John Carpenter might one of the few directors who could come close to capturing Lovecraft's style on film. Guillermo Del Toro comes a pretty close second though. Carpenter did do Providence's Favorite Son justice by capturing the sheer horror of living in a chaotic universe, and did so in a way that best ended his "things are bad and are just getting worse" trilogy.
Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) is a busy man. Society seems to be breaking faster and faster, but one patient of his claims to know why. Said patient, when he isn't scribbling crosses over every square inch of his padded cell, says he knows the why, the how, and more importantly the who.
John Trent (Sam Neill) may not look the part, but he was until some time ago a top insurance investigator. He knew how and why people cheat or thought they could. He's an ace at finding lost people who don't want to be found, which made him ideal for Arcane Publishing.
The initial briefing is interrupted by a madman with an axe. The man (Conrad Bergschneider) is shot dead, but his madness seems to be part of why the book company wishes to hire Trent. Their number one author, Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochow) has gone missing and more importantly he's taken the only manuscript of his latest book with him. The crazy guy with the axe? That was formerly Cane's agent and the only person who had any contact with him.
Trent doesn't believe it, but publisher Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston)'s money is hard to say no to, so Trent packs his bags and with editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) in tow, they start looking for the author.
Trent picks up a detail though, that seems odd. Arranging all of Cane's books together produces a map of New Hampshire, with a special place marked 'Hobb's End' a fictional New England town that factors into most of Cane's stories. The duo head off, although Styles finds it odd they left at night yet arrive in the middle of the day. They also find the town, populated with every single character Cane ever wrote about. Trent writes this off as a publicity stunt, but when old townie Saperstein (John Glover) warns him away before blowing his brains out ("He wrote me this way"), Trent starts to suspect things aren't what they seem.
When Trent finally confronts Cane, he learns the truth. He was supposed to, you see, because Cane wrote him...
Pretty darn good, although the film does overextended itself a bit. The idea of fiction and the power we have over it, and it over us, is a neat one and the film does a good job of that; Cane comes across as a bit too bland to have inspired nameless horrors from across time, but who am I question Those Who Can Not Be Named's taste?
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