He had one good, not-annoying role, in Stand By Me. That’s about it.
One of the best direct Lovecraft adaptations so far. 
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I am also a big fan of prior efforts by the HP Lovecraft Historical Society:
The silent version of Call of Cthulhu and “early talkies” version of Whisper in the Darkness.
They are worth hunting down
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I saw screenings of both at SIFF. They know their Lovecraft.
I was skeptical at first of Call Of Cthulhu till I read the full blurb and realized that as a silent film with title cards it would work with the jumping narrative of the story and they did an amazing job on a proper indie budget for both films.
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They did a terrific job with a tiny budget; those guys are wonderful and I’m a big fan of theirs. Especially their props and fonts.
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They’re both EXCELLENT!! <3
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I will not hear of such heresy towards Saint Nicolas.
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They just launched a podcast called “Voluminous” about Lovecraft’s letters.
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Will check it out!
Lord of War
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Of course, those two films had to be extended considerably beyond the original stories. I think the original “From Beyond” story is covered in the first five minutes of the movie.
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Cage is a talented actor forced to take basically any role he’s offered due to his propensity to buy castles and dinosaur bones. When he hams it up in crappy movies he’s just doing what he can to make these roles fun to play.
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I really wish it mattered that Lovecraft was from Rhode Island. Makes me wonder why he chose “colour.” Was that spelling common there and then?
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As best I can tell he did it because he was an Anglophile. He often used antiquated spellings or phrases such as “shew” and “man of science” instead of scientist. Some of this is due to his narrators but it’s probably also trying to connect back to the time when his family held higher status before his grandfather died.
Lovecraft’s writing is very much influenced by his childhood. His father died of paresis, and his mother was committed to a sanitarium before dying there. His maternal ancestors, the Phillips, were an old Rhode Island family known to have married first cousins. This probably helped to form his concerns about purity and backwards evolution as well as insanity.
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I think he was trying to highlight his love of the English (and by extension, whiteness of the Anglo-Saxon/Protestant variety)… @agies has got you covered on that, I think.
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I’d be really curious to know if this was unique to him or if it was part of the fad for things sorta-British in the 20s-30s, like the Mid-Atlantic accent.
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HPL was convinced that his era was far too modern and that the late 1700’s were where he would have been happiest. He enjoyed putting on the mannerisms of an upper-class dandy of the time in both his correspondence and his writing.
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Wild at Heart
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At the same time, though, HPL was deeply interested in the advances of science and technology. Stuff like relativity and quantum mechanics, or continental drift, that were either the cutting edge of science, or still unconfirmed hypotheses, show up in a lot of his stories, and he had more of a grasp of “deep time” than a lot of people have today.
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