Quote:My starting point is that film adaptations of Lovecraft are generally of poor quality or badly recieved (however, please feel free to debate this).
I'll debate this. It is generally true that straight adaptations are rare, and critical reception is generally lukewarm, but
Re-Animator (1985) has been hailed as a black comedy classic, and other films have likewise received honest praise. I think the real problem is less a lack of quality than the fact that Lovecraft's work tends to translate very badly to the screen. That doesn't mean you can't have very good quality and well-received adaptations, like
Die Farbe, but they're usually built on top of a Lovecraft story rather than being strict adaptations.
But, to answer your questions:
Quote:1. What do you think are the main problems in adapting the literature of Lovecraft to the screen, and why do you feel that, in general, it doesn't work?
Lovecraft's fiction is very atmospheric, with few characters, little character development, plot, or dialogue - not the easiest vehicle for creating a screenplay out of, with actual actors and sets. Probably to compound the difficulty, the special effects that are most impressive and memorable - like a shoggoth or Cthulhu - would tend to be fairly expensive to produce well on any budget. One of the things notable about
Re-Animator is the considerable use of stage tricks and practical effects, which not only come out rather well in the film, but have aged rather well compared to a lot of films, like
Lord of Illusions with its really cheesy early-CGI.
Quote:2. How do you feel that film-makers have dealt with concepts such as 'nameless', 'abbhorent', and 'unspeakable' - words which are a regular trope of his writings? How do you think that they could tackle these in future adaptations?
Kind of wish I had my copy of
Lurker in the Lobby at hand for reference - I think the "ineffables" get far too much attention when it comes to Lovecraftian filmmaking; it's cited by a lot of writers and directors as a kind of block to making Lovecraftian films, but if you look at the films themselves this kind of thing is rarely a problem at all. If you look at "Lovecraftian" films as opposed to straight Lovecraft adaptations, the mood, atmosphere, and set dressing of
Alien is wonderful before you even get to the monster - and the xenomorph itself is such a terrific shadowy, organic thing, so explicitly real and yet different, that it works fantastically well. You don't get a lot of that kind of thing in Lovecraft adaptations - the reveals in
Dagon just doesn't quite have the same "kick" - but that's not for lack of trying on the part of director Stuart Gordon, I just think the mostly internal reveal of Lovecraft's narrative is hard to express on screen.
Quote:3. What narrative elements of Lovecraftian fiction cause further complications in adaptation?
It's a hard sell to studios. No action, no overt sex, very little gross-out horror...to do properly you'd need to basically do a psychological horror film with the approach of an art film, something like
Suspiria meets
The Ninth Gate. There's a very slim area for getting such films funded and produced, which is why you see more amateur or semi-pro productions like the Lovecraft Historical Society films than you do major studios - and when you
do see bigger studios attempting this stuff, it's usually with more than a bit of sex, gore, or camp, probably to satisfy the people backing the film financially. I mean hell, they made two sequels to
Re-Animator; they're fun films and no mistake, but they're not great films in the league of the original.