“Lovecraftian” is slapped on marketing material for movies, books, and games at the slightest opportunity, yet competent adaptations of his actual work are almost nonexistent. But because Lovecraft’s fiction exists in the invaluable cinematic universe that is the public domain, anyone can take a crack at it, even when they really shouldn’t.Marketed as H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones, this 2021 film is a loose modernization of The Shadow over Innsmouth, one of Lovecraft’s best and most borrowed-from stories.

Directed by Chad Ferrin, the auteur behind an Easter Bunny slasher and a segment of Troma’s arthouse anthology Tales from the Crapper, it’s terrible as an adaptation but instructive as to why we keep struggling with horror’s most infamous creator.Alex (Gina La Piana) and Petri (Johann Urb) arrive at a remote California vacation rental, seeking solace after a miscarriage. Hosts Ingrid and Russel (Silvia Spross and Robert Miano, easily the film’s MVP) are welcoming, but excessively interested in Alex’s health. Petri is soon enthralled by the local commune, but Alex becomes convinced that something fishy is afoot.You’ve seen this movie before, and you’ve seen it done better.

Sloppy, sleazy, and suspenseless, it asks its stars to hit lines like “They’re into all this Nerconomicon stuff,” and they fail to rise to that formidable bar. More often than not, it feels like a soap opera spoof of Ira Levin (the movie name-checks The Stepford Wives, and Ferrin cited Rosemary’s Baby in an interview). If you stick around to watch the credits, you’ll be rewarded with a gag about jerking off.Petri bonds with his hosts. | ILY FilmsThere are moments of visual flair and genuine weirdness, but the movie feels more hamstrung by its Lovecraft trappings than inspired by them.

The famous names and lines are quoted, but thematically, it’s empty. Not to pick on Ferrin, but when asked about Lovecraft, he says that ambiance and dread are important Lovecraftian elements (other horror writers famously disdain those things) and that a good Lovecraft story, instead of spelling things out, “hits you days later how scary it was.” His movie then culminates in its heroine being sexually assaulted by a fish-monster.Why does Lovecraft remain such a challenge to filmmakers? His stories are rarely cinematic, relying on insinuation and horrors that his narrators struggle to describe (except for, ironically, The Deep Ones’ source material, which features a memorable chase scene).

But with some of horror’s greatest hits never showing their hand, that feels like a cheap excuse. Who says The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity suffered for never revealing their monster?Much of the problem is thematic. Lovecraft’s oft-unpronounceable creations are the stars of a sprawling mythos that any hack can dip into when they’re stuck, and The Deep Ones references Cthulhu like it’s a way to hack profundity into a plot.

But it's human characters who have to carry a movie, and Lovecraft’s protagonists are almost invariably unstable, isolated men who feel out of place in their own time and haunted by all the endless time yet to come.That’s hard to communicate on film, especially when you’re already concerned with making the half-dozen pool noodles you can afford look like quasi-convincing tentacles. And the latter is where most adaptations focus their efforts, because, as argued by The Movie Sleuth's Chris Jordan, Herbert West: Re-Animator inadvertently poisoned the well back in 1985. A huge cult hit for director Stuart Gordon, Re-Animator took one of Lovecraft’s worst stories and reworked it into a gross-out gorefest.

It works for what it is, but assuming that it represents Lovecraft’s worldview is like assuming that a Bugs Bunny cartoon represents a genuine outing to the opera.Next time, just go with the corporate hotel chain. | ILY FilmsAdaptations, then, tend to get split into two camps: tits and tentacles, where movies like The Deep Ones forever chase Re-Animator’s schlocky success, and the rarer, more ambitious adaptation, like the still fairly zany Color Out of Space, okay-ish episodes of Cabinet of Curiosities, and obsessive indie efforts like 2005’s silent Call of Cthulhu. But those are few, far between, and perhaps best known for the one we’ll never get: Guillermo del Toro’s Mountains of Madness.Some tangentially related fiction does live up to its Lovecraftian marketing: the world-weary heroes of Annihilation and True Detective Season 1 fit the label better than yet another doomed couple checking into an Airbnb, even if the former only draw loose inspiration while The Deep Ones rattles off verbat