Oh, boy: “Director James Wan is about to embark on a wild journey as he is developing a feature film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic short story The Call of Cthulhu. It was also announced that there will be a video game developed based on the movie.” See Deadline for more.
If I don’t sound enthused, it’s because I’m not! Not because it’s James Wan; it’s because it’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” It is not easy to put H.P. Lovecraft on the big screen. Either you stick very closely to the text, and accept that you’ve just signed up to show your audience the definitionally unshowable; or you just go with ‘Lovecraft-inspired,’ at the price of having to listen to hardcore fans kvetch at you until the moon cracks like an egg. The best adaptation we’ve had for this story to date was the HPLHS’s Call of Cthulhu, and they got around the problem by filming it as a 1928-style silent movie.
I wish James Wan all the luck in the world, but I wish he had gone with “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” instead. Judging from AQUAMAN, he likes Deep Ones anyway.
Moe Lane
That one has its own problems. Unless you can get the audience to strongly project themselves onto the protagonist, the ending falls flat.
And I’m not sure that’s possible in a third person visual format.
“Dagon”, I think, would be a good choice. Moonlight and sea mist keep the horror from being clearly visualized.
Maybe “The Thing on the Doorstep”, if the director really leaned into the psychological horror aspect of it to sell the Wham! at the end.
Mountains of Madness is more doable. Hell, they’ve done Color Out of Space adaptions galore!
Then again, I thought they would screw up the latest Dune on screen version and I was pleasantly surprised when it threaded the needle and was fun.
Ia Ia and all that.
A large fraction of Mountains of Madness is literally spent looking at bias reliefs and magically understanding the story they told.
Not exactly good stuff for a movie.