The upcoming adaptation of an indie Lovecraftian game could be the perfect rival to Mike Flanagan‘s big-screen take on a Stephen King book.
Lovecraftian horror is one sub-genre that is often approached with a lot of hesitation because its true essence lies in the unexplainable. Getting it right in the audiovisual medium of storytelling has always been a challenging feat. However, some filmmakers have still managed to capture its cosmic dread and existential terror in movies like Annihilation, Color Out of Space, and The Endless.
Mike Flanagan, too, is now about to dip his feet into the cosmic horror genre with his upcoming take on Stephen King’s most Lovecraftian story. Interestingly, an upcoming Lovecraftian game adaptation could become its perfect competitor.
Like Stephen King’s The Mist, A Lovecraftian Indie Game Is Also Getting A Movie Adaptation
Mike Flanagan has adapted several Stephen King books in the past, and he is all set to expand his own creative footprint within the author’s universe with yet another ambitious big-screen project: The Mist. The Mist seems to be one of the most challenging Stephen King projects he has picked up so far. One reason behind this is that The Mist already has a brilliant movie adaptation that came out in 2007.
The other is that The Mist is, by far, Stephen King’s most Lovecraftian story. It perfectly captures H.P. Lovecraft’s brand of “fear of the unknown” with its portrayal of humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of the universe.
Since getting Lovecraftian horror right on the big screen is not an easy feat, and The Mist‘s 2007 adaptation has already set a high bar, Mike Flanagan’s take on the Stephen King story has a lot going against it. However, it is not the only challenging Lovecraftian adaptation in the works.
As reports confirm, a big-screen take on the indie horror game, Dredge, is also being developed. Although Dredge is more of a maritime exploration game that primarily unfolds in the sea, it riffs on the same “something in the fog” Lovecraftian trope as The Mist. In both The Mist and Dredge, thick, unnatural fog serves as a veil for things that should not exist.
The ones who dare to delve too deep into the central mist in both the game and the Stephen King story encounter Eldritch beings and even risk losing their minds or lives. These intriguing parallels between the central narrative devices of both make them exciting additions to the Lovecraftian horror subgenre.
While both projects are yet to get confirmed release windows, they could also potentially be rivals because of their similar storytelling approaches towards portraying cosmic horror.
The Mist & Dredge’s Movie Adaptations Can Be The Perfect Horror Rivals
Most Lovecraftian movie adaptations struggle because they either turn the author’s stories and narrative tropes into conventional creature features or over-explain the unknowable. A few others end up delving a little too deep into the incomprehensible elements of Lovecraftian lore, making them incredibly confusing and intangible.
Fortunately, for both Dredge and The Mist, the original game and the Stephen King story strike the right balance between being ambiguously terrifying and relatively linear in storytelling.
The Dredge movie has been described as “The Sixth Sense on water,” with cosmic horror elements from both HP Lovecraft and Ernest Hemingway’s works.
In both, one can constantly feel the looming threat of something otherworldly over the characters at all times. One can even feel the sense of isolation and meaninglessness the characters experience when faced with vast, indifferent forces that defy their reality’s rules. At the same time, though, both are grounded in human drama that makes them relatable and comprehensible.
While The Mist, at its human core, is about how far people would go to hold on to their sense of control and mortality, Dredge explores the haunting consequences of obsession and curiosity. Hopefully, even Mike Flanagan‘s take on the Stephen King story and the movie adaptation of the game will strike a balance between subtlety and spectacle like their source material.
Dredge
9/10
