Welcome to Season 21 of People’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos — a journey through cinema’s strangest corridors, where cult horror, twisted classics, and deceptively familiar films intersect with the fevered imaginations of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard.
This season, we pair 23 films — from drive-in screamers and arthouse oddities to misunderstood masterpieces — with stories from the weird fiction canon. But don’t expect one-to-one adaptations. These are resonant reflections: films that hum with the same terror frequencies, that echo the same dread of forbidden knowledge, hidden realities, and shifting selves.
What does The Blob have to do with a wily thief sneaking into a temple of slime gods? Ask Satampra Zeiros.
What binds Picnic at Hanging Rock to The Charnel God? Disappearance, divinity, and the silence of cosmic rules we’ll never understand.
We explore horror for the horror-averse. We unearth the cyberpunk in the suburban, the Mythos in the melodrama, the ancient alien in your neighborhood haunted house. You won’t just hear about what’s on screen. We’ll pull the latex off and show you what’s pulsing underneath.
| Robert E. Howard | H.P. Lovecraft | Clark Ashton Smith | |
| Episode # | Story | Movie (Year) | Connection |
| 1 | The Tale of Satampra Zeiros (Clark Ashton Smith) | The Blob (1958) | Amorphous, creeping horror and monstrous, unknowable force; surreal and alien terror. |
| 2 | The Shadow Kingdom (Robert E. Howard) | Duel (1971) | Hidden, stalking threats; paranoia and mysterious pursuers in a hostile environment. |
| 3 | The Black Stone (Robert E. Howard) | The Night Stalker (1972 TV movie) | Occult investigations and dark ancient relics triggering supernatural events. |
| 4 | The Frost-Giant’s Daughter (Robert E. Howard) | Westworld (1972) | Mythic beings and blurring of human/inhuman boundaries in a constructed world. |
| 5 | The Charnel God (Clark Ashton Smith) | Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) | Mysterious disappearances amid an eerie, alien atmosphere suggest cosmic and otherworldly dread. |
| 6 | The Door to Saturn (Clark Ashton Smith) | The Last Wave (1977) | Cosmic horror and apocalyptic alien portents disrupting reality and sanity. |
| 7 | The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (Clark Ashton Smith) | The Secret of NIMH (1982) | Experimentation, hidden knowledge, and evolution of strange societies with a dark, alien past. |
| 8 | The Rats in the Walls (Lovecraft) | House (1985) | Ancestral home concealing madness, hidden horrors, and subterranean secrets. |
| 9 | The Seven Geases (Clark Ashton Smith) | Akira (1988) | Curses, mutation, and supernatural chaos echoing catastrophic transformation and power. |
| 10 | The Shadow Out of Time (Lovecraft) | Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) | Fractured identity, memory manipulation, and hidden realities behind appearances. |
| 11 | The Whisperer in Darkness (Lovecraft) | Fire in the Sky (1993) | Alien abduction and cosmic horror beyond human comprehension. |
| 12 | The Black Abbot (Clark Ashton Smith) | Strange Days (1995) | Dark sorcery, forbidden knowledge, and the collapse of reality through technology and memory. |
| 13 | The Outsider (Lovecraft) | The Others (2001) | Isolation, haunted environments, and revelation of disturbing truths about identity and existence. |
| 14 | The Ninth Skeleton (Clark Ashton Smith) | Monster House (2006) | The sense of haunted geography, dreamlike menace, and death-infused structure. |
| 15 | The Festival (Lovecraft) | Jennifer’s Body (2009) | Secret cults and ritualistic violence beneath suburban normalcy. |
| 16 | The Shadow Kingdom (Robert E. Howard) | Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) | Rural horror with misunderstood monstrous outsiders; paranoia and mistaken identity. |
| 17 | The Call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft) | Cabin in the Woods (2011) | Hidden cults and the awakening of ancient cosmic horrors in remote places. |
| 18 | The Dunwich Horror (Lovecraft) | The Final Girls (2015) | Family curses, monstrous legacies, and the blending of horror and dark folklore. |
| 19 | The Haunter of the Dark (Lovecraft) | The Love Witch (2016) | Occult obsession, doom, and seductive yet deadly supernatural forces. |
| 20 | The Haunter of the Dark (Lovecraft) | The Lighthouse (2019) | Obsessive curiosity, madness, and the haunting power of forbidden knowledge in isolated settings. |
| 21 | The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Lovecraft) | Possessor (2020) | Mind control, possession, and the battle for the self through technology and sorcery. |
| 22 | The Whisperer in Darkness (Lovecraft) | Titane (2021) | Body horror, alien influence, and loss of identity through external forces. |
| 23 | The Colour Out of Space (Lovecraft) | Pearl (2022) | Alien contamination causing physical and psychological transformations in an isolated setting. |
People's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos: 
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