by Tim Burton and a script by Neil Gaiman.

5. “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Strange High House in the Mist” spliced together and filmed as a laconic Tarkovsky’s Stalker-meets-Visconti-meets-A Field in England-meets-Picnic At Hanging Rock landscape art-house movie, in which first the young thieves and later the professor struggle to journey across the overgrown lanes and bare headlands toward the strange high house, having started in a sunny Death in Venice-like Edwardian New England seaside resort.

6. “The Lurking Fear” but set in the wild 17th century Catskill Mountains, as a dark fantasy origin tale for a Solomon Kane -like figure, perhaps made even more spicy with borrowings of scenes from R.E. Howard.

7. “The Horror at Red Hook” spliced with “Pickman’s Model”, in a vivid 1920s New York setting.

8. “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” as a faithful animated feature adaptation.

9. A dreamy shadowy “The Haunter of the Dark” spliced with “The Evil Clergyman” (mysterious figures are the psychic residue of the Starry Wisdom) and (for less predictability) the ‘angles’ elements from “The Dreams in the Witch House” (angles were being researched and probed by the Starry Wisdom?). Might have an “Erich Zann” sub-plot or opening section?

10. Lovecraft’s life story, a bio-pic.

io9 has a new ‘not safe for work’ article in “The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga”, a breathless scamper through Lovecraft’s reception and use in Japanese manga comics. Though supposedly about manga the article is unable to resist slithering in a mention of a genre of interactive, erm… “romance system tentacle battle” games and the existence of “porn anime” animated movies with titles such as Mystery of the Necronomicon. Generally the reader gets the impression that Lovecraft in Japan looks like this…

Yes, apparently Nyarko W is one of the top Lovecraft inspired series. Which, in terms of sheer chutzpah in using Lovecraft’s name and characters, rather overshadows the West’s recent wave of feeble ‘Kickstarter cash-ins’.

Though the article does have a more interesting mention of…

Innsmouth wo ô Kage [Insmus wo Oou Kage, 1992], Chiaki Konaka’s 1990s TV adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” transplanted to the foggy byways of rural Japan”

Sounds good, but looking at it on the YouTube link (above) it just seems very ‘TV movie flat’, cheesy, and distinctly lacking in mist and shadow. Maybe I skipped past too much.

Not that much to get excited about, then in terms of the possibility of a Japanese equivalent of a Berni Wrightson or a Mike Ploog penning Lovecraft adaptations in comics. But should readers want a little more authoritative detail on Lovecraft in Japanese manga, maybe in order to dig up a comic worth licensing for an English translation, the io9 article helpfully notes…

In an article in the Japanese Mythos horror anthology Night Voices, Night Journeys (published in English in 2005 by Kurodahan Press), Yoshihiro Yonezawa and Satoshi Hoshino provide an exhaustive 50-page history of manga which really refer to Lovecraft.”