Abstract
Lovecraft’s fiction, distinguished by awe-inspiring landscapes, spectacular monsters and earth-shattering events, has long enjoyed a reputation for conveying an atmosphere of dread. In tale after tale, whether set in his native New England or in far-flung wilderness spaces, Lovecraft’s evocative prose aims to facilitate textual encounters with a world beyond the realm of known human experience. Lovecraft’s legacy, propelled by disturbing images of monstrosity and powerful notions of cosmicism, has found new forms of artistic expression well into the twenty-first century. Playing out across a wide variety of media formats, franchises like Hellboy and Locke & Key and works such as Lovecraft Country, to name but a few, pay homage to, or take inspiration from, established visual and thematic aspects of Lovecraft’s works. In this essay, it is my intention to examine adaptations of one of Lovecraft’s most celebrated short stories “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), focusing on film and comics. Acknowledging cosmicism as an integral aspect of Lovecraft’s legacy, and examining how this might be expressed in fiction, I will consider how this tale translates into other media formats. Looking first at cosmicism and then at adaptation, I will then turn attention to Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space (2019), and “The Colour Out of Space” included in Self Made Hero’s The Lovecraft Anthology I (2011), to argue that a Lovecraftian atmosphere is nurtured in each text according to its medium-specific qualities.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Hine, David, and Mark Stafford. “The Colour Out of Space.” The Lovecraft Anthology, Vol. 1: A Graphic Collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Stories. Ed. Dan Lockwood. London: Self Made Hero, 2011.
Houellebecq, Michel. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Transl. Donna Khazeni. London: Gollancz, 2008.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd Ed. With Siobhan O’Flynn. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Janicker, Rebecca. “‘Madness and monstrosity’: Notions of the Gothic and Sublime in Comics Adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft.” Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siècle to the Millennium. Ed. Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. 187–205.
Joshi, S. T. A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
———. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004.
———. “Preface.” The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. Andrew Migliore, John Strysik, and Bernie Wrightson. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006. 5–8.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. London: Warner, 1993.
Levine, Caroline. “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42 (3), 2009. 517–523.
———. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters, 1925–1929. Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1968.
———. “The Colour Out of Space.” The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S.T. Joshi. London: Penguin, 1999. 170–199.
———.“Supernatural Horror in Literature.” H.P. Lovecraft: Collected Essays, Vol. 2: Literary Criticism. Ed. S.T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004. 82–135.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Murphy, Timothy S. “Variations on Avisibility: ‘The Colour Out of Space’ on Film,” Science Fiction Film and Television 14 (1), 2021. 71–81.
Oakes, David A. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Petley, Julian. “The Unfilmable? H.P. Lovecraft and the Cinema.” Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film. Ed. Richard J. Hand and Jay McRoy. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. 35–47.
Round, Julia. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.
Will, Bradley A. “H. P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime.” Extrapolation 43 (1), 2002. 7–21.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Janicker, R. (2023). Conveying Cosmicism: Visual Interpretations of Lovecraft. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, M.J. (eds) The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13765-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13765-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-13764-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-13765-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)