To pass the time as I wait for the premiere of the Lovecraft Country HBO series—just over two weeks away, now!—I’ve been on a Lovecraft binge-watch. There’s a lot to choose from. For a guy who never set foot in Hollywood, H.P. Lovecraft has an impressive IMDb listing, with 214 writing credits at present. And those are just the movies and TV shows directly based on his stories. The two films I want to highlight today belong to the much broader category of original works that incorporate Lovecraftian themes.
Spring is a rare example of a Lovecraftian romance. Lou Taylor Pucci plays Evan, an American who flees to Italy to escape legal troubles at home. He hooks up with Louise (Nadia Hilker), who claims to be a local girl even though she doesn’t sound particularly Italian (“I’ve lived in a lot of different places,” she explains, adding matter-of-factly that she speaks a dozen different languages). There are some other unusual things about her: her eyes are different colors, and she has an unspecified medical condition that makes her sensitive to sunlight and occasionally requires her to run off to the bathroom and inject herself with a serum. Despite some misgivings, Evan is smitten, and believes that Louise may be the love of his life—the catch being that if he’s wrong, she’ll kill him. It’s a surprisingly sweet and funny story, a kind of Before Sunrise with tentacles.
The Void, a more traditional horror story, opens with a shooting massacre at a house in the woods. A lone survivor escapes and gets picked up by Sheriff Deputy Carter (Aaron Poole), who takes him to a small rural hospital. Soon afterwards, the hospital is surrounded by knife-wielding robed cultists, and a malevolent force starts driving the trapped occupants crazy and mutating their bodies. It’s a fun ride that compares favorably to the old John Carpenter classic Prince of Darkness.
Spring is streaming on Tubi right now (free, with commericals), and if you’ve got a library card, you can watch The Void on Hoopla, but both films are also available as cheap rentals on iTunes and Amazon.