James Wan’s Call of Cthulhu - Howie goes to Hollywood

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

Lovecraft was a nobody in his time, his works were the proto nerdy type as much as his fans. The only reason he got fame was recommendations from his more successful friends and the timing, which was a decade after he died. After WWI, no way no one was gonna buy into his cynical stories with bleak dark endings and no romance, especially in Prohibition when people were thirsting for booze or even after the Crash when fortunes were lost. Who wants to hear doomer stories when all that happened? HPL at some point that time was also kinda Socialist. After WWII and after his death the GIs and young men that came home grew tired of hero stories and wanted more stories that were graphic with blood and sex. So HPL's stories somehow got it's recognition.

He was actually a lot more popular during his time than people nowadays give him credit for. Weird Tales was the Pulp Fiction rag of the 1920’s and 30’s, and Lovecraft was featured frequently on the covers as a selling point. He fell out of the fiction spotlight for a while due to his death, the decline in pulp readership during and following WWII, and the advent of speculative fiction magazines, before his work gained a resurgence of interest in the 1970’s.

Love him or hate him, we owe not only August Derleth for keeping Arkham House afloat during the decades that Lovecraft short story compendiums weren’t selling, but also Chaosium for popularizing the Cthulhu Mythos with their CoC TTRPG and subsequent Mythos Cycle books in the 80’s and 90’s.