It's going to be because he was a proper, full-bodied, no-messing-about racist. Remember the laughable REEEEfest over that HBO show they are looking to make where the south won the American civil war. Times that by a 100 if anything from HP got optioned today. Twitter would be interesting, to say the least.
Yeah, that's why 30 years ago we were getting
tons of Lovecraft adaptations. Once people started getting on social networks and caring about racism they just dried right up.
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Lovecraft is really,
really hard to do visually. That's kind of the point, it's generally people encountering the unknowable. But I think it mostly comes down to theme and how depressing most of his stuff is. We just don't see that much in mass market horror, where the monsters are usually defeated. And at the same time you can't really do an adaption of the Call of Cthulhu on a few million dollar budget like you can make a Raw or the Witch.
Most of his stories are also quite short by film standards. Obviously you can pad them out to a degree -- and this isn't always bad, I feel Dagon is surprisingly good -- but I don't see how you could make a film out of a story like Pickman's Model, which aside from its length would actually be relatively easy to adapt.
But just on the whole his stuff is very antithetical to the vast majority of horror film. It's not about monsters killing people or serial killers or ghosts, Lovecraft wrote about an unimaginably vast universe that simply doesn't care at all about humanity. There's very little evil in his work, it's more about apathy and how horrifying that can be.
