James Wan’s Upcoming Lovecraft Movie Has An Unlikely Solution To Development Hell
By
Cathal Gunning
Published Jun 14, 2024
- Lovecraft's challenging visuals make The Call of Cthulhu difficult for filmmakers like Wan to adapt for the big screen.
- Wan's horror expertise might be better suited for a television series adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu due to its cosmic scope.
- A TV format would provide more room for Wan to explore the story's unsettling slow-burn tension and psychological elements.
While James Wan is mostly known as a multiplex legend, the horror director could benefit from downsizing his ambitions when it comes to his H.P. Lovecraft adaptation
The Call of Cthulhu. While H.P. Lovecraft’s racism makes him a divisive figure in literary circles, his influence on the horror genre remains inescapable. The author is frequently credited with being one of the earliest writers to combine the tropes of cosmic horror into a cohesive whole, creating an immersive fictional world that has since been expanded by iconic writers like Stephen King, Alan Moore, and Thomas Ligotti.
Despite this outsized cultural impact, many of
Lovecraft's best stories still need movie adaptations due to a major issue with his style. Much of Lovecraft's work concerns itself with nightmarish horrors that's difficult to imagine on the big screen. Even
the best Lovecraft movie adaptations tend to struggle with depicting monsters like Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, which may explain why Lovecraft’s
The Call of Cthulhu still hasn’t been made into a full-length movie. An experimental 2005 short film adapted the story, but even a modern master of horror hasn't been able to make a big-screen, big-budget update happen yet.
Director James Wan is one of the most financially successful horror directors in Hollywood history thanks to the
Saw,
Insidious, and
Conjuring franchises and their spinoffs. Despite this,
Wan admitted to Empire that his Call of Cthulhu movie might never happen thanks to its “
very esoteric” story.
The Call of Cthulhu is among Lovecraft’s most famous and influential stories, but this doesn’t mean that it is easily translated to the screen.
James Wan’s best horror movies rely on implication as much as aggressive scares and gore, but
The Call of Cthulhu’s horror is intrinsically psychological.
The Call of Cthulhu features a monster whose appearance alone is enough to drive the viewer to madness, as well as entire settings that bend the rules of gravity and geometry by their very existence. All of this is tricky for readers to visualize, but almost impossible for filmmakers to realize onscreen. It doesn’t help that director Guillermo Del Toro’s Lovecraft adaptatio
n At The Mountains of Madness never happened since that scrapped project could have proven the potential of Wan’s passion project. That said, another Del Toro effort might be able to save James Wan’s
The Call of Cthulhu.
James Wan’s Call of Cthulhu Could Work As A TV Series
Lovecraft’s Work Has Succeeded On The Small Screen Before
Although the director never got to make his ambitious $150 million
At The Mountains of Madness adaptation,
Del Toro's Netflix show Cabinet of Curiosities did prove that
Lovecraft adaptations might be better suited to television than film. Both the underrated
Lovecraft Country and a standout episode of
Love, Death, and Robots that featured Cthulhu underlined this idea. Although it might seem like the story’s cosmic scope makes the big-screen format a necessity, Wan’s
The Call of Cthulhu could be a better fit for television.
While television budgets have ballooned in recent years, the format still comes with slightly lowered audience expectations when it comes to visual FX. On the small screen, Wan’s Lovecraft adaptation could aim for an aesthetic similar to 2017’s
Twin Peaks: The Return. That experimental masterpiece offered viewers scenes of mind-bending horror and cosmic trippiness that, while not traditionally realistic, were unforgettably disturbing, weird, and effective.
Wan’s many great movies prove he can switch between horror styles, from the gritty realism of
Saw to the ghost dimensions of
Insidious. Thus, this wouldn’t be a huge leap for the screen veteran.
A TV Show Gives Wan’s Call of Cthulhu More Room To Breathe
Lovecraft’s Iconic Story Would Be Tough To Condense
Since most of the original Lovecraft story’s scariest moments are reliant on slow-burn tension and subtle implications,
Wan’s The Call of Cthulhu might actually benefit from switching to television due to the format’s longer runtime and more relaxed storytelling style. A big-screen adaption of the Lovecraft story would be expected to follow the same familiar story structure as Wan’s earlier efforts, which doesn’t gel well with Lovecraft’s style. Lovecraft's story is slow and many of its most unsettling moments take place in the character’s mind, which is where the comparatively permissive medium of television could help Wan.
With its lower budget and longer runtime, a television version of
The Call of Cthulhu could allow Wan to approach the story via a more experimental lens. The director could turn
The Call of Cthulhu into a multiple-hour movie, with each chapter fleshing out more of Lovecraft’s famous story. In the process, Wan could introduce more characters and potentially even tackle some of the problematic elements of Lovecraft’s work with a more diverse cast. This would be harder to pull off if Wan turned
The Call of Cthulhu into a straightforward Hollywood horror movie.
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