Richard Stanley Confirms His Lovecraft Cinematic Universe Will Continue With 'The Dunwich Horror'

Richard Stanley's weird, wild H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space opens this weekend – and he's just getting started. Back in November, it was revealed that Color distributor SpectreVision was planning a potential Lovecraft trilogy with Stanley, and now Stanely has confirmed that news himself. According to the director, SpectreVision has greenlit two more movies – and The Dunwich Horror is next.

Ready for more Lovecraft weirdness by way of Richard Stanely? With Color Out of Space opening this weekend, the cult filmmaker is already looking to the future. According to Stanley, he's going to jump into his next Lovecraft film, The Dunwich Horror, this winter.

"I'm pleased to say that SpectreVision has basically greenlit two more Lovecraft adaptations, and I'm currently prepping my new adaptation of The Dunwich Horror," Stanley told Rue Morgue. "It will be set in the same milieu as Color Out of Space, in a near-future, disaster-struck Arkham County. Hopefully, we'll be able to get that before the cameras this winter."

Setting the "in the same milieu" as Color seems to indicate Stanely is building his own little Lovecraft cinematic universe for SpectreVision. Stanely also said: "With Dunwich Horror, we'll go on campus and get back to Miskatonic University for the first time since Re-Animator. We'll also get to deal with the Necronomicon, the black book at the core of the mythos. So I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on this."

"Lovecraft is possibly the most adapted horror author ever," SpectreVision's Daniel Noah said last November. "But there's really never been a totally faithful adaptation of any of his works. I think there are a few that are sort of close. One of them is the German version of Color Out of Space that came out a few years ago. Stuart Gordon's films are wonderful, but they are more Stuart Gordon than they are Lovecraft. We had been hellbent on finding the Lovecraft adaptation that truly captured cosmic dread without the camp. When we encountered Richard Stanley's script, I remember texting Elijah [Wood] after I read the first page and said, 'This is it. We found it.' When you see this film, you'll see that there are all kinds of little references that are allusions to other Lovecraft stories."

The Dunwich Horror "tells the story of Wilbur Whateley, the son of a deformed albino mother and an unknown father (alluded to in passing by the mad Old Whateley as "Yog-Sothoth"), and the strange events surrounding his birth and unprecedentedly precocious development. Wilbur matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. All the while, his sorcerer grandfather indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft." The story was previously adapted into a movie in 1970.