Between 1916 and 1937, the year of his death, American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote an entire series of pulp stories that rapidly became legendary. His specialty: horror with a twist of humor and psych, a genre which he used to describe humanity as an ignorant species trapped on a small island, plunged into a darkness inhabited by strange creatures, mysterious rites and ancestral gods and demons. His body of work inspired a cult following that has never hesitated to borrow from his rich imaginary universe. The occult novel The Necronomicon is so anchored in popular culture some readers believe it's a true history. Many directors have been inspired by Lovecraft's signature combination of insanity and mythology, but when his stories are adapted to the big screen the results generally leave to be desired.

A handful of mediocre adaptations like The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die (1965), or The Dunwich Horror (1969) served as precursors to the real breakthrough Lovecraft film adaptation: the cult movie Re-Animator by Stuart Gordon, released in 1985. This date marks the beginning of an era in Lovecraft adaptations: one that transforms psychological depth and images of anxiety into pure gore, opting for special effects rather than suggestion. Re-Animator is one of the more inventive horror films of the 80s (alongside Evil Dead II), whereas movies like From Beyond, The Resurrected or Dagon are clearly less well produced. One film from this period, although not inspired by a Lovecraft story, seems much closer to the writer's paranoid psychological universe. That film would be In the Mouth of Madness. John Carpenter, a veteran of the genre, is inspired by Lovecraft's mythological universe to conduct a brilliant exercise in sinister horror.