Hurricane Lovecraft

Many of you that follow my art blog or who are my friends, know that I am a nut about Lovecraft. Even though the long strangle hold over the copyrights of his work was released many years ago, Lovecraft is still sitting in a niche of small loyal fans. However, there is a storm brewing, and a media hurricane about the mythos that Lovecraft created is coming!

Recently I have been doing research to see where the popularity of Lovecraft's work was doing. I began with flexing my Googlefu. If you do a basic search for Lovecraft or names from his mythos you get between 12 million to 15 million results. There are over thousand different Lovecraft works or related works in books alone and over 100 different films that are directly Lovecraft or related to Lovecraft's work. Writers and directors such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ridely Scott, John Carpenter, and Del Toro just to name a few all have been influenced heavily by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's work is also picking up a lot of steam in foreign countries. For years I have known that Lovecraft's work has been very popular in Mexico, but because I am an artist who does a lot of Lovecraftian illustrations I have often been approached online, by groups in other countries to feature my work on their Lovecraftian sites. Some of the other countries that are becoming Lovecraftian Hotspots include Japan, Germany, Ireland and that is just to name a few in which Lovecraft's work has slowly metastasized to.

Lovecraft  has influence many mediums such as books, movies, music, and all forms of games, but if you mention the name Lovecraft to a random person on the street they may not know what you are talking about. However, I feel that there is going to be a dynamic shift soon in that general knowledge. A good portion of what is deemed popular is determined by the large media companies because when they produce something they have the ability to reach more of the general public than do individuals, but often is the case that they won't take a risk on what they consider an unknown. However, that is going to change sooner or later because the pressure is building  and then the hurricane named Lovecraft will be on us before we see it coming.






At the moment, there are two major forces that will bring Lovecraft into main stream media. The first force will be from the efforts of Del Toro the hottest director out there in the name of horror. Del Toro has already made a huge success with the Hell Boy movie series as well as a bunch of other successful horror films he has made over the years. When you watch his films it is easy to note how Lovecraft has effected his work. Right now he is now in his second attempt to get started on a movie based on Lovecraft's In the Mountains of Madness. His first attempt was push aside by the movie Prometheus because of the similarities between both stories, but after finally watching Prometheus I found that there was only a small similarity between the stories. Del Toro's version of Mountain of Madness is already confirmed to star Tom Cruise and with such a big name in the movie industry new Lovecraft fans are soon to generate.

 The second force will be coming from Alan Moore who was the creator of the Watchmen and Batman comics. He is in the works to create a Lovecraft comic called Providence which is such an awesome Lovecraft comic title since it is what is inscribed on Lovecraft's grave marker. I am really excited about this prospect because Alan Moore's style is really suited for the dark worlds of Lovecraft. So with just these two forces, I predict there will be a huge media hurricane surrounding Lovecraft's work and then everyone will jump on the band wagon to create more.




I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this and to help expand knowledge of the of incoming storm. Please feel free to comment.