The common axiom in storytelling is “show, don’t tell”, but Lovecraft’s writing is often most effective when it’s the opposite of that; tell, don’t showThat’s not to say that Lovecraft doesn’t describe (in great detail, sometimes) creatures or monsters. But, the true horror in Lovecraft’s writing comes from the characters internal realizations and feelings of dread invoked by the particular monster or object.He will go into great detail about the feelings of unimaginable horror or madness that overcome a protagonist upon the realization of some eldritch truth about the universe... how do you film that?Here’s a passage from a very influential Lovecraft story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth describing a carved, driftwood tiara:It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs—some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine—chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognised stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any—Eastern or Western, ancient or modern—which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestions of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion—which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.So, you can show a spooky, weirdly-shaped tiara on-screen, that’s easy. In fact, they show this item in ‘Color out of Time’ as a sort of Easter egg. But this is a profound, transformational moment for the protagonist that invokes latent feelings within him. It is incredibly hard to capture that essence on screen.It’s obvious in ‘Color out of Time’ where they tried to capture this essence. One of the most significant early setup scenes has Nick Cage’s character saying “there was a colour, it wasn’t a colour I’d ever seen before”. That is a really cool idea, and would work if you had written it and had the reader use their imagination (there must be colours we’ve never seen before right? We can’t even comprehend what they would look like, it’s outside our understanding of the known universe) - except in the film, we see it. It’s pink. Maybe magenta. It undermines the profoundness of the initial premise.After the initial setup, the film essentially becomes a very generic (albeit well-done) horror movie. Characters become crazy/mad and visually grotesque monsters chase our protagonists around. There is nothing Lovecraft about that. Sure, Lovecraft’s monsters are often described as having gangly tendrils, tentacles, eyes, gills, fins etc... but that’s not what makes them horrifying, what makes them truly horrifying is that trying to comprehend their true nature will rip your mind apart. The film had characters going mad, but it doesn’t land with the same impact as Lovecraft. Still a very enjoyable movie.TL;DR - unimaginable horrors from beyond the colours of time, whose true comprehension will drive you insane, are very difficult to depict visually. Lovecraft’s writing does a great job of letting the reader’s imagination fill this in, but it may be impossible to actually put that in a movie via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2DlyRpa
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