10 Most Lovecraftian TV Shows Of All Time

Despite writing around 65 novels, not including his short stories and poems, very, very few of these stories have ever been adapted for television or film. The psychological horror and fear of the unknown mean that putting his tales on screen can be tricky. These 10 shows managed to capture the essence of Lovecraft, even if they don't strictly adapt one of his stories.

Twin Peaks (1990-2017)

David Lynch's Twin Peaks is a surreal mystery, and still one of the best TV shows of all time. The series is set in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington, where the murder of a local teenage girl attracts the attention of the FBI, who send Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to investigate.

The setup of the series is very reminiscent of many Lovecraft stories, where an outsider ventures to a strange and mysterious town, only to find that something horrible and even unimaginable is going on underneath the surface. There may be no monsters in Twin Peaks, but the supernatural, edge-of-sanity feeling of the series is distinctly Lovecraft.

True Detective (2014-Present)

The anthology series True Detective has several nods to Lovecraft, especially in season 1 and season 4. Each season of the series follows a group of detectives, often fighting their own private demons, who are tasked with solving a grisly, grim crime, exposing something worse while they do so.

Season 1 makes an explicit reference to The King in Yellow, a short story collection of weird horror by Robert W. Chambers that inspired Lovecraft. "Carcosa" is a location that appears in Chambers' and Lovecraft's stories, for example. Season 4 features the icy, mysterious horror that is found in stories like At the Mountains of Madness.

The Mist (2017)

Stephen King's novella The Mist was adapted into a film in 2007, and later was turned into a TV show in 2017. The series was canceled by Spike after just one season, and it doesn't always do justice to the 1980 story, but it still captures the Lovecraftian setting of the novella very well.

The series is set in Bridgeville, Maine, where a thick mist suddenly envelops the town (and possibly the world). Strange, horrifying creatures arrive with the mist, and the town is forced to take shelter in a grocery store, where they try to figure out a way to survive the onslaught of disturbing, hungry creatures.

The Terror (2018-Present)

The Terror is an anthology originally adapted from Dan Simmons's 2007 novel, but each successive season has moved the series to a different time period and location. Despite the differences in the seasons, they each involve a group of people encountering an unknown horror that they are almost completely helpless against.

The Terror season 1, in particular, is very Lovecraft-adjacent. The series follows the crew of the HMS Terror in 1850 who attempt to find the Northwest Passage but end up stranded in the Arctic ice. Alone and desperate to survive, they encounter an ancient magical evil intent on making sure no one in the crew survives.

Love, Death & Robots (2019-2025)

Love, Death & Robots has a lot of influences, as any 45-episode animated anthology should. Every episode of Love, Death & Robots is supposed to have something to do with at least one of the three words in the title, but plenty of them have to do with another word: Lovecraft.

There are overt Lovecraft references in the show, like in "Beyond the Aquila Rift", "The Secret War", and "In Vaulted Halls Entombed", but even the episodes that aren't Lovecraft-heavy are still clearly inspired by the horror legend. "Into the Tall Grass", "Bad Traveling", and "The Dump" are some good examples.

Lovecraft Country (2020)

Lovecraft Country explicitly references H.P. Lovecraft in more ways than one. The series follows a group of Black Americans during the Jim Crow era, who encounter the cults and horrible monsters you would expect to find in a Lovecraft book. The series compares these incomprehensible horrors with the very real, tactile horror of 1960s America for Black people.

One of the unpleasant realities of reading Lovecraft is the realization that he, like many of his contemporaries, harbored racist assertions, and these can be plain to see when reading his texts. Lovecraft Country takes this unfortunate aspect of Lovecraft head-on, and spins something thought-provoking out of it.

Chapelwaite (2021)

Chapelwaite is an adaptation of King's short story "Jerusalem's Lot", itself a prequel to 'Salem's Lot. Though there are no vampires in the story, the events and history of the town suggest that awful things have been happening in the Lot for a long time, and the audience knows they will keep happening.

In Chapelwaite, Adrien Brody stars as Captain Charles Boone, who, in 1850, moves his family to Preacher's Corner in Maine after the death of his wife. There, he confronts the dark history his family has hidden there. The period, the feel, and the characters could be yanked straight from a Lovecraft novel.

Midnight Mass (2021)

Midnight Mass feels like the best adaptation of 'Salem's Lot we have, without actually being an adaptation. It's set on a small, isolated island filled with people who have given up hope in one way or another. The arrival of a charismatic priest and the source of his seemingly supernatural powers spells doom, however.

There is quite a bit about Midnight Mass that makes it feel like a Lovecraft novel, starting with its setting. Like the titular town in The Shadow over Innsmouth, Crockett Island in Midnight Mass is a depressing, fishy, wet place where it feels like anything could come up out of the ocean.

Archive 81 (2022)

Archive 81 is an eight-episode horror series made for Netflix and based on the podcast of the same name. The series is split into two timelines. One is set in 1994 and follows Melody (Dina Shihabi), a grad student who recorded documentary footage of an apartment building that burned down.

In the present, Dan (Mamoudou Athie) is hired to restore Melody's lost tapes and uncovers a mysterious disappearance and the presence of a cult. The series is packed with heavy Lovecraft themes, including sleeping gods, demons, cults, rituals, and all the other delightful, scary tropes of the genre.

Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities (2022)

Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is an eight-episode anthology series that not only has Lovecraft-inspired horror stories, but includes two honest-to-goodness Lovecraft adaptations. One is for Dreams in the Witch House, and one is for Pickman's Model, but the other episodes draw heavily from Lovecraft.

Cabinet of Curiosities is almost completely filled with excellent episodes, save for one or two that don't work quite as well as the rest. If you are determined to watch Lovecraft brought to the television screen, you have to watch this series, at least to see some of Lovecraft's horrors rendered for TV.