We live in an age where every movie studio with a known genre property wants to create their own shared cinematic universe to rival the juggernaut (ha!) of Marvel Studios. It doesn’t always work, but the allure is strong, especially for comics and novel properties that already have a huge shared roster of characters. One writer who was on the cutting edge of this was early 20th Century horror and weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft, who created his own mythos of gods, aliens, and creatures simply because he wanted to, never expecting they’d be read by anyone.
Evidently, the wheels are in motion for an “Expanded Lovecraft Universe,” though not on the scale we might have hoped. Actress Barbara Crampton, who starred in Re-Animator and From Beyond, which kicked off the Lovecraft movie mini-boom of the ’80s, tweeted that a remake of the 1995 shot-on-video chiller Castle Freak is happening, and that it will see the beginning of a shared universe of Lovecraft characters.The tweets (which we saw via Bloody Disgusting) are as follows:
And have you heard we are reimagining it in a new film? The story will have elements of the first but with many new characters and an expanded Lovecraft universe. https://t.co/LJcbj7wEWW
— Barbara Crampton (@barbaracrampton) May 31, 2018
CASTLE FREAK reimagining is BEING WRITTEN as we tweet… https://t.co/eyEvIfl57i
— Barbara Crampton (@barbaracrampton) May 31, 2018
From BD: “Castle Freak will be directed by SFX guru Tate Steinsiek with original star Barbara Crampton producing alongside Dallas Sonnier, Amanda Presmyk, and Charles Band.”
Of the films made by director Stuart Gordon based on a work by Lovecraft, Castle Freak is easily the least faithful or well-known. Extremely loosely based on his classic “The Outsider,” Castle Freak tells of an estranged family (with Re-Animator alums Jeffrey Combs and Crampton as the mother and father) who move into his family’s ancestral castle to try to start fresh, only to find a nasty creature lurking inside.
A reimagining of this movie would surely be a welcome one, especially if it, as Crampton says, introduces more Lovecraftian elements and characters for future installments. The Lovecraft “Cthulhu Mythos” is an extremely rich and layered one, which has been expanded upon by other writers long after the author’s death. I’ve long hoped a Guillermo del Toro Lovecraft movie would happen—and it still may now given his deal with Fox Searchlight—but I’ll take an indie approach too!
Would you watch a Lovecraft expanded universe? Let us know in the comments below!
Image: Full Moon Entertainment
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!
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