Lovecraftian influence has been creeping, crawling, slithering, lurking in and otherwise possessing horror films almost as long as the Elder Things have existed.

So maybe he hasn't been around for a hundred thousand years like his leathery-winged creations, but the author's spirit has haunted the genre for decades with the unsettling idea that reality is no more than a shatter-thin illusion hiding monstrous terrors that will drag you into irreversible madness when you finally realize that thing you thought you saw is actually a human-fish hybrid or tentacled thing from outer space. You might even turn into one. "Madness" is a word you can never use quite enough when dealing with Lovecraft.

These films are not direct adaptations such as Re-Animator, Dagon (which was actually based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth and not Dagon) or The Call of Cthulhu, but rather inspired by the dark swirls of nightmare fodder spawned by Lovecraft's diabolically brilliant imagination. They take the unspeakable things he summoned from the deep and warp them even further into their own atrocities.

Get your tentacles on these 11 Lovecraft-inspired films for a monstrous movie marathon that will send you screaming into the chasm of the cosmos.