H.P. Lovecraft grew up watching his father committed to a mental institution, and that early brush with madness runs through this look at the writer who reshaped horror fiction from a rented room in Providence, Rhode Island. The film traces his sickly childhood, his brief unhappy marriage in New York, and the poverty that kept most of his work confined to pulp magazines like Weird Tales during his lifetime. Interviews with Guillermo del Toro, Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, and Peter Straub explain why Cthulhu and the Necronomicon outlasted the man who invented them, while Lovecraft scholars and biographers fill in the racism and isolation that shaped his fiction as much as his imagination did. Archival photographs, letters, and readings from his stories carry the biographical sections. The film treats him as a case study in delayed recognition: broke and largely unpublished in book form when he died of cancer at forty-six, later claimed as a founding figure of modern horror by nearly every writer who followed him.