Unfilmable

Chris has a problem, which Michael is trying to solve, but now they both have a problem. Michael wants his estranged friend to quit drugs, and the only way he can think to accomplish this is to chain him to a pipe for seven days and make him quit cold turkey. Chris obviously hates this. And over the course of those seven days, Chris and Michael don't just have to deal with unhinged drug dealers an...

This episode begins a short run of the show where we share good horror movies with each other. First up is "Sorry to Bother You", written and directed by Boots Riley. Though it doesn't bill itself as a horror movie, we make the argument that it has many of the hallmarks: it features a character who is unwittingly in the hands of a destructive force that he is unable to stop. It features dread and...

This month, we conclude our series on Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories , a great horror comedy anthology show. We look at the last four episodes... "Angel Man" continues the story of Mr. Dimler and the otherworldly singer Scotty. "The Demotion" is about a desperately unhappy air traffic controller who gets a lot of people killed. "Squat" is all over the place. And finally, "Butter" is a legitimately...

Our discussion of Bedtime Stories , the Tim and Eric horror anthology show, continues with two double-length special episodes and the beginning of season two. Sauce Boy is about a man tormented by addiction who finds himself beholden to the mob. Tornado looks at a young man whose life is ruined by his sins as a child. Baklava is about the world's worst boss. And The Duke asks us: what do we really...

Our discussion of Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories , a horror anthology show from Adult Swim, continues with some real banger episodes. We begin with "Angel Boy", where an unearthly performer entrances a suburban dad. Next is "Roommates", where two awful, awful people struggle to cohabitate in LA. Then we have "The Endorsement", where Jason Schartzman makes a career misstep that ruins his life. Fina...

Welcome to the new Unfilmable! In our pivot to talking about horror media more broadly, we've decided to talk about the excellent horror anthology series "Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories". We know Tim and Eric aren't for everyone, but we think you should give this series a shot because their approach works really well for telling horror stories. We cover the pilot, "Haunted House", and the first th...

This is it, the last in our series covering Lovecraft screen adaptations. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society undertook the impossible task of bringing Lovecraft's most famous story to the screen, and they managed to succeed even with one hand tied behind their back. This silent film is riveting to watch, which is a real accomplishment all on its own.

We've reached our final Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation, which is fittingly the final Lovecraft adaptation Gordon had the opportunity to direct. His adaptation of Dreams in the Witch House was featured on the anthology series Masters of Horror, and it stars Ezra Godden, who previously featured in Dagon. Gordon brings the story to the modern day and substantially reduces its scope, eliminating t...

This month we talk about 2017's Annihilation , starring Natalie Portman and based off of the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Vandermeer. Portman is part of a team of scientists sent into "The Shimmer", an expanding zone of corrupted nature that arrived with a meteor strike. The team falls one by one as things get stranger and less reliable.

This infamous straight-to-video Stuart Gordon film stars Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, a castle, and a freak. While this is nominally a loose adaptation of "The Outsider", it mostly ends up being a gory and horny slasher film. And that's fine! But it's not without a brain or a heart, because just under the surface is Gordon's reaction to Lovecraft's conflicts about whether nature or nurture dec...

This month we cover the 1981 film Possession , which is one of the strangest things we've watched and covered on the network. Mark returns home to find that his wife Anna not only wants a divorce, but is also acting very strangely. But Mark is unwell too. And there are greater forces pulling the strings here. This movie is hard to get ahold of and very hard to watch at points, but it's also unlike...

Aaron and Justin escaped a cult as kids, but a mysterious video tape draws them back to answer questions about what was really going on there. What they walk into is cosmically and existentially horrifying in a way that would actually spoil too much if I said too much about it here. Not gonna lie, we really like this movie, and we encourage you to watch it first before hearing our discussion. It's...

Re-Animator is an extremely fun movie. It was the debut of Stuart Gordon (rest in peace), Jeffrey Combs, and Barbara Crampton, and it looms large in the world of Lovecraft film adaptations. It takes one of Lovecraft's lesser stories and moves it to the present day, making it a straight-up horror comedy classic.

Necronomicon: Book of the Dead is a straight to video horror anthology movie. H.P. Lovecraft finds a copy of the fabled book, and reads three stories of woe out of it. The movie itself is mostly schlocky fun, but it's hard to call this a very good adaptation of any of Lovecraft's stories.

Richard Stanley's 2019 adaptation of The Colour Out of Space is a fantastic movie, and a great adaptation. It moves the story to modern times, while putting the Gardner family in the foreground so we can fully absorb the tragedy of what the Colour does to them. It accomplishes this through spot on acting, great practical effects, and a truly psychedelic back half. Watch this film!

We spill the beans about a phenomenal movie that defies genre. The Lighthouse is in the "Lovecraftian" side of our ledger. It's not a straight adaptation, but a thematic echo, and it hits on one of the main aspects of Lovecraft's tales that we don't see a lot of: insanity. Come for the performances, stay for the amazing production details.

This month we return to the work of Stuart Gordon with his 2001 film Dagon . This is an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth , and it does a very good job of capturing the spirit of that story while still making some fundamental changes. It also has one particular scene that is extremely difficult to watch. So be warned?

Unfilmable is our show about different movies and television shows that have attempted to adapt the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Though this Roger Corman film bears the title of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe, it's really an adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". It stars Vincent Price, whose charisma brightens up a strange film that's at turns slow and schlocky, making it absolutely wo...

This is a different episode of this show. Instead of talking about one widely released film, we're instead talking about short films displayed at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival . We cover six shorts that can be found on the 2016 collection and 2018 collection (2017 knows what it did). I did my best to find online versions of each of the films discussed, or at least trailers, so you can have a po...

This episode introduces Lovecraft Ian, our friend who helps us find ways to justify covering Lovecraftian things on this show. While X-Files was in its late season dolrums, Vince Gilligan wrote a banger of an episode called "Roadrunners", where Scully is trapped in a small desert town by a cult that worships an alien being. This thing is a masterpiece, as it captures the creeping dread, paranoia,...

Is it Lovecraftian? Eh, only kinda sorta. But this slapstick horror movie is undeniably important and contains genuine moments of brilliance. Next Month? The X-files episode "Roadrunners"

There's something wrong with the Whateley boy. This 1970 adaptation of the Dunwich Horror was produced by Roger Corman, which should say everything you need to know. It's a very loose treatment of the short story, which is mostly a history of the Whateley family with a big ol' monster battled added onto the end. The movie, instead, makes the story about seduction and abduction, but the plan remain...

Hold on to your pineal glands, it's From Beyond! Let's get ready to horny! Stuart Gordon looked at a seven page Lovecraft story about seeing extradimensional beings, and said "I can make a movie out of that." The result is From Beyond , where overactive pineal glands enable shapeshifting and confer BDSM fascinations. It needs to be seen to be believed.

One of these lovecraftian tv shows is good and one is bad and I bet you'll be surprised which is which!

Horror author Sutter Cane has gone missing, and his work is spreading an epidemic of violence across the world. John Trevor is an insurance investigator hired by the publisher to find Cane, which takes him directly into Cane's world and work, and exposes the forces outside our reality that are shaping it. This John Carpenter classic is a love letter to Lovecraft, and you should absolutely watch it...