by Shonokin » Mon Aug 13, 2007 1:48 pm
Die! Monster Die! is based on "The Colour Out of Space" which in the 80's there was another version with Wil (William F^<King Shatner) Wheaton and Chet Atkins called The Curse. This was startlingly faithful but a baaad movie. Though from what I remember (just saw it once when it first came out) it had a good strong plot element of descent into madness.
Probably the earliest HPL adaptation is "Egdar Allan Poe's The Haunted Castle" with Vincent Price, which is based on "The Case of Charles Dextar Ward" and not on the Poe poem at all. It is actually a fairly accurate rendition outside of having the Hammer "period" look and feel. The later version by Dan O'Bannon called The Resurrected is very good.
"In the Mouth of Madness" is an ode to a lot of different HPL elements and is lovingly and tongue in cheekedly crafted into something that reeks of Lovecraftian horror much more than most books, stories and whatnot that try to ape him in pastiche.
There's a whole culture of amature Lovecraft short film adaptors that's been developing over the past 15 years or so. A lot of it is chronicled at unfilmable.com
Of course for the tagline of the site is the HPL quote "It is not likely that any really finely wrought weird story - where so much depends upon mood, and on nuances of description - could be changed to a drama without irreparable cheapening and the loss of all that gave it power."
- H.P. Lovecraft