H. P. Lovecraft Meets Alien In Prime Video's 12-Episode Sci-Fi Series

Although precious few shows have been able to recapture the appeal of HP Lovecraft’s writing on the small screen, an underrated Prime Video show inspired by Alien comes surprisingly close. As a writer, HP Lovecraft is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen. This is due in part to his shocking racism, which was notable even during his life and has only become more striking since his death.

Outside of Lovecraft’s appalling views and the ways they inevitably color his output, the nature of his work itself also makes a faithful screen adaptation tricky. Many of the best Lovecraftian shows, like HBO’s True Detective season 1, feature almost no explicitly supernatural elements, but an atmosphere of foreboding so ominous and overwhelming that it lends the entire story an almost otherworldly intensity. However, as effective as these shows are, they clearly fall short of faithfully adapting Lovecraft’s work since they don’t come close to depicting the Old Ones or any of the author’s other memorable monsters.

On the flip side, Lovecraftian horror shows like Chilling Adventures of Sabrina face the opposite problem as, while they may technically feature the author’s themes of cosmic horror and existential dread, their campy, self-aware tone betrays the essence of Lovecraft’s hopeless, dour writing style. The Netflix anthology Love, Death, & Robots struggles with the same tonal balance, as terrifying, immersive Lovecraft adaptations sit alongside goofy, comedic vignettes. However, Prime Video’s The Rig does a surprisingly good job of nailing both aspects of the writer’s unique appeal.

Prime Video’s The Rig Is A Claustrophobic Horror Series

Starring Game of Thrones supporting star Iain Glen and Schitt’s Creek breakout star Emily Hampshire, The Rig is a dark supernatural horror set on a remote Scottish oil rig that is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by an unexplained, unnaturally thick fog. When the crew of the titular rig begin to undergo strange changes after contact with the fog, Hampshire’s oil company representative, Rose, and Glen’s offshore installation manager, Magnus, start to realize something terrible has been unleashed from the ocean floor.

While the show’s setup might sound similar to Netflix’s Mike Flanagan masterpiece Midnight Mass thanks to The Rig’s isolated setting, its small, self-contained cast, and its supernatural villain, The Rig owes much more to the Alien franchise and other classic sci-fi horror movies like The Thing. Even though the show leans into the paranormal rather than sci-fi, its brooding cast of distrustful workers and its gloomy, faraway setting both call to mind John Carpenter’s masterpiece and the Alien movies.

The Rig’s Lovecraftian Horror Is Part of A Recent Streaming Trend

As the show’s two-season story unfolds, the threat of The Rig becomes less vague and more concrete, and the show’s ambitions to mix Lovecraftian-scale horror with this isolated workplace settings of The Thing and Alien becomes clearer. This largely successful goal proves that small-screen creators are getting increasingly comfortable tackling Lovecraftian horror on streaming, despite how infamously tricky this is to get right.

The most obvious example of this trend is, of course, HBO’s one-season masterpiece Lovecraft Country, a ten-episode adaptation of author Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel of the same name. However, the aforementioned Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, as well as the anthology shows Love, Death, & Robots and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, also utilized elements of Lovecraftian horror, with the latter adapting two of the author’s stories directly.

Admittedly, shows as far back as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone followup Night Gallery borrowed from Lovecraft directly. However, the creative freedom and bigger budgets of the streaming era have left creators feeling newly emboldened to explore the writer’s themes in more depth, resulting in shows like Prime Video’s Lovecraftian spin on Alien, The Rig.