Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the most important practitioners of 20th century fantasy and horror literature. A prolific writer with a strange and often dreamlike imagination, Lovecraft is known as the creator and pioneer of the term "cosmic horror". The overarching theme of this philosophy of "cosmism" is human futility.

In 1927 he declared, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." What petrifies the protagonists of his stories is the realisation that they are absolutely powerless to effect any sort of change on the indifferent and ultimately incomprehensible universe surrounding them. Lovecraft's cosmism stems from his disdain for conventional religions, a fascination with paganism, and his sense of humanity's existential impotence in the face of vast cosmic emptiness.

On top of that, the cosmos of his stories is inhabited by innumerable ancient and powerful extraterrestrial or parallel-dimensional beings who are worshipped as gods. This elaborate fictional universe forms the thread running through the author's work, and is known as the "Cthulhu Mythos".

The Cthulhu Mythos gradually extended its tentacles into other media, such as games, manga and film. Adapting Lovecraft's writing for the cinema has proved no easy task, the problem being that directors must at some point depict the indefinable. Yet the writer's world has been a fruitful source of inspiration for many filmmakers, so much so that Lovecraftian horror has developed into a subgenre in its own right.

Since the successes of the film Color Out of Space and the HBO series Lovecraft Country, the writer's oeuvre has once again begun to creep into the "mainstream." Which means this is the perfect time to compile a programme of ten Lovecraftian films comprising adaptations, more or less faithful reworkings, and tributes.