Vincent Price played Ward in Roger Corman’s 1963 horror The Haunted Palace, which, because the film shares its title with a poem by one of Lovecraft’s literary heroes Edgar Allen Poe, is often attributed to the wrong author. Chris Sarandon starred in a 1992 remake entitled The Resurrected. Author and Lovecraft-expert Peter H. Cannon soundly spoofed The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie in his 1994 parody, Scream for Jeeves.

Like his 1924 story The Shunned House, Lovecraft based The Dunwich Horror upon a folk legend, embellishing the details in his own unique style. The Dunwich of H.P.L.’s fiction is, in reality, Wilbraham, Massachusetts. For writing this story, he received his largest fee from Weird Tales – $240.

In Dunwich, the character of Dr Armitage refers to the work of Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen, one of H.P.L.’s favourite authors and most enduring influences; the terms ‘Aklo’ and ‘Voorish’ are lifted from Machen’s 1899 story The White People. Another professor at Miskatonic University sings Machen’s praises in The Whisperer in Darkness; the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu is also familiar with Machen’s work. The powder of Ibn-Ghazi used to make the invisible creature materialise at the story’s climax may be named after the sixteenth-century general Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi.

Filmed in 1970 with Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee, The Dunwich Horror boasts a screenplay by Curtis Hanson, now best known for his Academy Award-nominated work on LA Confidential.

The Whisperer in Darkness marks the first appearance in a Mythos tale of the Mi-Go, also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth. The Mi-Go are identified as the abominable snowmen of myth, and that assertion is repeated in At the Mountains of Madness.

Yuggoth is the Mi-go name for Pluto, although Lovecraft had written with astounding foresight about the planet in a series of sonnets published in Weird Tales and the Providence Journal under the title ‘Fungi From Yuggoth’ some years before Pluto’s discovery in 1930. Harold S. Farnese, the dean of the Los Angeles Institute of Musical Art, hoped to collaborate with Lovecraft on an operetta based upon the Yuggoth sonnets; Lovecraft declined.

Whisperer is one of the few Lovecraft stories that can easily be categorised as science-fiction, but the Cthulhu Mythos nevertheless rears its head with a long list of terms relating to the Old Ones. Some – Cthulhu, Leng, Azathoth, Yig – are familiar, while others belong to the works of Lovecraft’s colleagues and idols. Tsathoggua, for instance, is the creation of Clark Ashton Smith, Hastur belongs to the works of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers (Chambers also created the city of Yian, the Yellow Sign and Lake Hali), while the name ‘Bran’ is probably a reference to Robert E. Howard’s Pictish King Bran Mak Morn. Whisperer’s narrator, Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University, is mentioned in the next Mythos tale, At the Mountains of Madness, which also establishes the ancient war between the Mi-Go and the Old Ones.

In 1931, H.P.L. was contacted by the Reverend Dr Henry St Clair Whitehead, who wished to collaborate upon a zombie tale of his own devising, set in the Virgin Islands. Lovecraft cried off, claiming firstly that the results of such exercises were always disappointing for both participants, and secondly, that as a man who had travelled very little in his life, he could not do justice to the setting: ‘I am the sworn enemy of armchair exoticism, and believe in writing about those things one personally knows,’ he explained. One both counts, he was not being entirely honest; he continued to collaborate, not always willingly, for the rest of his career, and the Antarctic setting of At the Mountains of Madness seems to give the lie to his hatred of armchair exoticism.