“This is new territory for me”: Ron Howard’s abandoned detour into Lovecraftian horror
If you were to make a list of 100 directors you believed were capable of making a Lovecraftian horror movie, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Ron Howard wouldn’t be on the list.
After all, despite constantly saying that making a horror flick is one of the last remaining items on his to-do list, it hasn’t happened yet, and you get the sneaking suspicion he’d be shite at it when he considered a dream sequence in Tom Hanks’ Inferno as the closest he’s gotten, because it’s not really horror at all.
Guillermo del Toro could direct a Lovecraftian film in his sleep, even though nobody wants him to adapt the author directly, for some reason, peak John Carpenter could do it, so could David Cronenberg, and Stuart Gordon was a dab hand at channelling that spirit, too. Ron Howard, though? Surely not.
And yet, he almost did. In the late 2000s, the two-time Academy Award winner set out to kill two birds with one stone by helming not only his first horror-adjacent picture, but boarding the industry’s latest bandwagon by taking the reins on a comic book adaptation, too.
Image Comics’ The Strange Adventures of HP Lovecraft merged fact with fiction, using biographical elements of the titular scribe’s life story as the backdrop to a supernatural tale that finds him placed under a curse that turns his nightmares into reality, forcing him to battle the monsters he created.
“It very cleverly uses HP Lovecraft in a fictional way, but there’s some loose biographical elements,” the filmmaker explained at the time. “But it certainly has the flavour and the tone of Lovecraft.” That might be true, but the guy behind Parenthood, the Da Vinci Code trilogy, A Beautiful Mind, and Frost/Nixon didn’t jump out as the most qualified or obvious candidate for the job.
It was nothing if not an interesting concept, combining Lovecraft’s real life with what was presumably intended to be a big-budget supernatural adventure that was one part biopic, one part horror, and one part period-set adventure. Howard seemed excited at the prospect, until he wasn’t.
“Look, it’s challenging,” the Happy Days alum confessed. “But if we get it right, it could be really original and psychologically interesting and scary in a great way. And it’s a graphic novel; this is new territory for me.” All of those things are true, and it would have been interesting at the very least to see how he handled such a wild pivot, genre-wise, but development hell is a tricky place to escape from.
In the end, nobody made The Strange Adventures of HP Lovecraft, with the project petering out of existence. Howard would ultimately shift his focus to The Dilemma, which turned out to be the wrong move when he ended up coming as close to disowning one of his own pictures as he ever has.
