This weekend, SpectreVision will release Hardware and Dust Devil director Richard Stanley's H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space in theaters, and we've now learned that the film is just the first of three Lovecraft adaptations on the way from Stanley and SpectreVision!
Speaking with Rue Morgue, Stanley revealed that The Dunwich Horror will be the next Lovecraft work to be adapted following the Nicolas Cage-starring Color Out of Space, with filming hopefully beginning later this year. He also confirmed that all three films will exist in the same cinematic universe established within Color Out of Space!
"I’m pleased to say that SpectreVision has basically greenlit two more Lovecraft adaptations, and I’m currently prepping my new adaptation of The Dunwich Horror," Stanley told the site. "It will be set in the same milieu as Color Out of Space, in a near-future, disaster-struck Arkham County. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get that before the cameras this winter."
He added, "With Dunwich Horror, we’ll go on campus and get back to Miskatonic University for the first time since Re-Animator. We’ll also get to deal with the Necronomicon, the black book at the core of the mythos. So I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on this."
As for the third film, Stanley tells Arrow in the Head that he currently can't reveal what it'll be, "for all kinds of reasons."
"I will say that 2020 is set to be the year of The Old Ones. For whatever reason, everyone seems to be developing a Lovecraft project," Stanley tells AITH. "The Game of Thrones guys are doing their Lovecraft movie. Jordan Peele’s Lovecraft Country is about to hit. And I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of Lovecraft adaptations in the next two to three years, being that the great man’s work is now in the public domain. So that means we’ve got to be a little strategic in how much talking we do about where this trajectory is heading."
Written in 1928, The Dunwich Horror was first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales and focuses on terrible events surrounding a Massachusetts farm, where the Whateley family has something big and fearsome sequestered in their house. Of course, it ultimately breaks free.