1st commentor says Lovecraft no good for film. NO! List your faves here:

Sorry, but LORD OF ILLUSIONS is Clive Barker, NOT H.P.L.

Stuart Gordon has been the best adaptor of Lovecraft stories, especially when he works with co-conspirators Dennis Paoli and Brian Yuzna. There hasn't been much to top the original RE-ANIMATOR, FROM BEYOND or even the controversial DAGON, which seems to be the closest in spirit to any of the original tales.

LORD OF ILLUSIONS has a lot of Lovecraftian flavour to it, but it's not his. Neither is IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, a John Carpenter made neglected classic, which is the closest anyone ever came to making a Lovecraft story not based on any of the writer's original works.

"Tasty, Winslow! Tasty..."

...but the best Lovecraftian films made were never written by the man!

Need I mention:
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
ALIEN
John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING and even ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and DARK STAR.

What seems to be a common theme in Lovecraft's works is the horror of the ancient and the unknown. Of humanity becoming like insects to the fate of something far more superior than us, be it an actual race of beings or to an uncontrollable fate. His creatures were not bloody or gory, but grey and muddy; ambiguously hiding in fog, with unknown amorphous shapes of tentacles or sillouettes. The key was the CREEPY nature of something slowly but steadily happening and growing around you.

While I do love RE-ANIMATOR and its sequels, DAGON and NECRONOMICON, it would be nice if someone could do Lovecraft withOUT the blood and guts and actually delve on the creepy aspects (NIGHT OF THE DEMON would be another good example).

My favorite Lovecraft movie is The Dunwich Horror, with believe it or not Sandra Dee,who in this picture plays a blonde bimbo who has no clue what she is getting into.
What she gets into and seems totally oblivious to is a Satanic like ritual conducted by a Wilbur Whately(played by Dean Stockton).
With the aid of the Necronomicon he tries to bring back the old ones to rule the world and end the supremacy of mankind.
To those who haven't seen this one I will recommend it.
Has a great and haunting soundtrack to it also and some good special effects.
That is good special effects for the late 60's.

I have to agree that, cinematically, HPL has been rather hard done by. In the early '30s, he was approached by Paramount, who wanted to cash in on the horror boom that Universal was raping such profits from, but declined, saying himself that he didn't believe any of his work would be suitable!

I can understand, to a point, his reasoning: Lovecraft's body of work, by his own admission and design, was more concerned with creating an atmosphere, in which the story or plot was sometimes almost incidental. Still, there are several stories that I think would transfer reasonably well to the screen, some of which have been tried, with varying degrees of success: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for instance, disguised as Poe's The Haunted Palace came off rather well, but Die, Monster, Die! (The Colour Out of Space) did not, despite the presence of Boris Karloff, and with apologies to fans, The Dunwich Horror is an extremely mixed bag (something about Dean Stockwell's moustache just deflates the entire proceedings for me). The Re-Animator films are fun, and do catch that rising-tide-of-out-of-control-nightmare quality of the stories, but something's just missing; likewise, From Beyond. There are shloads of Lovecraft adaptations that I haven't seen, so it isn't fair to make an across the board pronouncement, but the weak appear to out-weigh the strong. Personally, I think that the recent silent short-feature, Call of Cthulhu was a triumph, but there seems even to be some disparity of opinion about that (read the review by the Vietnamese fan, and you'll wonder just what he was expecting).

Anyhow, this thread was about what HPL stories I'd like to see as movies (if done with any faithfulness to the originals):

The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Pickman's Model
In the Vault
The Colour Out of Space
At the Mountains of Madness
The Whisperer in Darkness

Maybe even another crack at Herbert West: Re-Animator and From Beyond.

The trouble with filming a lot of HPL's work is filling in the plot - not that there are holes, but just to make the characters real enough for audiences to care about.

The Resurrected (1992)is a good movie based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

Also, The Descent (2005)reminded me both of The Beast in the Cave and a little of The Lurking Fear in that both featured people who had devolved into beasts and in the Descent it is somewhat implied that the beasts could've been descended from the explorers who found the cave 100 years ago.

I'd give my eyeteeth to see a proper movie version of At the Mountains of Madness, but I can't imagine who would do it justice. The idea would be to concentrate on the horror and wonder and not so much post-Lord of the Rings meta-fantasy we can so easily visualize in Hollywood movies these days.

"Mollymauk doesn't park. He makes lazy circles in the sky."

For the most part, I agree completely that Lovecraft isn't good for film. Mainly because his horror revolves almost entirely around what the imagination conjures. You can't do that on film, or it's very difficult, unless you want to have all the monster scenes in near-total darkness. That said, I do actually like the '60s ones a great deal. I've loved 'The Shuttered Room' since I saw it on late-nite '70s TV as a teenager, ditto 'The Dunwich Horror." Be honest, I mainly love them because they're Psychedelic '60s movies with a HINT of Lovecraft in them. I also liked Re-Animator because it was so funny and so well-done, and I love Jeffrey Combs' and Bruce Abbot's chemistry. The rest of them, I really have no use for. 'From Beyond' was all tits, rubber, and goop, and I have yet to see another cinematic go at Lovecraft that was any good. Honestly, though, I would love to see a film version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", that is if they did it RIGHT (aka no modern movie *beep* orchestral score with NO pop music of any kind, no stupid startles, no stupid teal colour scheme, no stupid CGI..I really hate modern movies).