match 1. Misery (1990) v Re Animator (1985). Two of my all time favourite films of any genre. if i could call draw i would, but that's lame, so... Combs is hobbled by Bates! Crampton crushes Caan! Dr Carl Hill beheads everyone and declares himself the winner. 1-0 HPL

match 2. The Running Man (1987) v From Beyond (1986) Arnie wades through slimy primordial soup creatures to take the prize. 1-1

match 3 The Shining (1980) v The Haunted Palace (1963) Jack axes em into an early lead pinning Vinny down by the hairs on his chinny, but just as the final blow is about to be delivered Edgar Allan Poe comes from nowhere to shock Danny and the crowd into submission. no DQ the ref contrtoversially giving HPL the tightly fought contest 2-1

Dagon is great, love the constant dank atmosphere of dread

s'all about the cinematic, or at least visual, adaptations - i too prefer reading Lovecraft, but King has his moments on paper that cant be translated to screen. s'pose both have. anyhoo Shuttered Room i'm gonna check out & Cujo is great, love the corn syryp rabid dogface!

you can count 'inspired by', Lovecraftian, Kingesque whatever goes, the rules are arbitrary & the gamesmaster fickle!

Gordon also made Dagon & From Beyond, but i get what you mean. He & Yuzna were partly responsible for the Lovecraft resurgeance in the 80s, after the relative success of thie adaptations re-issues of HPL collections were published here n that's how i found him so eternally grateful to those two.

Even for his time Lovecraft wrote in an old fashioned style with all his preternatural gibbous moons and eldritch gods, King is way more accessible and can write dialogue. and paragraphs less than a page long! Both writers are hugely imaginative and as mentioned by others HPL had concepts which were way ahead of thier time. Aside from the racism, which had already caught on...

Pretty sure the filmmakers inject the balck humour, in the Yuzna/Gordon collaborations at least, From Beyond story is just four pages and not funny, nor is Herbert West Re Animator as i recall.

Poe vs. Barker is an exccellent idea, however my predisposition to all things Hellraiser would make it a one sided contest, though the Corman/Price flicks from the 60s are excellent.

*edit - meant to ask is the Call of Cthulu the silent one? there's a few adaptations out there

nice work with the poll

Stuart Gordon & Brian Yuzna are responsible for bringing a lot of HPL inspired stuff to screen & they're all fun to some degree. Dagon is more serious, very atmospheric movie. I'd also rec The Dunwich Horror 1970 with a young Dean Stockwell taking on psychadellic cosmic beastie offspring, Dan O'Bannon's The Resurrected 1991, Corman & Price's The Haunted Palace 1963 & i've not seen Pulse Pounders 1988 but you've mentioned it here recently & apparently HPL inspired the The Evil Clergyman segment.