Originally Posted by LoathsomePete

I haven't really found another author that really captures the essence of Lovecraft other than Clive Barker, M.R. James, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Ligotti, Robert W. Chambers, Edgar Allan Poe and Laird Barron. As for movies... that's a bit of a mixed bag. All of them have short stories collections which is probably the best way to go but here's my recommendations.

Clive Barker - Books of Blood Vol. 1 - 6

M.R. James - Collected Ghost Stories (he's more inspired by Victorian era ghost stories, but has a similar writing style)

Laird Barron - The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

Neil Gaiman - The Sandman (this one's a graphic novel, but very well done)

Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (this is actually a work of non-fiction that was a major inspiration for Rust Chole's pessimistic world view in True Detective)

Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow (another piece of work that was very inspirational for True Detective. He was kind of in the same boat as Lovecraft, writing Weird fiction for magazines, although it's been said that Lovecraft didn't really care for him too much, even though his work influenced Lovecraft).

Poe - Pretty much anything, I'd recommend just getting a collection for your local book store for like $10


I don't think there's ever been a truly accurate adaptation of one of his stories outside of the 2005 black and white silent film The Call of Cthluhu. The 2001 Stuart Gordon movie Dagon is a good movie heavily inspired by The Shadow Over Innsmouth but does have some of the same problems his other modern Lovecraft movie, Re-Animator had where it couldn't decide on a tone. The 1995 John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness is pretty Lovecraftian as well, but like the others, doesn't really commit to just one tone and is kind of tongue-in-cheek. Ironically, one of the films that best exemplifies Lovecraft is probably the 2007 film The Mist which easily has one of the most soul crushing endings, and the monsters seem to be very Lovecraft inspired, not that it's that surprising as Stephen King was hugely influenced by Lovecraft.

Video games have probably had the best success with that kind of thing, but I think that's also due to the fact that the medium is so well suited for horror. The 2005 game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a technically an original work but contains elements of "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", including the hotel escape. The 2010 game Amnesia: The Dark Descent is very Lovecraft inspired as you're being haunted by an unknowable darkness accidentally unleashed on a trip to Africa. The 2001 Gamecube game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem also contains A LOT of Lovecraft references thoughout the course of the game.